Hannah Arendt’s homeland was populated with friends, astir of them men—at slightest that is what her published correspondence would pb you to believe. The published letters betwixt Arendt and her friends see books with Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Heinrich Blücher, Gershom Scholem, Kurt Blumenfeld, and Joachim Fest. The lone pistillate whose correspondence with Arendt is published successful a standalone measurement is Mary McCarthy. But Arendt had different adjacent women friends, including Hilde Fränkel, Anne Weil, Charlotte Beradt, Rose Feitelson, and Lotte Kohler. These voices are important and yet excessively often near retired of our knowing of Arendt’s governmental thinking.
One crushed Arendt’s letters with women are little disposable is simply that letters among women person agelong been devalued successful philosophy. It is besides true, however, that Arendt cultivated with women a quieter mode of connection—one little bound to the nationalist satellite and much rooted successful affectional resonance, bodily vitality, and care. The objection to this regularisation is McCarthy, whose published letters with Arendt are affluent successful intelligence inquiry. It is nevertheless the lawsuit that her friendships among women manifest a broadside of Arendt excessively often ignored: not the philosopher of worldliness but a pistillate susceptible of intimate, adjacent erotic, bonds.
Arendt cultivated with women a quieter mode of connection—one little bound to the nationalist satellite and much rooted successful affectional resonance, bodily vitality, and care.
In her code “On Humanity successful Dark Times,” Arendt distinguished 2 kinds of friendships. “We are wont,” she said, “to spot relationship solely arsenic a improvement of intimacy, successful which the friends unfastened their hearts to each different unmolested by the world.” But her treatment of relationship successful the Lessing code was to beryllium directed toward a antithetic knowing of friendship, namely the “political relevance of friendship.” Based successful respect for others, politically inflected relationship “is 1 of the cardinal requirements for the well-being of the City.” It is the governmental thought of relationship grounded successful sermon and respect that has dominated accounts of her thought.
There is, however, the different broadside of friendship—intimate and unguarded, embodied, nurtured successful “face-to-face encounters.” In intimate friendships, Arendt wrote, we “speak astir ourselves.” In governmental friendships, connected the contrary, the absorption is connected the “common world.”
Arendt seldom wrote astir intimate friendships. To the grade she spoke astir love, arsenic successful The Human Condition, it was to exclude emotion from the nationalist world. Love, she wrote, is antithetic from friendship. While relationship is the enslaved that unites america with the communal world, “love, successful favoritism from friendship, is killed, oregon alternatively extinguished, the infinitesimal it is displayed successful public.” Love erases the distinctions betwixt 2 people, “destroys the in-between which relates america to and separates america from others.” Contained truthful afloat successful the cocoon that isolates 2 people, emotion is “not lone apolitical but anti political.”
Yet, successful her backstage letters with women, this intimate magnitude comes alive. There are, of course, flashes of intimacy successful her letters with Blücher and Jaspers. But the gravitational propulsion of those relationships is public. With women similar Hilde Fränkel and Anne Mendelsohn Weil, Arendt’s friendships reached for a much backstage and intimate insistence connected caring support. Even successful the letters with McCarthy—an important objection for its nationalist engagement—we spot a broadside of Arendt absent successful her nationalist writings: that friendship’s powerfulness is not lone governmental but besides profoundly intimate.
The premix of intimacy and worldliness characterized her closest American friendship, with the novelist and professional Mary McCarthy. Things betwixt them began badly. At a party, McCarthy made an offhand remark astir Hitler’s tendency to beryllium loved by his victims. Arendt—a stateless Jewish refugee—was incensed: “How tin you accidental specified a happening to me, a unfortunate of Hitler, a idiosyncratic who has been successful a attraction camp!”
They remained chill toward each different until a accidental gathering connected a subway level years later. Arendt approached McCarthy and said, “Let’s extremity this nonsense. We deliberation truthful overmuch alike.” So began a lifelong friendship.
Their correspondence often reads similar a doctrine seminar conducted successful a surviving room. Michelle Dean writes that successful an property erstwhile “women hunger for models of intelligence self-confidence,” Arendt and McCarthy are a celebrated paradigm for “ferocious friendship” among women. McCarthy devoured Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism “in the bathtub, successful the car, successful the market store.” It was, she wrote, a “truly bonzer portion of work, an beforehand successful quality thought.” Arendt praised McCarthy’s Oasis arsenic a “veritable small masterpiece.”
They constitute astir everything from home politics—“Watergate has eaten alternatively profoundly and sharply into my clip and my attention”—to governmental philosophy—“the main vice of each egalitarian nine is Envy”—and adjacent to philosophy—“Truth, connected the contrary, is ever the opening of thought, reasoning is ever result-less.” Their correspondence, arsenic Carol Brightman noted, has “the prime of a conte philosophique,” a shared enquiry into the satellite they some inhabited.
But their narration was much than intelligence fencing. As Brightman recognized, determination was a tenderness that “bespeaks a relationship that borders connected romance.” “Dearest Hannah,” McCarthy confided, “I’m penning you this enactment for purely selfish reasons: due to the fact that my bosom is afloat of emotion and I privation to talk. As if we were successful your apartment.” Arendt wrote to archer McCarthy astir her interest for Heinrich Blücher aft helium had been ill: “I americium inactive profoundly disquieted and rather unhappy I person to spell to Chicago (But please, fto this stay entre nous.) We person been unneurotic for 28 years and beingness without him would beryllium unthinkable.” The code switched rapidly betwixt the intimate and the political. In that aforesaid letter, Arendt wrote of the intelligence “mob” that had been mobilized against her connected relationship of Eichmann successful Jerusalem. Worried astir Blücher, she “can nary longer spot [herself] to support my caput and not to explode. What a risky concern to archer the information connected a factual level.”
In the letters with McCarthy…we spot a broadside of Arendt absent successful her nationalist writings: that friendship’s powerfulness is not lone governmental but besides profoundly intimate.
Beneath the superior speech of ideas determination was romance arsenic well—at times tragic and astatine different times comical. McCarthy enlisted Arendt successful her extramarital escapades, astatine 1 point, enclosing a missive for Arendt to station to McCarthy’s 3rd husband, Bowden Broadwater, truthful that helium would not observe she was successful London for a rendezvous with the writer and erstwhile boxer John Davenport.
When McCarthy fell successful emotion with James Raymond West, a U.S. embassy authoritative successful Warsaw, she again called connected Arendt’s help, this clip successful the effort to person her existent hubby to assistance McCarthy a divorce. The letters during this play are filled with McCarthy’s exuberant excitement: “Dear Hannah, I emotion him, much than before. He’s the astir wholly superior idiosyncratic I’ve ever known, anywhere, I don’t mean lacking successful gayety oregon quality oregon chaotic precocious spirits.” Arendt responded, “I americium frightened that you mightiness get wounded and you cognize besides that I americium rather alert that this is nonsense.”
McCarthy did get hurt. She wrote Arendt astir however erstwhile she told West astir an aged matter she had had with Clement Greenberg, she had been “over-exuberant” successful the telling, which led to his aggravated response. The nighttime ended with McCarthy and West lying “awake successful a azygous furniture portion [she] wept dilatory and steadily.” McCarthy explained that she wrote this to Arendt “not to marque you a confidante but truthful that you’ll know, if you worry, what this is concretely.” Arendt answered that McCarthy’s missive had “done the trick, I guess. I tin nary longer interest The communicative astir the Clem-tragedy sounded precise funny—how agelong immoderate chickens instrumentality to travel location to roost.”
Their letters are peppered with affectionate domesticity—reports of dinners, students, and speculative comments astir imaginable flirtations. At 1 point, McCarthy speculated that Arendt mightiness beryllium having an matter with Harold Rosenberg.
Arendt and Mary McCarthy, arsenic Kathleen Jones has observed, had thing similar a “workmanly” friendship. This thought comes from McCarthy, who noted what she called the “workmanly” quality of Arendt’s presumption of friendship, successful which friends travel each different “in the consciousness of” 2 “apprentices” walking a agelong of roadworthy together. Arendt was “touched” by the phrase. It captured, amended than thing else, the quality of their bond: intimate, yes, but grounded successful shared labour and intelligence companionship, not romanticist confession.
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Excerpted from A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship successful a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz. Available from YaleUniversityPress. Copyright © 2026 by Roger Berkowitz.All rights reserved.
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