Communiqué

Hannah Arendt’s story, like so many, is the story of America, and the promise of American democracy.

Forced to give up her successful academic career in Germany and flee Nazi Europe, Arendt made a home in New York City, after emigrating through Ellis Island in the spring of 1941. She worked as a housekeeper, an editor, a columnist, and an adjunct professor, all while writing her first major work,

The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, the same year she received American citizenship. To mark the occasion as a new beginning, she legally changed her name from Johanna to Hannah. As a Jewish refugee, Arendt saw firsthand what happens when a nation-state collapses, when social order disintegrates, when fake news and big lies dominate politics. She experienced the horrors of prejudice, the melancholy of homelessness, and the terror of isolation in Nazi Europe.

But in the United States she found a country not defined by ethnonationalism or totalitarian power. She found the promise of politics, the “freedom to be free,” democracy in action, and the spirit of American revolution. Through resilience, courage, hard work, and luck, Hannah Arendt became the most influential and provocative political thinker of the 20th century.

Today, her story and voice continue to shine a light on how to act as a private individual and public citizen in dark times. This film reveals the complex, controversial, flawed, and irrefutably courageous woman whose intelligence and fearless truth-telling led her to breathtaking insights into the human condition, and introduces Hannah Arendt’s life and work to a diverse and contemporary audience.