Gutes Exemplar; Umschlag stw. berieben; Schnitt minimal fleckig; leichte Gebrauchs- und Lagerspuren. - Englisch. - The correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Karl Jaspers begins in 1926, when the twenty-year-old Arendt studied philosophy with Jaspers in Heidelberg. It is interrupted by Arendt's emigration and Jaspers's "inner emigration," and it is resumed immediately after World War II. The initial teacher-student relationship develops into a close friendship, in which Jasper's wife, Gertrud, is soon included and then Arendt's husband, Heinrich Bl�cher. These letters show not only the way both philosophers lived, thought, and worked but also how they experienced the postwar years. Since neither ever dreamed that this correspondence would be published, and each had absolute trust in the other, they reveal themselves here-for the first time-in a personal and spontaneous way. Brilliant, vulnerable, forthright, Arendt speaks about America, her adopted country. About American universities, American politics from McCarthyism to Kennedy, American urban decay. She speaks about Germany, the country she left: its anti-Semitism, its guilt for the Holocaust, its politics. And about Israel, which she always supported as a Jew but also criticized, especially in her controversial book about the trial and execution of Adolf Eichmann in 1961. In his dialogue with Arendt, the thoughtful, generous, concerned Jaspers considers the question of the German essence, and of the Jewish character. He speaks about philosophers past and present-Spinoza, Heidegger. About old age and retirement. Corrupt journalism. Suicide. Man's future on this planet. Here is a fascinating dialogue between a woman and a man, a Jew and a German, a questioner and a visionary, both uncompromising in their examination of our troubled century. (Verlagstext) // INHALT : Introduction ----- Letters ----- Notes ----- Index of Works by Hannah Arendt ----- Index of Works by Karl Jaspers ----- Index. // . The relationship took on another dimension as a result of Arendt's thirteen visits to Basel after 1949. These visits included days and often weeks of intensive discussion. These conversations should not be pictured as altogether idyllic, however, since both loved to argue and sometimes did so with abandon. That they were able to say anything and everything to each other without screening their thoughts or filing the rough edges and that they always felt an affinity in their mode of thought, despite their disagreements about details, are what formed the basis of their trust. There are no other witnesses to these conversations, but the intellectual climate surrounding them is evident in the spontaneity of the letters. When they reestablished contact in 1945, both had the sense of having survived the deluge. Until 1951, Arendt led "the infinitely complex red-tape existence of stateless persons" (L. 34). Although she had made something of a name for herself as a writer, she had not "become respectable in any way" (L. 34). From her "perspective of frequent emigration and exposure to so-called world history" (L. 154), she rejected any integration into society. "I'm more than ever of the opinion that a decent human existence is possible today only on the fringes of society" (L. 34). But even on the fringes there was still a center: "Monsieur," her husband-"we're the only people we know who speak the same language" (L. 43). Otherwise, feelings of being alien, homeless, and alone characterized her existence. Jaspers shared these feelings completely, but he saw in them, as did Arendt, the possibility of a new beginning. After years of official banishment, he had suddenly become "respectable" again, indeed, almost a paragon of respectability for the nation. He had a profound mistrust of this "stale fame" (L. 32) that brought him "a life of irreality . . . ruled by haste" (L. 35). For him, too, there was only one place where he felt absolute trust: with his wife, who, as a Jew, had suffered immeasurably in the recent past. Yet the "gates of hell are wide open" (L. 35), he wrote, and it was important to live in the consciousness that the deluge had "to remain our point of orientation" (L. 60), to remember that "everything that constitutes our world can be wiped out in a month" (L. 107). � (S. VIII) ISBN 0151078874
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