Hannah Arendt

In the summer of 1945, Melvin Lasky, who was stationed in Germany with the American occupation forces, visited Karl Jaspers. Lasky mentioned the name of Hannah Arendt. Jaspers was stunned to discover that Arendt was still alive because he had lost contact with her since 1938. He asked Lasky if he could write to her through the American military post. In October 1945, he wrote to Arendt, ‘Often have we thought, with sorrowful concern, about your fate over these years, and for a long time have had little hope that you were still alive.’¹ This was the beginning of a renewed correspondence that had begun in 1926, when Arendt was Jaspers’s student. Their friendship deepened over the years with many personal visits. Their correspondence, which lasted until 1969, reads like an epistolary novel where the full humanity and the intellectual vigour of each are intimately revealed. The correspondence ultimately included exchanges with their spouses, Gertrud Jaspers and Heinrich Blücher. One of the most charming letters is dated November 18, 1945, where Arendt, who started sending food packages to the Jaspers, instructed Gertrud about how to fry American bacon. ‘Put the slices in a moderately hot pan and fry over a low flame. Keep pouring the fat until the slices are crisp. Then nothing can go wrong with either the fat or the bacon.’² But from the beginning, Jaspers and Arendt exchanged views on much weightier topics. Commenting on Jaspers’s influential Die Schuldfrage (The Question of German Guilt), she wrote in a letter dated August 17, 1946,

Your definition of Nazi policy as a crime (‘criminal guilt’) strikes me as questionable. The Nazi crimes, it seems to me, explode the limits of law; and that is precisely what constitutes their monstrousness. For these crimes, no punishment is severe enough … We are simply not equipped to deal, on a human, political level, with a guilt that is beyond crime and an innocence that is beyond goodness or virtue.³