Selected by Choice Magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title Hannah Arendt still makes people angry. Her writings on the modern German-Jewish experience are deliberately challenging--and sometimes shocking--to an audience used to thinking of the Jewish people as the victims of history. Visible Spaces is the most ambitious attempt to date to explore the origins and implications of Arendt's political thought. Dagmar Barnouw, an admiring yet critical reader, draws extensively on unpublished archival materials relating to the Jewish experience in modern Germany and its influence on Arendt's political philosophy. Arendt's work is discussed chronologically, from Origins of Totalitarianism to The Human Condition and the unfinished Life of the Mind. Barnouw also offers a challenging reassessment of Arendt's well-known report on the Eichman trial. The result is an insightful study of Arendt's thought in its complex historical context.

Explores the influence of German-Jewish history and of her own Jewish experience on Arendt's political thought. Summarizes Arendt's ideas on antisemitism and its German particularities, expressed in "Rahel Varnhagen, " "The Origins of Totalitarianism, " and her articles on Zionism. Discusses the problem of guilt and responsibility in a totalitarian state, especially the Germans' responsibility in the Nazi period, issues raised in Arendt's correspondence and polemics with the Zionist leader Kurt Blumenfeld and with Karl Jaspers, as well as in her early postwar essays. Ch. 6 (pp. 223-251), "The Obscurity of Evil, " analyzes Arendt's report on the Eichmann trial and the heated debates it aroused. Explains her critique of the trial by her interpretation of the Holocaust as a Nazi attack on mankind, not only on the Jewish people, and by her need to understand the Nazi regime as a model of a totalitarian system, refusing to recognize antisemitism as an essential element. Argues that Arendt did not succeed in penetrating the obscurity of Eichmann and Nazi evil.