• DOI:10.1086/673223
• Corpus ID: 162242781

The Refugee Speaks of Parvenus and Their Beautiful Illusions: A Rediscovered 1934 Text by Hannah Arendt

@article{Saussy2013TheRS,
  title={The Refugee Speaks of Parvenus and Their Beautiful Illusions: A Rediscovered 1934 Text by Hannah Arendt},
  author={Haun Saussy},
  journal={Critical Inquiry},
  year={2013},
  volume={40},
  pages={1 - 14}
}

• Haun Saussy
• Published 1 September 2013
• History
• Critical Inquiry

When Hannah Arendt left Berlin in 1933, embarking on an eighteenyear period of wandering without a nationality, she carried in her bags eleven chapters of a book manuscript about Rahel Levin Varnhagen von Ense, a salonnière and letter-writer of the early nineteenth century.1 Arendt’s doctoral dissertation about the concept of love in Saint Augustine had already been accepted and published in 1929. Retrospectively at least, the book about Rahel Varnhagen became the Habilitation that Arendt could not have submitted, given the legal exclusion of Jews from German university teaching as of 1933. Nothing is simple about the Rahel Varnhagen book. She carried the unfinished manuscript to Paris, where Walter Benjamin, another author of a Habilitation that went nowhere (though for different reasons), urged her to finish it, as she finally did in 1938. Thereafter she was interned in a camp for enemy aliens at Gurs in southwest France, escaped, and made her way to New York. The manuscript, entrusted to a friend, resurfaced in 1945. In 1958 the book was published by the Leo Baeck Institute in an English translation by Richard and Clara