Across Hannah Arendt’s early years, her circle of intimates tended to be male—at least by what her published correspondence suggests. Letters she wrote and received mention men like Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Heinrich Blücher, Gershom Scholem, Kurt Blumenfeld, and Joachim Fest. Yet the only woman whose correspondence with Arendt has appeared in a standalone volume is Mary McCarthy. Arendt, however, had several other close female friends, such as Hilde Fränkel, Anne Weil, Charlotte Beradt, Rose Feitelson, and Lotte Kohler. These voices matter greatly, though they are frequently missing from the ways we understand Arendt’s political thought.
A practical reason for the scarcity of Arendt–women correspondences is the longstanding undervaluation of women’s letters within philosophy. Equally true is that Arendt cultivated with female friends a gentler, less public form of connection—anchored in affect, bodily presence, and nurturance. McCarthy stands as the notable exception, her exchanged letters with Arendt brimming with rigorous inquiry. Still, the female friendships reveal a facet of Arendt that is too often overlooked: not merely the thinker of global affairs, but a woman capable of intimate, even sensual, 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 remarks On Humanity in Dark Times, Arendt drew a distinction between two forms of friendship. She warned that we often imagine friendship as a private exchange of hearts, shielded from worldly interference. Yet in the Lessing Lecture, she directed attention to another conception: friendship with political significance. A form built on regard for others, a discourse-based, respectful kinship whose health is essential for the polis’ thriving. The dominant readings of her thought have tended to privilege this political notion of friendship rooted in dialogue and regard.
However, there exists another dimension of friendship—intimate, unguarded, physical, sustained through direct, face-to-face interaction. In such closeness, Arendt observed, we reveal ourselves; in political bonds, the emphasis shifts to shared affairs and the common world.
Arendt wrote little about intimate love, and when she did, as in The Human Condition, she argued that love should be excluded from public life. She distinguished love from friendship, noting that while friendship binds us to the shared world, love loses its particularity the moment it enters the public arena. Love dissolves the distinctions between the two individuals, erasing the space that connects us to others. Trapped within an enclosed, private sphere, love becomes not only apolitical but oppositional to political life.
Nevertheless, private correspondence with women reveals this intimate dimension more vividly. While there are moments of closeness in letters to Blücher and Jaspers, their dynamics largely pull toward public concerns. In friendships with Hilde Fränkel and Anne Mendelsohn Weil, Arendt’s ties aimed for a more private, intimate practice of care and support. Even in the McCarthy letters—which stand out for their public engagement—Arendt’s other side emerges: friendship can be profoundly intimate as well as political.
The closest American friendship in her circle, with writer and critic Mary McCarthy, blended intimacy with worldly concerns. Their initial encounter was tense: at a party, McCarthy casually suggested that Hitler longed to be loved by his victims. As a stateless Jewish refugee and survivor of the camps, Arendt was outraged: “How could you utter that to me, a person who endured a concentration camp?”
Their animosity cooled only after a later, chance encounter on a subway platform, where Arendt approached and proposed, “Let’s put an end to this foolishness—we actually share many viewpoints.” Thus began a friendship that endured for decades.
Their letters resemble a philosophy colloquy held in a domestic setting. As critic Michelle Dean observes, at a time when women crave exemplars of intellectual steadiness, Arendt and McCarthy stand out as a model of “ferocious friendship” between women. McCarthy reportedly consumed Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism in many places—bath, car, even the market—and called it a remarkable achievement, a genuine advance in thought. Arendt, in turn, lauded McCarthy’s Oasis as a true small masterpiece.
Their letters span topics from domestic politics—”Watergate has intruded heavily into my days and attention”—to political theory—”the primary flaw in any egalitarian system is envy”—and even to speculative philosophy, such as “Truth, in contrast, marks the starting point of thought, while thinking itself remains purposeless.” As literary scholar Carol Brightman remarked, their exchanges possess the flavor of a conte philosophique, a joint investigation of the world they inhabit.
Yet their bond exceeded mere intellectual sparring. Brightman notes a warmth within that suggests a relationship verging on romance. McCarthy pleads, “Dearest Hannah, I write with selfish motive: my heart is overflowing, and I want to talk, as if we were in your room.” Arendt responds with concern for Heinrich Blücher following his illness, writing that she remains deeply worried and unhappy about traveling to Chicago, adding privately that they have shared a life for 28 years and that life without him would be unimaginable. The messages repeatedly vacillate between the personal and political. In one letter, Arendt also speaks of the uproar from the intellectual mob mobilized against her Eichmann in Jerusalem piece, noting that fear for Blücher has left her unable to trust herself to stay calm or to refrain from speaking truth—acknowledging the peril of telling the truth on a factual level.
In the McCarthy correspondence we glimpse a dimension of Arendt not visible in her public works: the force of friendship as something that is not only political but profoundly intimate.
Alongside the weighty conversations, there were romantic episodes—often somber, sometimes humorous. McCarthy leaned on Arendt in her affairs outside marriage, even sending her a note to mail to her third spouse, Bowden Broadwater, so that he wouldn’t learn she was in London meeting the journalist and ex-boxer John Davenport.
When McCarthy fell for James Raymond West, a U.S. diplomat stationed in Warsaw, she once again turning to Arendt for assistance, hoping to persuade McCarthy’s husband to allow a divorce. The correspondence from this period buzzes with McCarthy’s fervent joy: “Dear Hannah, I love him more than ever. He is the most serious person I’ve known—yet not devoid of wit, warmth, or exuberant spirit.” Arendt’s reply was cautious: “I fear you may be harmed, and I recognize this is foolish, yet I understand.”
McCarthy did experience pain. She told Arendt how, after recounting a past liaison with Clement Greenberg to West, she had been overly exuberant, provoking his anger. The evening concluded with McCarthy and West sharing a bed, while she cried quietly. She explained to Arendt that she wrote to give her a concrete sense of what was going on, if it mattered. Arendt replied that McCarthy’s missive had the intended effect, and that the tale of the Greenberg episode had a certain humor—the timing of consequences catching up with indulgence can be remarkable.
Their epistles carry a warm, domestic texture—noting suppers, students, and playful speculation about flirtations. At one moment, McCarthy even wondered aloud whether Arendt might be conducting an affair with Harold Rosenberg.
As Kathleen Jones notes, McCarthy described their alliance as a “workmanlike” friendship. The phrase arises from McCarthy’s observation of Arendt’s view of friendship as two apprentices moving along a shared road together. Arendt was moved by the expression; it captures, perhaps better than any other description, the essence of their bond: intimate, yes, but anchored in collaboration and intellectual companionship rather than 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 Yale University Press. Copyright © 2026 by Roger Berkowitz. All rights reserved.
