Arendt. Denken in finsteren Zeiten

By Rhea Leman

Hannah Arendt, who became world-famous for her thoughts on the rise of totalitarianism, returns to Europe in 1975 to accept a prize for her "contribution to European civilization". While she is writing the speech that will be her last in her hotel room in Copenhagen, the ghosts of a past haunt her and continue to have an effect deep into the present. Her beloved, deceased husband Heinrich Blücher remembers together with the Jewish philosopher: her arrest by the Nazis in Germany; her escape to Paris, where she was interned in a women's camp after the Germans invaded; how she was able to escape from there; how the two of them found each other again by chance and were finally able to obtain a visa for the already walled-in USA. But a malicious Adolf Eichmann also repeatedly haunts the political theorist like a nightmare. In disturbing conversations, Arendt also wrestles with what her most controversial work "Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil" means to her personally.
In this contemporary play, Rhea Leman paints a complex portrait of one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century, who never gave up hope despite statelessness and flight.