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PARTISAN REVIEW
the way for totalitarian rule; her acute sense of Nazism as arising out of the
collapse of all Europe's social and poli tical structures, of its cuI tural tradi tions
and moral standards.
Jaspers recognized the tendency of his temperamental former student to
overexaggerate, to make sweeping generalizations, to ignore causal relation–
ships and disregard empirical facts. However, the disagreements between
Jaspers and Arendt were never of a kind that could threaten the solidari ty of
their friendship or the openness of their dialogue. For Arendt, he was a kind
of surrogate father, a vital element of continuity in her life, the teacher ("the
only one I have ever been able to recognise as such")- who by the gift of
friendship had helped anchor her love of the world. For Jaspers, she was quite
simply "a prodigal human being."
Jerome Kohn's compilation of Arendt's lesser-known essays between
1930 and 1954, very usefully complements the moving and frequently rivet–
ing Jasper-Arendt correspondence. Kohn, who was at one till1e Arendt's
assistant at the New School for Social Research in New York, has included
a very broad range of themes, beginning with some of her earliest published
work on St. Augustine, Kierkegaard, Friedrich von Gentz, the 13erlin salons,
the emancipation of women, on Kafka, the French existentialists, religion and
politics, Communism and the Fascist International. The book is a selection
of Arendt's uncollected and (largely) unpublished writings-including man–
uscripts of lecture materials and book reviews that were exercises in thinking
with or against a particular author. There is also a revealing interview with
the Germanjournalist Clinter Gaus entitled "What R.emains? The Language
Remains," which dates from 1964 and opens the book. This was one of the
rare occasions in which Arendt spoke personally about her life (especially her
youth), her political awakening, her feelings about the German language and
about Jaspers.
The book offers us a valuable glimpse into Arendt's workshop, into the
process by which she gradually arrived at some of the crucial distinctions that
subsequently marked her oeuvre: the difference between the public and pri–
vate realms of experience, her analysis of the ll1eaning of "homelessness," of
poli tical action, as well as the tradi tion of philosophy that began wi th Plato
and culminated in Marx. It also reveals her precocious concern with the
"question of European unity" and the need for a new beginning- for a
European federation of states in the post-war world . We can also find in these
essays the sources of her distinction between "organized guilt" and "univer–
sal responsibility" as well as her belief that the German people had no
"monopoly of guilt" for the inhuman crimes of a racist ideolob'Y As Kohn
puts it in his introduction: "She fe lt that the defeat of the Nazis ought not
to be greeted with euphoria; her response was not victorious exultation, but
a profound lament over the destruction of Cerman culture."
