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PARTISAN REVIEW
sometime in the forties, I think at a party given by Schocken
Books where she was working as an editor. She had recently
arrived in this country from France, where she had gone from
her native Germany, keeping one step ahead of the Nazis. She
had difficulties with the language; in fact, for a number of years
her understanding of English and her ability to use it were much
less than she-or others-seemed to realize. This was most evident
when she submitted something she had written and one tried to
untangle the meaning from her awkward prose, which had the
look of precision one associates with philosophic jargon, par–
ticularly with a German flavor, but was actually vague. Perhaps
this is the special gift of German thought and writing; I recall
the difficulty I once had trying to help "English" some lectures
by Max Horkheimer, a leading figure in the Frankfurt school,
which he delivered at Columbia University in 1944. I could not
tell whether the trouble lay in the German language, the German
philosophic tradition, the ambiguity and vagueness inherent
in Horkheimer's attempt to reconcile Marx and Freud, or in
the quality of Horkheimer's mind and in the usual difficulty of
translation-or in my own shortcomings. All I know is that I
was constantly struggling not only to find an English equivalent
but to figure out what Horkheimer really meant. Hannah Arendt
charmingly summed up the difficulties of language when I asked
her where she would go if the U.S. were to become fascist. "I
would stay right here," she said. "I do not want to learn another
language.' ,
Hannah Arendt was also seemingly trying to make sense out
of America and its literary intellectuals-something that even
native thinkers were not always able to do. But one was immedi–
ately struck by her intense alertness, as though she were actually
trying to penetrate ideas or people simply by looking through
them, which one associated later with the power and the original–
ity, as well as the eccentricity, of her mind. I also remember being
impressed by the unusual combination of gentleness and force
which, perhaps, was her most distinguishing trait to the end of
her life.
It
was a very strange and seductive combination: firm–
ness of tone and strength of conviction with a soft, almost caress–
ing manner. Even at her most ipsistent, when she was rejecting
an idea or a ' person and talking louder and more impatiently,
her eyes seemed to be smiling benignly. But there was never any
