Life in New York Places, People, and Intellectual Passages

Between exile and arrival, Hannah Arendt found in New York not just refuge, but a stage for her thinking. From cramped rooms to riverside views, the city shaped her intellectual journey — and became the backdrop for some of her most influential work.

Hannah Arendt’s arrival in New York marked the beginning of a new intellectual chapter — one shaped by exile, urgency, and a city in motion.

Ellis Island

On May 22, 1941, Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher arrived at Ellis Island as refugees. When she saw the Statue of Liberty, perhaps she did not think of its iconic associations with freedom and liberation, but rather of her friend Walter Benjamin’s vision of the Angel of History, a figure who sees the past as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet,” while a “storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.” Benjamin concludes that “this storm is what we call progress.” Benjamin came up with this metaphor for his essay Theses on the Philosophy of History, then an unpublished manuscript he entrusted to Arendt before his suicide. The manuscript was one of the belongings Arendt brought with her to America after a narrow, harrowing escape from France. New York would be the city where Arendt would live the rest of her life, and where she would tirelessly investigate the forces of evil and totalitarianism that forced her out of Europe and nearly destroyed the continent. Her time in the bustling city is characterized by a flurry of activity, throwing herself into thinking, research, writing, teaching, and publishing, as Benjamin’s storm of progress pulled her further into the 20th century.

317 West 95th Street

Arendt and Blücher’s first stop in New York was a cramped room on 317 West 95th Street, tucked into the Upper West Side. Beginning in November 1941, Arendt wrote columns in German for the local multilingual newspaper Aufbau as well as articles for other émigré journals. The neighborhood had many German-Jewish residents and Arendt found companionship with other German speakers in the area, like the historian Salo Baron, who worked at nearby Columbia University, and the modernist author Hermann Broch, who lived in nearby Princeton, New Jersey. Baron even helped her secure a job working for the Commission on European Jewish Reconstruction.

Hannah Arendt continued to see the wreckage pile up from her perch in Manhattan as the war continued, and the situation for European Jews became increasingly dire. During this time she began to write the work that would eventually take shape as The Origins of Totalitarianism, published after the war in English in 1951, which would cement her status in the United States as a public intellectual.

130 Morningside Drive

Arendt and Blücher finally moved north to an apartment of their own on 130 Morningside Drive the year that The Origins of Totalitarianism was published. It was a small space but still an opportunity for Arendt to write tirelessly, and entertain their growing intellectual circle. By this time Arendt was publishing in English in many of the prominent American magazines of the day. Arendt’s generous friendships with American writers and intellectuals like Randall Jarrell and Mary McCarthy helped expand her command of the language and allow her to gain a deeper understanding of American life. Politically she admired the American revolution and its enlightenment foundations, a topic she would explore in her 1963 book On Revolutions. She became a U.S. citizen in 1951 after years of statelessness, and Blücher followed suit in 1952. But Arendt was troubled by the chilling political climate taking over the academic life in the United States. The spectre of McCarthyism was sweeping American academia, and people like Blücher who had past associations with the Communist party were in danger of losing their jobs, or even their citizenship.

370 Riverside Drive

In 1959 Arendt and Blücher were able to move to a more spacious apartment at 370 Riverside Drive, just above the Upper West Side. Riverside Drive is about as bucolic as Manhattan can be, stretching across the west side of the island with beautiful park space. The neighborhood was developed in the 19th century for the newly wealthy with picturesque apartment buildings directly on the Hudson river, but by the end of the war it was more modestly middle class and home to many German Jewish immigrants like Arendt. Arendt’s new apartment even had a Hudson river view, and was a perfect place to work and to entertain.

It was in this apartment that she wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem. She traveled to Jerusalem in 1961 to report on the trial of the notorious Nazi SS officer Adolf Eichmann, curious to see a Nazi perpetrator with her own eyes. She was surprised that Eichmann didn’t seem to fit the mold of a radically evil criminal mastermind, but instead resembled a mediocre bureaucrat incapable of original thought. This encounter with a man capable of directing mass murder but incapable of critical introspection led her to coin her most iconic phrase “the banality of evil.” Her reportage of the trial was published in installments in the New Yorker in 1963, and then was published in book form as Eichmann in Jerusalem that same year. It became her most famous and controversial work. Her critics accused her of relativizing the crimes of Eichmann and even sympathizing with him.  She was also pilloried for implicating that the Jewish councils (Judenräte), established by the Nazis mainly in occupied territories, increased the magnitude of the extermination of Jews in Europe due to their compliance with Nazis. Yet the book has endured despite its detractors and so did Hannah Arendt’s intellectual celebrity.

Later Years

Arendt’s apartment continued to be frequented by some of the most fascinated thinkers and writers of the times, now including a younger generation, like the New Yorker journalist and novelist Renata Adler, and the German author Uwe Johnson, who became her neighbor in 1967 at 247 Riverside Drive. Arendt herself continued to work tirelessly, both as a teacher (though never accepting a tenure-track position) and a writer.

Arendt increasingly wrote about political events and catastrophes in her adopted country.  She sometimes misunderstood them. A notable early misfire of hers, Reflections on Little Rock, published in Dissent Magazine in 1959, quibbled with the Civil Rights movement’s strategy of school desegregation, seeing education as a private matter that unfairly thrust Black children as political props. (She later admitted privately in correspondence with Ralph Ellison that she was wrong.) But in many cases she was a remarkably astute critic of American politics and its failures, like the Vietnam War and Watergate. She warned in Home to Roost, her last published essay before her death in 1975: “We may very well stand at one of those decisive turning points of history which separate whole eras from each other. For contemporaries entangled, as we are, in the inexorable demands of daily life, the dividing lines between eras may be hardly visible when they are crossed; only after people have stumbled over them do the lines grow into walls which irretrievably shut up the past.” New Yorker editor William Shawn wrote of her death: “We felt a tremor, as if some counterweight to all the world’s unreason and corruption had been removed.”