Reading and conversation
The Gods Show Their Love Between Friends

The Extraordinary Friendship of Hannah Arendt and Helen Wolff

10/22/23
3:00 PM
3:00 PM Goethe-Institut New York

Marion Detjen, Roger Berkowitz, Thomas Wild, and Tristram Wolff explore the extraordinary friendship of Helen Wolff and Hannah Arendt. Register
Helen Wolff and Hannah Arendt were born in 1906, read Schopenhauer at an early age, loved their husbands devotedly, fled Germany in 1933 and Nazi-occupied Europe in 1941—and made their respective ways as refugee women of letters in Manhattan during and after the war, Wolff as a book publisher and Arendt as an editor, political philosopher, and journalist. Yet their lasting friendship stemmed from differences as much as similarities.

Historian Marion Detjen, Wolff’s grandniece and biographer, will present on this extraordinary relationship. Roger Berkowitz, founder of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, will moderate a conversation between Detjen and Thomas Wild, the HAC’s research director. And comparative literature scholar Tristram Wolff will read from his English translation of his grandmother’s posthumously discovered novella Background for Love, which was a bestseller in Germany and is forthcoming from Pushkin Press of London and Edizione Marsiglio of Venice. The program will be introduced by Helen Wolff’s step-grandson Alexander Wolff, author of the family history Endpapers and co-initiator of the Helen Wolff Grants for women writers at risk.


Roger Berkowitz is Founder and Academic Director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and Professor of Politics, Philosophy, and Human Rights at Bard College. Professor Berkowitz authored The Gift of Science: Leibniz and the Modern Legal Tradition (Harvard, 2005; Fordham, 2010; Chinese Law Press, 2011). His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The American Interest, Bookforum, The Forward, The Paris Review Online, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and many other publications. He is the winner of the 2019 Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought given by the Heinrich Böll Foundation in Bremen, Germany.


Marion Detjen teaches history and advises the scholarship program for displaced students at Bard College Berlin. She worked as a freelance curator, teacher, writer, and activist, before receiving her PhD in history from Freie Universität Berlin. 2009-2014 Marion worked at Humboldt University Berlin, 2014-2017 at the Center for Contemporary History in Potsdam. She is a regular contributor to the column „10nach8“ at ZEIT-Online as part of its editorial team, and a co-founder and board member of "Wir machen das," a coalition of action focused on the migration crisis, where she recently co-initiated “Helen Wolff grants” to support female writers at risk in Afghanistan and other regions of crisis. Currently she is a visiting fellow at the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College Annandale.


Thomas Wild is Professor of German Studies at Bard College, where he also serves as Research Director of the Hannah Arendt Center. He works on modern German literature and culture, with a particular interest in the intersections of literature and politics, ethics, and multilingualism. Thomas Wild is General Editor of the first Critical Edition of Hannah Arendt’s Complete Works. Selected books: Hannah Arendt. Leben, Werk, Wirkung (2006); Nach dem Geschichtsbruch. Deutsche Schriftsteller um Hannah Arendt (2009); editions of Hannah Arendt’s correspondences with Uwe Johnson, Hilde Domin, Joachim Fest; Wolfgang Hildesheimer: 12 Briefwechsel (2016); ununterbrochen mit niemandem reden. Lektüren mit Ilse Aichinger (2021).


Tristram Wolff is Associate Professor in English and Comparative Literary Studies at Northwestern University. He received his AB in comparative literature and translation from Brown University, and his PhD in comparative literature from the University of California at Berkeley. His first book, Against the Uprooted Word: Giving Language Time in Transatlantic Romanticism, was published with Stanford University Press in 2022. He has published numerous essays in academic journals, and he is working on a new book that tries to change how we read the historical rift between emotion and critical thinking.