Hannah Arendt’s homeland was populated with friends, most of them men—at least that is what her published correspondence would lead you to believe. The published letters between Arendt and her friends include books with Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Heinrich Blücher, Gershom Scholem, Kurt Blumenfeld, and Joachim Fest. The only woman whose correspondence with Arendt is published in a standalone volume is Mary McCarthy. But Arendt had other close women friends, including Hilde Fränkel, Anne Weil, Charlotte Beradt, Rose Feitelson, and Lotte Kohler. These voices are crucial and yet too often left out of our understanding of Arendt’s political thinking.
One reason Arendt’s letters with women are less available is simply that letters among women have long been devalued in philosophy. It is also true, however, that Arendt cultivated with women a quieter mode of connection—one less bound to the public world and more rooted in emotional resonance, bodily vitality, and care. The exception to this rule is McCarthy, whose published letters with Arendt are rich in intellectual inquiry. It is nevertheless the case that her friendships among women manifest a side of Arendt too often ignored: not the philosopher of worldliness but a woman capable of intimate, even erotic, bonds.
Arendt cultivated with women a quieter mode of connection—one less bound to the public world and more rooted in emotional resonance, bodily vitality, and care.
In her speech “On Humanity in Dark Times,” Arendt distinguished two kinds of friendships. “We are wont,” she said, “to see friendship solely as a phenomenon of intimacy, in which the friends open their hearts to each other unmolested by the world.” But her discussion of friendship in the Lessing speech was to be directed toward a different understanding of friendship, namely the “political relevance of friendship.” Based in respect for others, politically inflected friendship “is one of the fundamental requirements for the well-being of the City.” It is the political idea of friendship grounded in discourse and respect that has dominated accounts of her thought.
There is, however, the other side of friendship—intimate and unguarded, embodied, nurtured in “face-to-face encounters.” In intimate friendships, Arendt wrote, we “speak about ourselves.” In political friendships, on the contrary, the focus is on the “common world.”
Arendt rarely wrote about intimate friendships. To the extent she spoke about love, as in The Human Condition, it was to exclude love from the public world. Love, she wrote, is different from friendship. While friendship is the bond that unites us with the common world, “love, in distinction from friendship, is killed, or rather extinguished, the moment it is displayed in public.” Love erases the distinctions between two people, “destroys the in-between which relates us to and separates us from others.” Contained so fully in the cocoon that isolates two people, love is “not only apolitical but anti political.”
Yet, in her private letters with women, this intimate dimension comes alive. There are, of course, flashes of intimacy in her letters with Blücher and Jaspers. But the gravitational pull of those relationships is public. With women like Hilde Fränkel and Anne Mendelsohn Weil, Arendt’s friendships reached for a more private and intimate insistence on caring support. Even in the letters with McCarthy—an important exception for its public engagement—we see a side of Arendt absent in her public writings: that friendship’s power is not only political but also deeply intimate.
The mix of intimacy and worldliness characterized her closest American friendship, with the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy. Things between them began badly. At a party, McCarthy made an offhand remark about Hitler’s desire to be loved by his victims. Arendt—a stateless Jewish refugee—was incensed: “How can you say such a thing to me, a victim of Hitler, a person who has been in a concentration camp!”
They remained cool toward each other until a chance meeting on a subway platform years later. Arendt approached McCarthy and said, “Let’s end this nonsense. We think so much alike.” So began a lifelong friendship.
Their correspondence often reads like a philosophy seminar conducted in a living room. Michelle Dean writes that in an age when “women hunger for models of intellectual self-confidence,” Arendt and McCarthy are a celebrated paradigm for “ferocious friendship” among women. McCarthy devoured Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism “in the bathtub, in the car, in the grocery store.” It was, she wrote, a “truly extraordinary piece of work, an advance in human thought.” Arendt praised McCarthy’s Oasis as a “veritable little masterpiece.”
They write about everything from domestic politics—“Watergate has eaten rather deeply and sharply into my time and my attention”—to political philosophy—“the chief vice of every egalitarian society is Envy”—and even to philosophy—“Truth, on the contrary, is always the beginning of thought, thinking is always result-less.” Their correspondence, as Carol Brightman noted, has “the quality of a conte philosophique,” a shared inquiry into the world they both inhabited.
But their relationship was more than intellectual fencing. As Brightman recognized, there was a tenderness that “bespeaks a friendship that borders on romance.” “Dearest Hannah,” McCarthy confided, “I’m writing you this note for purely selfish reasons: because my heart is full of emotion and I want to talk. As if we were in your apartment.” Arendt wrote to tell McCarthy about her concern for Heinrich Blücher after he had been ill: “I am still deeply worried and quite unhappy I have to go to Chicago (But please, let this remain entre nous.) We have been together for 28 years and life without him would be unthinkable.” The tone switched quickly between the intimate and the political. In that same letter, Arendt wrote of the intellectual “mob” that had been mobilized against her on account of Eichmann in Jerusalem. Worried about Blücher, she “can no longer trust [herself] to keep my head and not to explode. What a risky business to tell the truth on a factual level.”
In the letters with McCarthy…we see a side of Arendt absent in her public writings: that friendship’s power is not only political but also deeply intimate.
Beneath the serious exchange of ideas there was romance as well—at times tragic and at other times comical. McCarthy enlisted Arendt in her extramarital escapades, at one point, enclosing a letter for Arendt to post to McCarthy’s third husband, Bowden Broadwater, so that he would not discover she was in London for a rendezvous with the journalist and former boxer John Davenport.
When McCarthy fell in love with James Raymond West, a U.S. embassy official in Warsaw, she again called on Arendt’s help, this time in the effort to convince her current husband to grant McCarthy a divorce. The letters during this period are filled with McCarthy’s exuberant excitement: “Dear Hannah, I love him, more than before. He’s the most wholly serious person I’ve ever known, anywhere, I don’t mean lacking in gayety or human or wild high spirits.” Arendt responded, “I am frightened that you might get hurt and you know also that I am quite aware that this is nonsense.”
McCarthy did get hurt. She wrote Arendt about how when she told West about an old affair she had had with Clement Greenberg, she had been “over-exuberant” in the telling, which led to his angry response. The night ended with McCarthy and West lying “awake in a single bed while [she] wept slowly and steadily.” McCarthy explained that she wrote this to Arendt “not to make you a confidante but so that you’ll know, if you worry, what this is concretely.” Arendt answered that McCarthy’s letter had “done the trick, I guess. I can no longer worry The story about the Clem-tragedy sounded very funny—how long some chickens take to come home to roost.”
Their letters are peppered with affectionate domesticity—reports of dinners, students, and speculative comments about possible flirtations. At one point, McCarthy speculated that Arendt might be having an affair with Harold Rosenberg.
Arendt and Mary McCarthy, as Kathleen Jones has observed, had something like a “workmanly” friendship. This idea comes from McCarthy, who noted what she called the “workmanly” nature of Arendt’s view of friendship, in which friends accompany each other “in the sense of” two “apprentices” walking a stretch of road together. Arendt was “touched” by the phrase. It captured, better than anything else, the nature of their bond: intimate, yes, but grounded in shared labor and intellectual companionship, not romantic confession.
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Excerpted from A World We Share: Hannah Arendt and the Power of Friendship in a Broken World by Roger Berkowitz. Available from YaleUniversityPress. Copyright © 2026 by Roger Berkowitz.All rights reserved.
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