ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt, thirty-five years of age at the time, arrived in the United States in 1941, having escaped from France. Her main intellectual interests had been philosophy and modern literature. She had written a doctoral dissertation on the concept of love in the work of St. Augustine; her first articles, published in Germany, were on Rilke's Duino Elegies and on Kierkegaard. She belonged to a generation and a milieu that was basically unpolitical but which had developed a passionate interest in politics—in the widest sense—following Hitler's rise to power and the outbreak of World War II. It is difficult to think of a book in living memory that stirred up as much controversy as Hannah Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem. A reading of Hannah Arendt's political journalism shows that she was far more often wrong than right both in her analysis and predictions.
