Hannah Arendt’s first-ever book tells as much about its subject—the Jewish hostess of literary salons in early-1800s Germany—as it does about its author.

Kindred Spirits

By Adam Kirsch

Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman by Hannah Arendt

Almost half a century after her death, in 1975, interest in Hannah Arendt continues to grow—and not just in academia, where countless monographs have been written about her political thought. Arendt was the rare thinker whose personal story makes her equally compelling to a wider public—including her two narrow escapes from Nazism, her love affair with the great philosopher Martin Heidegger, and her controversial reporting on the Adolf Eichmann trial in Israel.

The German director Margarethe von Trotta dramatized her life in the 2012 film Hannah Arendt, and last year Samantha Rose Hill published a new biography of Arendt. So it’s surprising that the first book Arendt wrote has been out of print in English until now.