ABSTRACT
Essays in Understanding, the first of two collections that gather Hannah Arendt’s fugitive writings, contains forty papers, most but not all of which have been published before, some in German magazines and some in English-language journals such as Commentary, Partisan Review and The Commonweal. Its contents are various. There are several book reviews, half a dozen essays on philosophy (or rather, on philosophers), some pieces on religion, a dedicatory letter to Karl Jaspers, an essay about Kafka and two or three items containing material destined to form part of what is perhaps Hannah Arendt’s most important work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). The more significant essays, however, are those about Nazism. There are eleven or twelve of these and it can be seen from their titles that they must have formed the basis of much of what Arendt later wrote in her well-known, her almost notorious, book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). The titles include ‘Approaches to the German problem’, ‘Organized guilt and universal responsibility’, ‘Nightmare and flight’, ‘The seeds of a Fascist International’, ‘The image of Hell’, ‘The study of concentration camps’, ‘The aftermath of Nazi rule’, ‘At table with Hitler’, ‘Understanding and politics’, ‘Mankind and terror’ and ‘The eggs speak up’ (i.e. the eggs which make the omlette).
