Backlisted - What Remains by Hannah Arendt

Episode Date: March 25, 2025

Elif Shafak and Lyndsey Stonebridge join John and Andy for a discussion of the life and work of Hannah Arendt, the historian and philosopher whose books include The Human Condition, The Origins of Totalitarianismand Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. This being Backlisted, we approach Arendt's formidable oeuvre and truly extraordinary biography via an intriguing route: her poetry. The book Elif and Lyndsey have chosen for this special episode is What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (Norton), published in November 2024. Arendt wrote poetry from a young age; she kept the manuscript of many of these poems with her as a refugee from Nazi Germany, in the camps and on the boat to America. What did they represent to their author? And as the world finds itself once again grappling with the threats of populism and totalitarianism, what can we learn from Hannah Arendt? We hope you will enjoy this fascinating, thought-provoking conversation as much as we did.  Elif Shafak's new novel There Are Rivers In The Sky (Penguin) is available now. Lyndsey Stonebridge's We Are Free To Change the World: Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience (Vintage) was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Writing 2024. *For £100 off any Serious Readers HD Light and free UK delivery use the discount code: BACK at seriousreaders.com/backlisted * To purchase any of the books mentioned in this episode please visit our bookshop at uk.bookshop.org/shop/backlisted where all profits help to sustain this podcast and UK independent bookshops. * For information about everything mentioned in this episode visit www.backlisted.fm *If you'd like to support the show and join in with the book chat, listen without adverts, receive the show early and get extra bonus fortnightly episodes and original writing, become a patron at www.patreon.com/backlisted *You can sign up to our free monthly newsletter here  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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The book featured in today's show is what remains the recently published collected poems of the German born philosopher philosopher Hannah Arendt. I'm John Mitchinson, the publisher at Boundless. And I'm Andy Miller, the author of The Year of Reading Dangerously, and regular listeners will spot that I have a cold today. So I apologize for that. Hopefully it won't spoil your enjoyment too much. And today we welcome two new guests to back Listed, Elef Shafak. Hello. Hi.

Welcome in. Lindsay Stonebridge, hello. Welcome, Lindsay. We are very, very delighted to have you here. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you. Elef Shafak is an award-winning British Turkish novelist and storyteller. This is weird, isn't it, actually doing this sitting next to the person who is the Bat?

Did you know that she has published 21 books, 13 of which are novels and her books have been translated into 58 languages. The Island of missing trees was a finalist for the cost reward, British book awards, RSL on darchy prize and women's prize for for fiction and was a Reese Witherspoon book club pick. 10 minutes 38 seconds in this strange world was shortlisted for the Booker prize and RSL on Darche prize and was Blackwell's book of the year. The 40 rules of love was chosen by the BBC among the 100 novels that shaped our world. I like that. I like thinking this is the first time Elif ever heard any of this. Elif holds a PhD in political science and is an honorary fellow

at St Anne's College, Oxford University. She's a fellow and a vice president of the Royal Society of Literature and has been chosen by BBC's 100 most inspiring and influential women. Elif is a prominent advocate for women's rights, LGBTQ plus rights and freedom of expression. In 2024, she was awarded the British Academy president's medal for quote, her excellent body of work, which demonstrates an incredible intercultural range listeners.

What's she doing here? She's massively overqualified for that. but we are so glad to see you. Thank you. Thank you. Lindsay Stonebridge is a professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham, UK. She is the author of Placeless People, Writing Rights and Refugees, winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize and a choice outstanding academic title, The Judicial Imagination, Writing after Nuremberg, which won the British Academy Rosemary Crochet Prize for English Literature and the essay collection Writing and Writing, that's writing and writing, Literature in the Age of Human Rights, We are Free to Change the World, Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience,

was published by Jonathan Cape and the Hogarth Press in January 2024. Lindsay is currently working on a new book, Old Women, A History of Our Future. That's a good title. Was that greeted warmly? Yes it was, but I now have to get old and write the book. And that's going to be published in 2027. Goodness, you're announcing that early. Yeah, that was my publisher's decision. I think they were worried I might die or get ill before I finished it. So this is going to be a quick book. decision I think they were worried I might die or get ill. She is a regular

media commentator and broadcaster she lives in London and similarly we are surprised and delighted you're here Lindsay thank you so much. It's great to be here. Fantastic well onto the book what remains the collected poems of Hannah Arendt published for the first time in March 2025 by LiveWrite Publishing in New York in a dual language text, edited and translated from the German by Samantha Rose Hill with Genesee Grill. So Hannah Arendt is best known as one of the 20th century's most famous public intellectuals responsible for a string of challenging philosophical works which include the origins of totalitarianism, the human condition on revolution, on violence, and men in dark times. Her work remains influential today for its powerful defense of and investigation into

human freedom and its unflinching contemplation of our capacity for violence and evil. Nowhere was this more evident than in her coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem in 1961, serialized in five editions of the New Yorker. Her presentation of Eichmann as a self-serving bureaucrat rather than a genocidal monster led to her most famous catchphrase, the banality of evil, probably revisit that later, but also alienated her from many of her fellow Jewish friends who saw the articles and resulting book as an attack on the state of Israel and an insult to the memory of the Holocaust victims. The poems, undiscovered until 2011,

26 years after Arendt died, reveal a different, scrupulous, private person. Influenced by Emily Dickinson, Raina Maria Rilke and Robert Lowell, and a friend W.H. Auden and Randall Jarrell, Arendt marked out the key moments of her life with poetry, and it played a crucial role in a sense of what it meant to be a thinking person. I'd like to appeal to long-time listeners of Backlisted and say nothing is ever wasted. We learnt how to pronounce Randall Jarrell about eight years ago and we have yet to forget it's not Randall Jarrell, it's Randall Jarrell. As we hope to show over the next hour, Arendt's poetry offers a fresh and interesting perspective on the rest of her work. But first, here's a message from our sponsors. And we're back. And before we start on the main course, it's a good moment to mention

that we'll be picking up elements of today's discussion in next week's Locklisted, our show for patrons. You can subscribe for that at patreon.com forward slash backlisted and five years of superior book, film and music chat, plus ad free early versions of the main show will be yours. Right, to business. We always ask this question first and I suspect we'll get particularly deep and interesting answers today.

Elif, when did you first become aware of the work of Hannah Arendt? First of all, it's wonderful to have this conversation together. I have started reading Hannah Arendt. Well, first of all, it's wonderful to have this conversation together. I have started reading Hannah Arendt's work in my early 20s. I was in Turkey and I was a student of political science, so that brought me into her work. But to be honest, it was for me personally, Walter Benjamin who connected me to Hannah Arendt. And after that, I started reading her work

almost with hunger. There are a couple of reasons for this. First of all, her work about the dangers of apathy and numbness spoke very deeply for me. I think when you're a novelist, when you're a storyteller, you're very connected to the idea of empathy, right? We don't want a society in which we're atomized individuals. And I think Hanarand was warning us against that. In my opinion, literature is the antidote to numbness. I was very interested

in her friendship with Walter Benjamin, the very fact that she was inspired by poets from Realke to Goethe to Bertolt Brecht. So all these interdisciplinary conversations that shaped her thinking spoke to me deeply. As time went by, as the country where I come from went backwards and populist authoritarianism became stronger, I became interested in Hanar and for different reasons. I started reading her work on totalitarianism and as years went by, her voice as an exile, as a refugee, she says, we refugees, we don't like to be called refugees. But the way she deals with identity, multiple belongings, there's a melancholy to her, perhaps existence, you know, she has left a big part of

herself behind. So on so many levels, I think Hanarayan speaks to me, but for me, personally, after all these years of reading about her political thinking, her as a public intellectual, to discover her poetic voice was an amazing delight. Yes, we should say this might be the newest, technically speaking, the newest book we've ever featured on Batlist. Because it was only published three or four months ago, wasn't it? But it seems such a good way to open up various conversations about our end, exactly as you suggest. So you have a, to all intents and purposes, you have a lifetimes relationship with Arendt.

I really, really think so. Lindsay, similar question to you. You've written about Arendt. Your book is wonderful, has done very well, very successful. but when did you first encounter her work? It's a very similar story to yours, actually. I was reading Arendt in the 1980s, and I was a postgraduate student, and I was working on feminism and psychoanalysis. And Arendt wasn't being read in those circles in the 80s. She wasn't popular. Partly, you know, the left didn't like her, partly she wasn't feminist enough. So I was immersed in post-structuralist theory and Jacquela Collins saying, you know, the family exists, but women didn't. And I somehow stumbled upon The Human Condition. And I never read anything like this before in my life. I didn't

know that it was philosophy or political science or poetry. And interestingly, it was the passage about storytelling. There's this beautiful passage in The Human Condition where she talks about the great storybook of mankind where we're all in a world together writing stories. But then she says, and it's beautiful, she says, but we're not in control of those stories. What happens? The storytelling kind of happens behind our back.

So it's a sense of a network of stories that we're making the world. And all the stuff in the 80s was very much about critique and being quite cool into things, but this wasn't. So I kind of treasured it and kept it quiet. And then very much, I worked on, as we turned into the 20th century, I started working on exile, statelessness, return of totalitarianism. So it was the rent of origins and the rent of we refugees and revolution that I became interested in. But I'll never forget reading this passage from The Human Condition going, yes, in my early 20s, it was comforting and challenging. And the

writing was like, I mean, of course she's a poet. I mean, the writing in human condition is, every time I read that book, it's like, I've never read anything like this before. I've never read this book before. I've read it about five times. Yes. Exactly. Yes. Because of the language. Very interesting, isn't it? All sorts of books, but particularly with our end, as I see it, the way the book,

her work simultaneously seems to speak of different things at different moments. But actually, if we see it in the overview of it, it's all one thing. It's all one, you know, the relationship between thought and freedom seems to me a recurring trope of the essays, the books, the poetry, whatever. John? So I first encountered almost in a sort of almost by accident because I was doing a course in philosophy course at Auckland University and there was an existentialism module which was the thing I was really excited about because you know I'd read Camus and such and I thought I kind of already had a bit of an inside track on it. And then the astonishing thing is that she wasn't mentioned in that course at all. Husserl was taught and Heidegger was taught. Now the connecting, if you know anything about

Hannah Aaron, is the connecting person there is Husserel's top student is Heidegger, and also teaches Karl Jaspers, who became best friends with Hannah Arendt. And as we now discover to our shock and horror, certainly wasn't known in the early 80s when I was at university. I don't know when it was, the affair, the love affair between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger

is it comes out. So I discovered her kind of by accident. I was reading a New Yorker piece and I got really excited that she'd actually written a whole book on totalitarianism and a whole what went wrong with existentialism, which is the thing we all want to say. These guys seem pretty cool, but hey, hang on, Heidegger was actually a Nazi, actually joined the party, and Sartre, for all his brilliance, I think by that stage, certainly a lot of the women I knew were kind of urging me to read a second sex, which I did, and said, you know, the whole point really is that he was a controlling,

another controlling male, and Simone de Beauvoir was the really interesting thinker. So at that point I became really curious about Hannah Arendt. Before we move on to a kind of deeper discussion of Arendt, let's talk about the book, the poetry gathered in What Remains. Elif, I'll come to you in a minute, but Lindsay, I know, how long ago did you read these poems? They're not new to you, are they, in the same way? No, I mean... With your research. Yeah. They've been known about since the 80s, since the Archive went to the Library of Congress. There were some translations that Elizabeth Young-Broil did in her magisterial biography,

Hannah Arendt, For Love of the World. They weren't particularly good translations. So they have been around, but whenona Rent is taught in universities. It's usually in political science departments or political theory. And there's kind of reluctance to see her as a writer and a poet. And then there are people who come at the other end who are kind of like, well, actually, what's really the reason people are always saying, well, she's not very systematic and she's incoherent. You think she's not incoherent.

She's a poetic writer. Yes. Can I? Presumably those departments are reluctant and perhaps less well-equipped to deal with her as a stylist. Yeah. Right, so the style in which she expresses herself.

So you were familiar with some of the poems or you read the poems. So it's a significant moment, the bringing together of all her poetry. Elif, what was your first response to the poetry? We should just explain that most of the poems were written in two batches, weren't they? In the 1920s and the 1940s to 50s. And that Arendt carried them with her on her various travels. They clearly meant a lot to her.

We don't know in what way, we can speculate in what ways, but she kept them close. Did you recognize the Arendt that you had spent all those years reading in the poetry? I did actually and if we can dwell upon the word we used earlier, she did carry these poems with herself during her journeys, but these are not like light travels we're talking about. This is like risking her life. She does not know whether she's going to wake up tomorrow and see another day. She's losing her friends, like the death

of Walter Benjamin. She's looking for the graves of her friends. So this amazing, the horrors of the uncertainty, Holocaust ongoing, during all those ordeals, trials, the fact that she hung on to these poems. And I'd love to ask Lindsay about this. I have a feeling there might be more poems that were lost in between. So we have these two chunks, but what was going on in between, because it doesn't feel like she ever stopped writing. And to me, it feels like there's such vulnerability, tenderness, gentleness. I think one of the poems is called Intimate Tenderness in these poems. So on the one hand, you have this very strong figure, public intellectual speaker who has

dealt with so much, including sometimes unfair, from people on her side, because they misunderstood what she was saying with the banality of evil. So she really dealt with a lot. But on the other hand, having this very personal intimate voice, I think to me that was important. If I may add one quick thing,

I think Hanarant is the kind of intellectual who doesn't like to be behind closed doors, like an ivory tower, atomized disciplines. She's always much more fluid than that, and that's why she makes this distinction between Socrates and Plato, doesn't she? So the kind of intellectual who's engaged in the conversations of today. And in that sense, perhaps it is not surprising that she has such a curious mind, restless mind and she always wants to flow beyond the boundaries of that these disciplines are drawing in front of her.

And yet she didn't publish this post. She didn't publish, yes. So if this is of a piece with her thought, again, I'm not asking you to speculate, but we must remember that she chose to keep these private. How do you think she would feel about the publication of them? That's a wonderful question. She'd fully blocked the publication of them. How do you think she would feel about being discussed on a podcast?

She might have liked that. She would have loved podcasts. She would have loved podcasts. She would have loved podcasts. She would have loved podcasts because she has this, I mean, what I love about these poems is you can see, you can tell her biography through these poems, which I didn't think you'd be able to do. So the early ones are the young woman and thinker, and she's discovering what she'll

later call the two-in-one conversation in your head. So thinking for andt is not kind of masterful reason. Thinking is just the conversations we have in our heads all the time. That is thinking. And that's what poetry is. I mean, poetry and writing are having a conversation. So you read the early ones and you can sort of, I mean, she was born in Hanover, they moved to Königsberg, the center of the Enlightenment, that little red rectangle which is now Kaliningrad. And you can see her discovering her sense of self, her sense of thought, falling in love, falling

out of love, all that, discovering Nietzsche, discovering philosophy, discovering Kant. And then there is this break. I mean, she, you know, she had- Nine years, as far as we can tell. As Elie said, if we just spell out the exile's journey, from Königsberg she went to Marburg where she met Martin Heidegger and learned about philosophy. This was great news because it gave her the philosophical tools she needed to do her work. Bad news because he turned out to be a Nazi. They were lovers. And quite controlling in the relationship.

And very controlling. And after that, she moved to Berlin, and it was in Berlin that she started working for the then German Zionist organization. She had a very ambivalent relationship to Zionism, often very critical. But what she was doing, she was actually gathering material in the Prussian Library to demonstrate anti-Semitism. She was a scholar in a clean skin, so no one really suspected her, except it was a librarian who turned her in because this scholar was looking at newspapers and contemporary papers. So the librarian said, well, obviously there's something wrong with them. She was arrested with her mother by the Gestapo, kept, we're not sure for how long in a Gestapo cell, fortunately by a rookie Gestapo

person who, there's an interesting story there. But they got all her papers and said, well, what's this? She was obviously writing in code and she said, that's Greek, my Greek primer. Eventually free, she was freed by the Gestapo, we're not quite sure how, but she fled Germany to Czechoslovakia border, ended up in Paris and she was a social worker. She was working with refugee kids. She later said, you know, I was just a social worker who read philosophy and politics in my spare time. And she was helping Jewish kids, Jewish youth get to Palestine. Then was arrested again by the French at the beginning of the war, sent to a camp in southwest France in Gers, hideous conditions.

When France was occupied, she fled with another group of women. The people who stayed were all murdered in Auschwitz. So everyone she was in that camp with who didn't escape were murdered. From there, she went to Marseille, did the famous hustling to get papers. She only just got papers, had to leave her mother behind at that point. She fled to Spain and then to Portugal, stopping to look at Walter Benjamin's grave on the way, which she couldn't find. Walter Benjamin had famously gone a few months ahead and committed suicide on the border and then went to the States. Became an au pair to learn English, went on a refugee hosting scheme. Her story sounds quite familiar, right? Big, big displacement,

horror, horror, horror. One of the first people to find out about the Holocaust. And so these poems kind of like, you know, the life of the mind, as she'll later call it, that lived through these experiences. And exactly, thank you so much for, the thing is, as I called them journeys, you're quite right, through these series of exiles, she's keeping under the most difficult circumstances a little bit cache of her poetry with her all the time. John, I think we should hear one of the poems. Would you like to share one with us? Should we do one of the early ones? What should we do? They're all good. There's one called Weeriness that I really like, which is in her very early mode.

Which is just, night falling, birds calling a quiet lament, a song I made. Grey walls collapse to the floor, my hands grasp each other once more. I can no longer hold what I used to love. I can no longer escape what imprisons me. Everything fades. Dawn rises. Nothingness conquers me. It's just life's way. That's definitely a poem that we know that she sent to Heidegger, I think. So how old is she when she writes that, approximately?

I mean, it's 25, we think so. 1920. 1920. What to you, Ellef, what are the qualities of that writing as poetry. You know, as Lindsay pointed out earlier, as you keep reading these poems, you see how she changes. Certain things remain the same. I think the core is always there, even when she's quite young, but there is a change, shift in a style.

There's perhaps a layer of melancholy that increases as years go by. For me, I think what's crucial and maybe coming back to your earlier question, why couldn't she let go of these poems at any point even during those trials? Because I think this was her homeland because language is her homeland. And she says this in so many ways that for her motherland is the German language. And coming back to Heidegger, this very complex love affair, she says that they met in the German language. I've always thought about that. What does that mean? To meet someone and to love

someone in your mother tongue or in a foreign language. But I think that gave her a sense of continuity, a center, almost like a sanctuary. She was writing these poems in German, always in German. I mean, eventually she started writing in English when she came to America. She didn't speak a word or very few words in English, like she's in her mid-30s, so she has to do a lot of learning very quickly. And it's her third language. And it's her third language.

So she does express her political philosophy in her second or third language, but poetry always in her mother tongue. And I find that quite interesting too. There's a comparison there, isn't there, with an earlier refugee, that being Nabokov, who is writing English. Is his third language, is it? I'm going to say Russian and French are his first two, and possibly German as well. I don't know, but he's writing. But of course, there's a radical difference in subject and style, not least that Arendt doesn't have Nabokov's relish for the novel word, for the extravagant phrase. Arendt is a much more brilliant writer that controlled

plane wants to get to the idea, to the sense. John mentioned Heidegger, Lindsay. and Heidegger, Lindsay, you were saying that she loved a man in German. I met him in... I met him in German, yeah. Might I speculate that perhaps she was reluctant to share these because of the troublesome reputation that Heidegger subsequently acquired. I think that's, yeah, exactly. I mean, it's very notable when we look at the gaps, the young poetry, the time of their affair, then there's the gap. And she starts writing poetry before she meets Heidegger again. When he became a Nazi, there's a series of letters where she says, is it true? And he says, well, yeah, I'm kind of like, I still got Jewish friends and I really like you. And then she just

says, oh, that's it, I'm off, I'm out. But in 1950, when she goes back to Europe and to Germany for the first time, she's moved to get in touch with him. And she writes to Mary McCarthy and says, I really want to get back in touch with him. And Mary McCarthy gives her bad advice. She says, you're obviously still in love with him. You must do that. Whereas my advice would have been, it's quite often attempting to go back to old boyfriends in your forties. It's never a good idea. Stairway love. But she didn't. And it's very notable that reading the- Huge risk really, because by that, I mean, I don't suppose she'd, by 1950, she hadn't pulled the world down on her head that she did later, but she was still writing,

you know, she wrote a big thing on for New York Review of Books in the early 70s on high degradation. Because she was rehabilitating his work and getting it translated. But I think it was But she was rehabilitating his work and getting it translated. But I think it was the work. I mean, two things about this. I think on the one hand, without Heidegger's thinking, and thinking is a key word here. I mean, it was Heidegger who showed that, I mean, part of existentialism is like, there is no ground. There are no certainties. There's no truth. What is there? What is thinking? There is thinking. What is thinking? It's language. What is thinking at the edges of creation and freedom? Poetic language. So she says one point, she repeats it. She says, you know, poetic language is not a refuge. It's a place. Poetry is not

somewhere where you go to be safe. It's where you live. Wow. I wonder whether as well there was an element of, she was in love with Heidegger. It was a very significant relationship intellectually, spiritually. I wonder whether, and I think one of the things the poetry captures, even if you know nothing about Hannah Arendt, is that intoxication of young love. And again, I'm going to speculate wildly and wonder if she carried them with her, partly in the sense of the man on the back of Caesar's chariot whispering in his ear, remember Caesar, you are mortal. That there's a sense that the beauty of the purity of the feeling of the sensation of young love is contradicted by the mess of the lives that are then gone on and led by the subject of fantasy. It's really complicated, isn't it, Lallie? Because on the one hand, there's a kind of

in the German tradition, but not actually in the modern tradition, you'll know this from your existentialism course, what Nietzsche and Heidegger teaches is we're all strangers in the world. We're all homeless. But what happened to Arendt's generation of refugees and migrants similar to today is that existential truth becomes a historical actual truth. So it's no longer a metaphor. So what I read in the poems is that, I mean, Arendt lived that in a way that Heidegger simply didn't. And she never forgot that either. So this is kind of sense why she's so, and it does get us back to, you know, people often talk about the relationship between Arendt and Heidegger. What they don't do is go and read the human

condition, which is not only in debt to Heidegger, it totally refutes his fascism. It's a book about love. It's a book about beginning. It's a book that says, yes, it's poetry. Yes, it's language. But that doesn't mean nihilism. That doesn't mean negativity. It means the possibility for human joy. And so people are very content to slag off her hand without actually seeing the way that she absolutely turned her back on Heidegger philosophically. I mean, she sent him a copy of that book with a poem that she didn't, she's not in here, that she didn't actually include and said, this is my forgiving, unforgiving book to you. He didn't acknowledge the letter and he didn't acknowledge the book. He ghosted both of those.

Heidegger seems nice on the basis of this conversation. The thing I love about is that her commitment to truth, always trying to get to the bottom of things. She won't give up on Heidegger's work because to her it's important, the life of the mind, as you say, it becomes the thing for her that she is continually trying to triangulate what goes on in our heads with what goes on in the world and the connection between those two things.

And she won't, for reasons that we might now say, because it would be politically expedient, he was a Nazi, he's a bad guy, don't have anything to do with him. Instead, what she tries to do is to preserve the good bits of his legacy because she knows that it's important and she knows that for the people who were in those extraordinary early classes, he taught a whole generation of German thinkers how to think, deep, proper thinking that maybe is his contribution to 20th century philosophy. And she also has a theory of forgiveness. You can't have politics without forgiveness.

You can't have life without forgiveness. Yeah, amazing. I also wanted to ask Elif about this because her sense of reality, you're quite right. And so why she's so important today is like tell her truths. We have to get in touch with reality. The image makers, the lies, the politics of post-truth. But what she meant by factual truth was very much about, it's very Kantian, it's about common sense with emphasis on sense. So it's what I smell, what I see, what I feel, what I can share

about that reality. And that seems to me, this is a writer's mentality. It's not theory, it's about what it means to experience, which is such a key word in her lexicon, what it means to experience the world. And experiencing the world for Arendt is kind of anti-totalitarian, because what totalitarianism is about is making sure that we can't experience the world together. I don't know, I mean, is that what you... No, absolutely. It deeply resonates with me everything you said. I mean, one thing of course totalitarianism can never stand is ambiguity or pluralism or multiplicity. And I think all these are very crucial for Hannah Arendt. And that's why I wish, you know, a

part of me always thinks if she were alive today, how would she respond to this moment? I do not think she would be happy with this extreme polarization and bitter politicization. The civic space, how do we become more engaged? How do we find shared values? And what happens when we lose those shared values? These are big, big concerns for her. So I think in that sense, there's a consistency. Even when she goes back to her memories with Heidegger, I mean, she does separate the man and of course his awful wrongdoings, but then his philosophy, the good things that he did, like how can we keep these conversations? Are there moments

when we can separate the art from the artist, the deed from the doer? I know these are not easy questions, but I feel like she keeps asking herself these. And they're also very, very relevant questions for our time. So the ability to forgive, the ability to empathize, to try to understand why different people vote in different ways rather than categorize them, generalize them, and then push them down in this mental hierarchy that we have in our minds. We would have needed her voice today. And indeed she was criticized, wasn't she, in the way she treated Eichmann.

She refuses to cancel Eichmann. She won't demonise. She doesn't demonise. Right. Yeah. Which of course is exactly the impulse in the modern world to push to extremes, as you say. In fact, Lindsay, you were saying to us before we started this, which I thought was hilarious,

that to some extent, Aaron's resurgence in the public realm in the last 10 years has been because of social media. KS. She would have been appalled. I mean, it's very, just to pick up on one thing that you said, I think it was very revealing to me that when I looked at, she taught at Berkeley in 1955, she taught a course called political science. to, she taught at Berkeley in 1955, she taught a course called Political Science. And when you look at that course, and she's teaching to white male Californian happy students in the 1950s who haven't

been touched by fascism or totalitarianism. And you look at the course and what she's teaching, novels. She's teaching folklore, she's teaching cameo. And people, they're political scientists, so we should never be able to get away with that. Why is she doing that? Because fiction literature is the way that you can look at the world from someone else's perspective. You don't have to like that perspective. You don't even have to empathize. At one point she says, empathy can be controlling. She's mistrustful of empathy. But what you do have to be able to do is go visiting in your imagination. And the medium for doing that for her was writing, was literature. You lose that at your peril. Going back to Eichmann, this is of course what Eichmann couldn't do. He

couldn't hear another voice. He couldn't see another perspective. His language, I mean, Muriel Spark also wrote about Eichmann. She used Arendt's accounts because his language had no resonance. Really poor metaphors, like I'm being grilled like I'm a rump state. Yes, he'd make up his own cliches. She is a poetic thinker. There was something profoundly insulting to her about his bad language. It wasn't just bad language, it was a language without thought and resonance. And she said, this is part of the reason why he was able to eliminate other people. He could not abide a plural world. And I think it comes back to apathy and the dangers of apathy again, because actually

many thinkers, I mean, among those who survived the Holocaust have said something similar, the opposite of evil or goodness, the opposite of goodness is not necessarily evil. The opposite of goodness can be actually numbness. The moment we become desensitized, indifferent to each other's stories, the moment we stop caring. And that's why I think she's so careful about that. When we are drawn into our own cocoons and we stop interacting, we abandon that civic space, that shared space, then democracy very quickly, unfortunately, declines into majoritarianism and from majoritarianism into authoritarianism. It's a very, very shortfall. So I think she does care so much about stories. And that's one of the

many things I find in common between her and Walter Benjamin. I think they were both storytellers. But it's also going back to Andy's question, she would have hated social media because she had this famous distinction between political life, private life, which she guarded fiercely because totalitarianism attacks private life, and social, which merges politics and private life together. And what she understood about the social, she wasn't the only one in this time, is a very lonely place. It's not actually, it's the opposite to what it says it's going to be. And you can see this on social media, which must be one of the loneliest places on the planet right now, because people aren't expressing

and sharing. They're scared. It's fear that drives through. You can't listen on social media. No. It's always broadcast. So it's never a conversation. I think we're living in an age in which we are bombarded by information, but there is very little knowledge and even less wisdom. And we have to make a distinction between these three things, maybe following T.S.

Eliot's advice. And when I think about late 1990s, early 2000s, there was so much optimism back then. Do you remember? And the big optimists were tech optimists. If you give people information, everyone is going to become informed citizens. Informed citizens are going to make the right choices. I think she would have, Hannah Arendt would have been very aware of that distinction, that information is not knowledge. It's not wisdom definitely. And actually too much information, all these snippets, morsels of information

give us the illusion that we know something about everything. And we have forgotten to say, I don't know, which was the beginning of philosophy, you know, Socrates, right? And we don't say, I don't know anymore. But also, as Timothy Snyder says in his, in his books, one of the things in retrospect, the people got wrong in the nineties. I doubt Hannah Aaron would ever have believed there was an end of history. Oh, yes. Right. You're right. Aaron would ever have believed there was an end of history. Oh, yes. Right. The idea that would have been as Tim Snyder says, you know, the mistake everybody made was to think, well, that's that

then. But the, the iron curtains come down. We won't make that mistake again. But that's because of this linear arc of history that it's an illusion. This linear time. You know, why she she said famously, no, I don't want anything to do with any of the intellectual business. And she'd quite often say, I'm not a philosopher. And the reason for that is she did not trust big theories. She saw what happened. I mean, once you're going to predict me, she says, why would you do dialectics with the Holocaust? What kind of logic is that? Yes. You say somewhere in your book that she doesn't have a, you know, one of the reasons that perhaps she doesn't get taught as a, because she doesn't have a system that is easily

breakdown. You say her work is more like a force field. It kind of, it brings in lots of interesting ideas about, but she's always coming back to that kind of tension between the person and people cooperating with one another. She refuses this atomization. There's that beautiful bit about the Portuguese Revolution, which I have to confess I didn't know until I read your book.

I didn't know that. I knew a bit about the end of Francoism, but, you know, and the giving out of carnations, which again reminded me a little bit of the, as Alif just said, of the coming down of the Berlin Wall and the belief suddenly that maybe there was a possibility to have a more participative democratic state. Yeah, but I think that's why I think quite a lot of the Irenian politics now, going back to Hope, is in places like Iran, the women of Iran, which are precisely about being seen. The politics for her is about appearing in the world. It's also about courage. And the counter politics now doesn't tend to be the one that's driven by big theory, or we're going to do this instead, or politicians.

It does, and you know this so well from Turkey, it does happen from the ground when people actually step into the world to be seen and to take action. That's what happened in Portugal. Listen, we're going to take a little break. And when we come back, I'm going to ask, be asking Elif about, amongst other things, how it feels to not write in your first language. And presumably you feel some kinship with Arendt there, but hold that thought while we hear this word from these nice people. Welcome back. We are discussing the poetry of Hannah Arendt, although, hands up, we've been having such an interesting discussion, we haven't talked enough about the poetry of Hannah Arendt, although hands up we've been having such an interesting discussion we haven't talked enough about the poetry of Hannah

Arendt. So we're going to do that in a moment but Elif I know there was a section of Arendt's writing which is reproduced in What Remains that you wanted to share with us as a jumping-off point. Yes I was very intrigued by this. So there's a moment when during an interview after she's survived all these horrors, I think on German national TV, the journalist asks, what remains of the Europe that you've known, that you've loved, you know, after the turbulence and the catastrophe of wars and holocaust and then in her answer she says what remains? The language remains. I've always consciously refused to lose my mother tongue. I've always maintained a certain distance from French, which I then spoke very well, as well as from English, which I write today. There's a tremendous difference between your mother tongue and another language. For myself, I can put it extremely simply. In German, I know a rather large part of German poetry by heart. The poems are always somehow in

the back of my mind, but I can never do that again. So- Exiled from- Exiled from- From- Yes. Some strand of thought, which represents how interesting. Yeah. I do think about this a lot. I think some novelists are more perhaps plot driven, others are more character driven. And then some novelists I think love language just as much as

poets do. I am of the latter group, you know. For someone like me to abandon my mother tongue and to try to Refind my literary voice in a third language was really like cutting off my hands You know the hand that I write with and you feel lost you're somebody in your mother tongue And then almost overnight you become nobody you become a child again. You start from scratch again So her yeah her commute between languages, but her awareness that there are things that you cannot say exactly the way you want in a foreign language. There's always a gap between the mind and the tongue because the mind runs faster. The tongue in its own clumsy, awkward way tries to catch up, but doesn't quite get it. You always want to crack better jokes, you can't do it right. So I think she's very much aware of those gaps between the

mother tongue and the foreign language. Tell us in your experience then how one reaches a settlement with that. In my experience, of course, unlike her, there came a moment in my life when I decided to write in English. My fiction, my storytelling, you know, that's where my heart beats. I decided to do this in English, primarily because I needed freedom. Being a writer in Turkey is a very heavy experience, particularly for novelists, because novelists deal with ideas from sexuality to history to politics. Anything you touch can be offensive and you can be put in, you know, put on trial, you can get in trouble in a day.

So writing in English, I think, gave me an additional zone of existence, a little bit of cognitive distance where I could take a step back and feel a little bit lighter. I could maybe, you can swear better, you know, you can say the words that you cannot say with no sense of guilt. I like that, I needed that. But I think to this day, if my writing has melancholy, longing, loss, I find these feelings still to this day easier to express in Turkish. But humor, which I love and I adore, I think compassionate humor is our oxygen., which I love and I adore, I think compassionate humor is our oxygen. So humor, irony and satire, I think in English, they're

much easier. Oh, compassionate humor. Was Aaron, was she funny, do you think? I think she was very funny. I think she was very funny too. She was very funny. I think she liked humor, no? Yeah. She loved, because she had a genuine talent for friendship. That's one of the things that

comes out of, it comes out of the poetry, but it also comes out of, you know, the correspondence that we have. She made friends for life. Was she convivial company? I think when you were a friend. Very, very, very loyal. But also is Mary McCarthy was a great, great friend. And they had lots of parties.

Yeah, her new year party. She made a mean Negroni. Yeah, yeah. a great friend. Great friend, yeah. And they had lots of parties, didn't they? Yeah, her New Year party. She made a mean Negroni. Yeah, yeah, and Campari. Some of the things she did with language were around friendship, because I mean, one of the first things she wrote in English was the essay you've already quoted, We Refugees, which is heart-wrenchingly beautiful. It's an ironic piece of fury as well. And she's writing in English with help, but there's some German

syntax remains. So it's a beautiful essay because you actually get the sense of her language being in refugee. Can I just read one stanza? There's a poem from the 40s, which captures everything that you were saying, Elif, and this sense of estrangement in language. And she's talking about exile and she says, this was the farewell. Many friends came with us and whoever did not come was no longer a friend. This was the evening. Haltingly, it slowed our pace and drew our souls out the window. This was a train measuring the country in flight and slowing as it passed through many cities. This is the arrival. Bread is no longer called bread and wine in a foreign language changes the conversation. And it's that last line,

and wine in a foreign language changes the conversation. Her last night in Berlin, her and her friends emptied out the cellar of a wine merchant had also had to flee. So you say it was the most drunk they'd ever been. Yeah. And I can hear a rent saying so far, so far, because she was still very young. But it's that sense of bread is no longer cool bread and wine. So the kind of sense of taste and taste linked to judgment wine in a foreign language changes the conversation. I think she was acutely aware of that mission. And the other thing she's her friends helped her. So, you know, with the origins of totalitarian, she, she said, I wrote it in my dinglish,

my denglish. Well, we, we are going to hear her speak in that denglish right now, I believe. So this is from when, John? This is from 1968. So it's from a lecture on revolution. She had her book on revolution sort of brilliantly. It compares and contrasts the American Revolution, which she thinks was successful with the French Revolution, which famously wasn't. But she's also interested in the idea of birth and rebirth. You know, we can all begin again,

which I think every refugee must believe. Absolutely. Let's hear this now. But no matter whether it is a question of birth or rebirth, decisive in these last remarks, I think, of mine is decisive in these last remarks, I think, of mine is that the line I quoted was taken from a Nativity hymn, not of course prophesying the arrival of a new generation is the great saving event which will always salvage mankind time and again. There you go. Negroni's all around. And cigarettes. And smoking. But it did make think, I would love to have heard her read her poetry.

Oh yeah. Because I don't read German. It's always difficult, isn't it, when you're trying to read poetry. It's almost untranslatable, really. I think Samantha Rose Hill has done an amazing job. I've done an amazing job. Can I read one of these poems and just not connect, with Lindsay and Elif will be able to help me. I'm not going to connect it to Aaron's life. I'm going to connect it to my life. Well, that's what poetry is for. She would have approved.

I'm currently living through a period of insomnia and the worst parts for me are the insomnia. And the worst parts for me are the passing out at about 10 o'clock and then waking up at one and thinking, oh, right, you know, no more sleep for a while. So this poem spoke to me, it's called Night Song. Night Song. The days lapse away, letting our time expire. Still the night shows us silently the same dark signs. Night must always say the same thing, always sing the same note. Showing in new ways we only are what we already were. Morning light, loud and strange, breaks the dark and silent show, returning us to the colors of day

with a thousand new troubles. And yet, when the day is done, the shadows linger. On rushing rivers, let us drift off to distant shores. The shadows are our home. And when we're weak and tired, In the dark womb of night we hope for comfort. We hope we can forgive all the horrors, all the grief. Our lips grow still, silently the day breaks.

I mean, that's pretty good in any language, right? Yeah, that is pretty good in any language. That's what I thought. Beautiful. You know, I don't wish to, you know. There are. I mean, the hair's my arm are standing up. I mean, I really hope that the poetry gets folded

into the Arendt discourse from here on in because I think it really does help. It helps connect all the bits together. So Lindsay, in 2016, Hannah Arendt's on totalitarianism became a best seller in the US. Circumstantially, we can only speculate why that would be. Why, I wonder. Right, yes, unfortunately. But, so this, returning to this social media thing, Arendt liked to

write in an epigrammatic way, didn't she? And is that part of the reason why superficially her work gained some traction on social media? Yeah. I mean, she always loved Nietzsche, some of the earlier poems you can see her debt to Nietzsche. Nietzsche, of course, writes epigrammatically, writes brilliant aphorisms. And I think the other thing to say about it, she has this book called Her Thinking Book, where she tries out thoughts and writing, both in German and in English. And a lot of those aphorisms, those really pithy, there are no dangerous thoughts, thinking itself is dangerous. The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or communist, but the person who can no longer tell

the difference between reality and fantasy, et cetera. In 2016, people started quoting, tweeting. She has tweet size aphorisms and people thought, oh, this is great. At the same time also when Elif and I was starting to read her, we didn't know that she was glamorous and beautiful. We just, you know, as so much feminist history is, you find these women from nowhere and you have to really, you know, you have a private relation with our sisters from the 20th century. And then the images started, you know, with the smoking and her cradling her hand and oh, and so this beautiful woman saying beautiful things that seemed to speak to our moment meant that she was circulating through the internet. But as, as Edith said, without actually

the kind of work you need to do to read around, which is to be constantly perplexed, um, to work with her in thinking and following those wonderful, quite often her paragraphs, very German like this, will start with a perfect sentence, aphoristic sentence, and then it will go on for another page full of qualifiers and subcourses before you can get to the end. So she's quite hard to read. I mean, I was trained as a literature scholar. So when I teach a rent, I do it through close reading because that's... And does she leave... I wondered with the poetry, the poetry in the relationship to thought and the work she leaves open, to what

extent do you feel the poems are finished? That's a tough question. Some of them might, you know, when I was reading, I felt like they might be unfinished. Perhaps she would have loved to have the opportunity to revisit them. I don't feel like she intended them to be shared publicly and discussed in the way that her work is. And yet at the same time, I fully agree. I think her poetry should be part of this conversation

from now on because she's someone who always joins the dots. This kind of interdisciplinary, intercultural thinking is at the heart of who she is. And she also always invites, I don't know if you'd agree, her readers, yes, she's very difficult to read in that sense, you're absolutely right. But also she invites us to engage in this conversation. And as you said, in this process of thinking, like, come with me, let's think together,

let's take another look at this, let's not take it for granted. So I think she might have been okay with this online conversation. I mean, I think that for me, reading the poetry, what was so interesting to me is I, me is, some poems are more finished than others, but they have the quality of authentic poetry in as much as there is a lot of room for us, the reader, to walk around in those poems. So as you say, very evocatively, the idea she's saying, we'll think together, walk beside me, we'll think. That's what I got from these poems. Yeah. And also, I think it's no accident she was an excellent teacher. She wasn't an excellent

colleague. She hated academic institutions and only got a 10-year job towards the end of her life. But she loved that process of thinking alongside with others. And I think the poems do invite that in. I think also, I do think what's very sad is one that we may be missing the poems that she wrote, if she wrote any in Paris, she was writing other things in Paris and she was very busy. So there's that bit, the bit of when she had the most direct contact with European fascism, yet she was living it, is missing. But what I also

find heartbreaking is the last poem we have here is 1961. She's working at Chicago. And after her writing about Eichmann, after the Eichmann trial, there's not a trace of any more poems. And I find that kind of heartbreaking. I mean, did she stop writing? Could you unpack that? Yeah. I mean, it was a very difficult time for her. She'd gone to Jerusalem, she'd looked like she wanted to do face to face. Before she wrote her reports up for the New Yorker, two things happened. Her husband, her second husband, who she adored, who was her third, her fourth, four walls had his first aneurysm stroke. And then she was in a terrible car accident in Central Park. So she wrote The Eichmann Trial, I think

in a kind of a late life fury. I mean, she was in her late fifties and it all came out. And I don't think she was prepared for the backlash that she got. She misjudged, I think it's a brilliant book, but it is a political book in the world. And what was in a nutshell the nature of that backlash fit for our listeners who aren't up on the story? Well, many people were upset at her and these people are her readers, some of them are her colleagues. I don't think she ever expected that kind of backlash from the people around her. I think they misunderstood what she was saying.

She wasn't saying that there's an Aichman in each and every one of us. I don't think she was saying that this is very commonplace, ordinary. Actually, she's showing us how serious this is, you know, because yes, there are some evil people, but if you compare their numbers with the rest of humankind, it's a small group of people we're talking about. And yet, how can these atrocities happen on such a large scale? So it doesn't answer that question. In order to answer that question, she's talking about the banality of evil. The moment we stop thinking, questioning, that's why she's so interested in Kafka, in my opinion. She wants to understand bureaucracy. When do we stop being individuals and just

become little cogs in a huge machine and just repeat the orders. So it's actually much more serious what she's pointing at. Yes. Also her relationship to Kafka, Lindsay, you talk about in your book is, is as a Jewish writer as well. The experience of the outsider. Yeah, yeah, yeah. The pariah. The civilizational collapse, I think she felt that what had happened was so profound, what had happened to Western civilization was so profound. And that I think part of that she refused, as it were, to take Jewish culture out of

that collapse, that she said there has been a collapse through all of civilization, including Jewish culture. I think that she didn't ring fence the state of Israel. She was very, very critical of the way. She felt it was a show trial. She felt that a lot of the witnesses who were brought up there were done to make Ben Gurion's political agenda kind of more, I mean, I can't say any of this without massive kind of red flags about what's happening today being waved. And I don't think she was prepared because she was doing what she always did, which was to try and get to the truth and to try and understand how did this happen

and why did it happen? I would like to ask you both. Now in his excellent introduction that Jon wrote, which you can all see me reading on my phone, you described hilariously, I thought, but the banality of evil as her catchphrase. And that's not wrong in terms of, she wouldn't have intended it as a catchphrase.

And it's, how would she feel about her whole life's work being reduced to that one phrase? She did not feel good about it. Is that right? Yeah. She was, I mean, in some ways she said, I don't know if she'd ever said it, because what she was trying to say was your point, which is like, what happens when we invent

political and social systems, which have embedded thoughtlessness into them? So bureaucracy be one thing, techno feudalism would be another. The fact that these things not being there are a couple of, there are a few evil men, of course there are, but the rest of it's being done unthinkingly. And I think she thought that had been let loose in the world, you're quite right, she was the break in tradition. And she loved to quote Hamlet, you know, cursed am I to ever, I ever was born to put this right. But she said, I mean, this is not without grandeur. What she really, and I think a lot of us feel like this is that people haven't realized how much we are broken, how much our traditions and the authority of being together has been smashed to bits.

So if you want to have just goodies and baddies and straightforward narratives, those are kind of totalitarian narratives in themselves. Indeed. She's always saying, you know, we missed it. We missed the moment to actually see. And that's what's so upset her about the Eindman trial. It's like, it's not enough. And Jasper said to her, don't give them the kind of, you know, they like being evil, these people. It's not like calling them evil is going to offend them. You can see this, you know,

there are characters today with their black t-shirts and their ridiculous posturing. They like it. Don't give it to them. Show them for what they are. But no, I'm actually stupid. Maybe we should listen to the little bit of her at the end of the film where she's speaking, which you say is verbatim from her. Okay, so it's not Hannah. It's not Hannah. We've got a clip now from... It's the marvellous Barbara Sikover in 2013.

...2013's film Hannah Arendt, which even as I say it sounds like it can't be quite right. It's like a biopic with dramatised thinking. And yet, we listened to this earlier and we thought it was rather good, didn't we? It's not without its problems. But let's... Some good bits in. But let's hear it now. Some good bits in it. Since Socrates and Plato, we usually called thinking to be engaged in that Eichmann utterly surrendered that single most defining human quality, that of being able to think.

And consequently, he was no longer capable of making moral judgments. This inability to think created the possibility for many ordinary men to commit evil deeds on a gigantic scale, the like of which one had never seen before. It is true. I have considered these questions in a philosophical way. The manifestation of the wind of thought is not knowledge, but the ability

to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly. And I hope that thinking gives people the strength to prevent catastrophes in these rare moments when the chips are down. Well you know that is powerful isn't it? It is. It is. Fair play. Yes.

Elif, I want to ask you this as we're getting near to the end of our recording today. day. What do you feel is the most important aspect of Arendt's work to our current historical moment? Such an important question because it is happening. We are in the middle of it. It's not a theoretical abstract question anymore. And I think it's all the more important that we read Han Narayan today carefully and discuss and bring her work into public spaces, into our conversations. She has very important things to teach us about the dangers of apathy, atomized lives. How do we stop this from becoming even worse? What I'm trying to say is democracy is much more fragile than we assumed years back. And we all need to become engaged citizens. I have had people with good intentions telling me years ago that it was

very understandable for me to be a feminist because I was Turkish. And back then, and they didn't mean this as an insult, what they were saying is, because we're Western, we don't have to worry about such things. Because back then we thought the world was divided into solid lands versus liquid lands. We put all that behind us as well. And those solid lands in the West, you didn't have to worry about democracy, freedom of speech, minority rights or women's rights. But as Zygmunt Bauman has been telling us, we're all living in liquid times.

There's no such thing as solid lands versus liquid lands. So I think Hanna Arendt's work is very, very important today and very relevant, even more so than yesterday. Yes. Okay. relevant, even more so than yesterday. Yes, okay. And presumably Lindsay, Aren offers us a challenge, and we like a challenge on Batwest, it offers us a challenge as readers, which is to not look for the simple answer, but to be, I remember Tessa Hadley, John, when she was our guest talking about Henry James, Tessa Hadley John when she was our guest talking about Henry James and we were talking about how a Henry James paragraph will often not seem to resolve into one meaning. And she

said, yes, that's the idea. It's between the lines. It's between, you know, the sense of contradiction of unease is, and there's something similar with that with Aaron. There is. I mean, I absolutely agree with everything you just said, Elif. I mean, it's like, but she would be asking us to think for ourselves. So don't draw analogies. She didn't like analogies. Engage with reality in all its difficulty and face it. The other thing I'd say, which I don't think I would have said 10 years ago, is what Arendt gave me when I was writing my book and rereading her in our times, our dark times, is the importance of love and beginning anew. And the reason I'm saying that is because she lived and understood totalitarianism and

what it taught her was the importance of loving the world. So she says in one of these poems, this is in 53, I love the earth as if traveling to a foreign place and not otherwise. And it's her embrace of the strangeness, the mystery of our lives together that she wants. And that is anti-fascist and that is anti-totalitarian. And that's also why we need her today. And that's, I'm afraid, where we must end things. Huge thanks to Elif and Lindsay for being such wise and enlightening guides to the remarkable edifice of Hannah Arendt's life and work. Thanks also to our producer, Nicky Burch, who makes the whole thing blend seamlessly into a satisfying whole.

If you would like show notes with clips, links and suggestions for further reading for this show and the 235 that we've already recorded. Please visit our website at backlisted.fm. And if you would like to buy the books discussed on this or any of our shows, visit our shop at bookshop.org and choose backlisted as your bookshop. And do subscribe to our Patreon at patreon.com forward slash backlisted. Remember if you subscribe at the lot listener level, you'll get two extra exclusive podcasts every month.

The next one will feature Andy, Nikki and I talking about this show and recommending other books, films and music we've enjoyed in the previous fortnight. People who subscribe at this level also get their names read out like this. Christina Ballis, thank you. Stephen Hall Jones, thank you. And also I'm saying a special thank you to Rowan Maitson, whose name I said incorrectly on the last show. Who did you?

So, so I'm putting, I'm putting that right now, Rowan. Thank you so much. Um, before we go, uh, Lindsay, is there anything else you would like to add about this book or the life and work of Hannah Arendt that we didn't manage to cover? Um, about this book or the life and work of Hannah Arendt that we didn't manage to cover? I know. I thought it was going to. I'd say read her, but also I think that the, look, you know, a lot of women in the 20th century

were trying to rethink freedom, Simone Vale, Simone de Beauvoir, Hannah Arendt, and we didn't pay attention to them. We need to stop paying attention to other notions of freedom now. Okay. Yeah. We're a quarter of a century into this benighted era. So yes, good advice. Which book would you start with? I'd start with the Eichmann book, because it's journalism. And then I'd go to the essays Men in Dark Times. She was a brilliant biographer. She was a brilliant life writer.

Aleph, is there any last message you would like to leave our listeners with? I think Hannah Arendt was a curious person. It might sound very simple, but she always kept that childish curiosity alive. And I find that very crucial because the moment we stop asking questions, that is when things get darker. I don't think we have enough conversations across disciplines today. I'm always interested in when a novelist, for instance, becomes drawn to physics or biology or neuroscience, or when a scientist becomes interested in film theory or a film director becomes obsessed with poetry. Those are the moments when our minds are more nourished, nurtured. And Hannah Arendt is very open to that. She reads literature. She draws from

multiple disciplines and she's always curious, always a learner, always a listener. She also listens to people a lot. And I think we should pay attention to how she accumulates that knowledge, how she does it as well as to what she's saying. Perfect. I would like to thank both Lindsay and Eif and to a lesser extent, John Mitchinson. That's all right. For joining us today and thank you all so much for listening.

If you want to buy and read this book, What Remains, The Collected Poems of Anne Rowandt, for once you don't have to scrub around looking for it. It is available right now to buy. So thank you everybody again and we'll see you next time. Bye bye. Bye bye. Amazing. again and we'll see you next time. Bye bye.