The Department of German at NYU and Deutsches Haus at NYU present a talk by Barbara Hahn on "The Burden of Our Time. Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism."
What a burden it was to write this book. Hitler in Germany – Stalin in the Soviet Union. How did, how could that happen? In Parisian exile, Hannah Arendt tried to reconstruct the history of Antisemitism; soon after her arrival in the USA, the focus of her attention shifted. She now thought that the atrocities, committed in the century of Imperialism, pathed the way for those committed in her time. After 1945, she added a third part – a study of totalitarianism. In the end, the Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was addressed to “each one of those who rightly is in despair”, as Arendt wrote in the last chapter. After genocide in the middle of Europe, after the most devastating war in human history.
The lecture will follow Hannah Arendt on her long way of writing this book, a book that is distressingly up to date.
Please RSVP for in-person attendance here.
About the participant:
Barbara Hahn is the Max Kade Foundation Chair in German Studies Emerita at Vanderbilt University and Honorary Professor at the Free University, Berlin as well as the Fall 2023 Eberhard Berent Goethe Chair in the NYU German Department. She is editor of the first three volumes of a complete and critical edition of Hannah Arendt’s work; https://hannah-arendt-edition.net.
Attendance:
While NYU has ended COVID-19 related restrictions and policies, we continue to remind and recommend to members of the NYU community that they stay up-to-date on their boosters and stay home if they feel sick. Masks are always welcome.
To RSVP for in-person attendance, please click here.
"The Burden of Our Time. Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism." is funded by the DAAD from funds of the German Federal Foreign Office (AA).