ABSTRACT
Dean Mathiowetz: Where did you grow up and what did your parents do? Do you think of any particular aspects of your childhood as especially formative for the questions you have explored as a political theorist? Hanna Fenichel Pitkin: I grew up in Europe. My father, Otto Fenichel, was a
psychoanalyst. My parents were both, shall we say, “unaffiliated intellectuals,” not professors, but both in their different ways teachers and certainly intellectuals, and of the Left. They were not members of the Communist Party, though my mother’s younger sister was, and they had friends who were either Party members or fellowtravelers like themselves. My parents certainly considered themselves Marxists, but critical Marxists, humanist Marxists, complicated Marxists. Not Party members, not because that would be a terrible thing to be, but because (as my mother explained to me), they weren’t obedient enough and orthodox enough. They thought for themselves. And, of course, we were Jewish, although not religious. (I think I’m third generation non-religious.) Anyway, for all those reasons Germany was not a good place to be in 1933 when I was two years old. At that point Hitler came to power, and my parents very wisely got me out of there. We went to Oslo, Norway, and lived there for a couple of years, and then for various reasons moved back to the Continent, to Prague, where we lived for another couple of years. And then we came to Los Angeles when I was six going on seven. My mother, Cläre (born Nathansohn), had been both an engineering draftsman,
and a practitioner of what she called “body work.” She studied with Elsa Gindler. The work was about improving people’s relationships to their own bodies. She gave lessons, took patients or clients. When my parents divorced after we had been in this country for a couple of years, she needed to resume full-time work, and so she became a draftsman again, and that’s what she did until she retired.
