Hannah Arendt fled Germany in 1933 shortly after she was released from a Nazi interrogation that lasted days. Little is known about what happened when she was held—or why she was set free. In a television interview in 1964, Arendt merely said she was lucky because her interrogator was young, new to the job, and humane. Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library, a play by Jenny Lyn Bader, now showing at the WP Theater in New York, imagines that cross-examination as a game of cat and mouse, pitting the young philosophy student, who then went by her married name, Stern, against a meticulous, dedicated yet fair-minded young Nazi officer. Arendt, who was accused of smuggling anti-Semitic literature out of the library to expose Hitler’s intentions to the West, defends her innocence with such intellectual rigor, conviction, and charm that the audience, like the interrogator, is hard put to decipher the truth. —Alessandra Stanley