Today I am sharing with you a special conversation with writer and fellow Substack author, Samantha Rose Hill, about Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin.
Hannah Arendt was the most imaginative political thinker of the twentieth century. Her Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) became a bestseller, again, after the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Many contemporary American and Western thinkers read Arendt for consolation in a new dawn of dark times.
Her admirers may be haunted by an imagined spectre of totalitarianism, but Arendt wrote Origins from direct experience of its brutal reality. She fled Germany in 1933 after persecution by the Nazis. In 1941 she sailed from Europe to safety in America where she discovered, to her surprise, a protected space for freedom.
Her friend, Walter Benjamin, never found that refuge. Arendt and Benjamin were friends in exile in Paris in the 1930s, but misfortune and malaise stranded the author of Theses on the Philosophy of History on the border of neutral Spain and German-occupied France. He never made it to a melancholy exile in America.
Arendt mourned Benjamin, but she made a new life of the mind in the protected space for freedom she found in the American Republic. There she joined a constellation of émigré European intellectuals who mingled with local American poets, writers, and thinkers. Theodore Adorno, Leo Strauss, Thomas Mann, Karl Mannheim, W.H. Auden, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell and so many more. Together they created many of the classics that defined post-war American culture. America left behind the Gothic Puritan Prairie. New York became the displaced cosmopolitan homeland of a new story of Western Civilization.
And so, this detour through two German Jewish political thinkers of the twentieth century joins my world history tour of American powers and culture.
Samantha Rose Hill modestly describes herself as a writer. You will discover in the interview that she is much, much more. She is the author of Hannah Arendt (Reaktion Books, 2021), and What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (Liveright, 2025). Her next book is about loneliness for Yale University Press. She is an associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, where she teaches on Arendt, Thomas Mann and, from March 2025, an online class on loneliness. You can find out more about Samantha at www.samantharosehill.com.
Samantha is offering through her Substack, Reflections by Samantha Rose Hill, a close reading of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. It is a timely program that asks important questions, such as: does Hannah Arendt offer insight into the rise of the New Right in the United States and abroad? I can personally recommend Samantha’s close reading programs since I have enjoyed her programs on Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain and Arendt, The Human Condition.
So please join Reflections by Samantha Rose Hill. But first, enjoy our conversation about Hannah Arendt’s vision of freedom and Walter Benjamin's poetry of history.
P.S. For my regular readers I am offering this interview as part of my series offering new history perspectives on America’s in place in the world. It replaces my planned post on Kathleen DuVal, Native Nations. I will reschedule that post till a later time.
My deep dive on Wednesday will explore Arendt’s ideas in On Revolution about the political tradition of the American Revolution. How was it different to the French Revolution? Can we reimagine Arendt’s ideas about politics with the latest and best world history?
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