Flight and Philosophy
An Intellectual Kinship
Illustration: © Eléonore Roedel
What connects Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin beyond their shared exile in Paris? Sigrid Weigel and Uta Staiger explore their intellectual paths and surprising parallels between the two thinkers – and examine why their ideas are more relevant today than ever before.
Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, the most influential German-speaking intellectuals of the 20th century, crossed paths in Paris, where both had fled Nazi persecution as Jews. But their connection ran deeper than shared circumstances – they also had an affinity of minds. What was the basis of this intellectual kinship?
Sigrid Weigel: Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin shared a radical approach to the catastrophes and crises of the 20th century, taking them as a starting point to fundamentally rethink key concepts of European intellectual history. Both began in the in-between space of philosophy and literature, yet their thinking extended far beyond this – into political and historical theory. Central to this is their engagement with language – the precise literalness of their writing, and their method of re-examining concepts, images and words from their very foundations, including from the reverse sides and what lies within them.
Another link between the two is their concept of inheritance as a bond that connects generations. In Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, he speaks of a “weak messianic force” that unites generations: we were expected on this earth, and we have a responsibility to those who came before us – one that is not easy to meet. Responding to the aftermath of catastrophe, the Holocaust and World War Two, Hannah Arendt reimagines this idea as a post-messianic hope. For her, the birth of every human being marks a potential new beginning. Natality, in Arendt’s mind, is the condition that makes action possible.
The political is not defined by institutions, but arises through human interaction.
Those who belong to a certain avantgarde, because they sense new boundaries and venture into uncharted intellectual territories, often struggle during their lifetimes, gaining recognition only much later. Could this be another shared experience that connects Arendt and Benjamin?
Uta Staiger: I find it intriguing how the posthumous reputations of both Arendt and Benjamin have grown – especially in the case of Benjamin, who received little recognition during his lifetime. Arendt’s trajectory was somewhat different, yet the enduring influence of her work over the past decades has been equally profound. It’s also noteworthy that Arendt wrote the introduction to Illuminations, her collection of Benjamin’s writings, in which she reflects on the nature of fame – fama – and especially posthumous fame. Arendt suggests that lasting recognition usually comes to those who resist easy categorisation, thinkers who challenge convention and remain outside established frameworks and genres.
This also applies to Arendt, who frequently redefined her intellectual position – initially as a philosopher, later as a political theorist. She repeatedly struggled with the rigid, analytical tradition of Anglo-American philosophy, striving instead to introduce a different formal language and mode of writing. At one point, she remarked that she was trying – without full success – to explain philosophy to the Americans, while noting that the Germans might benefit from a little tutoring in politics.
As philosophers and thinkers, Arendt and Benjamin are more accessible than, say, Kant, Heidegger or Nietzsche. They write more figuratively and are therefore harder to categorise.
While in exile in Paris, Benjamin struggled to establish himself as a writer and literary critic. Hannah Arendt, on the other hand, became politically active, working for the Youth Aliyah programme, which helped bring young Jewish children to Palestine. Do these different paths reflect a contast in their practical engagement with the world – one that also finds expression in their respective writings?
Sigrid Weigel: Before Arendt went into exile, she had been working on her habilitation thesis. She was already established as a university philosopher, even though her writing diverged significantly from mainstream philosophy. Her thesis on the concept of love in the writings of Saint Augustine is highly complex in its philosophical terminology. Once in exile, however, she was unable to continue her academic work and instead became politically active. Her escape had been difficult, fleeing first from Germany to Paris, and later again after internment in the Gurs camp.
Benjamin went into exile earlier, having anticipated the need to flee well before the Nazis came to power. He was not affiliated with a university, as his habilitation thesis had been rejected, and instead lived as a freelance writer. Maintaining close ties to French intellectual circles, he continued his work as an essayist and critic. So their starting points were very different. After arriving in the United States, Ahrendt began anew, writing in English and turning her attention to political theory.
Uta Staiger: During her time in the United States, Hannah Arendt frequently spoke out about major political events such as the Eichmann trial, the Vietnam War and Watergate. At times, she became so deeply involved as a public intellectual that she nearly withdrew from academic work altogether. Walter Benjamin, by contrast, was perhaps sometimes too obscure – both in his intellectual pursuits and in his style of expression.
Sigrid Weigel: Walter Benjamin is often regarded as a “founding father” of cultural studies, while Hannah Arendt could be seen as a “founding mother” of an anthropological theory of the political – one that belongs neither to traditional philosophy nor to conventional political science. Yet her work draws from both: she engages with philosophy’s fundamental questions, typically approached with some distance from practice, while also incorporating political science’s focus on the present. Despite their differences, Arendt and Benjamin are united by their shared reflection on how writing styles, metaphors and images shape thought itself.
One example is the state of being caught between two languages – a foreign language that one learns to write, and yet one that still carries echoes of foreignness.
Uta Staiger: We Refugees started off as a short article, but later developed into a more extensive work. What is particularly interesting here is that Arendt personally identifies with this text; she didn’t typically write from the first-person perspective. This positioning is quite compelling.
Arendt was particularly skilled at articulating the experience of foreignness in its many forms. One example is the state of being caught between two languages – a foreign language that one learns to write and which eventually becomes one’s own, yet one that still carries echoes of foreignness. In an interview, she once noted that speaking English enabled her to express herself differently than in German. She also described the other registers, forms of arrival, being categorised, assimilation or resistance to assimilation. This is emblematic of the situation of a refugee who attempts to build a new home within new surroundings – linguistically, professionally and intellectually. That’s one key aspect.
We should also acknowledge that Arendt was a refugee with a degree of privilege. Although she experienced a long period of statelessness, she was ultimately able to continue her work and build networks.
The other part of We Refugees explores the question of what defines a human being. What constitutes human life, especially when, under totalitarian rule, a person’s life is no longer tied to territorial nation-states and therefore cannot assert enforceable rights?
Sigrid Weigel: For me, We Refugees marks the starting point of Hannah Arendt’s political theory. Based on her personal experience, she writes about the plight of refugees – especially Jewish refugees and stateless people – and develops a radical critique of assimilation policies, challenging both the assimilation demands of host countries and the assimilation behaviours of many migrants.
She develops the theory that history must be written from the perspective of the most vulnerable, noting that, for the first time in history, the history of the Jews no longer stands apart, but is intertwined with universal history.
This insight led to Arendt’s book on totalitarianism, The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she meticulously analyses the extermination methods and practices of the concentration camps and includes a theoretical chapter on the paradoxes inherent in human rights.
And this is especially significant because it is the first critical analysis of the paradox of human rights: while human rights are often seen as the final safeguard for individuals, they become meaningless without the protection of citizenship rights. Although commonly understood as universal and independent of citizenship, Hannah Arendt shows how stateless persons – who must rely solely on human rights – are effectively left without any real rights at all. And this observation remains as relevant today as ever.