"Hannah Arendt and Exile " by Anna Argirò (Keywords: Refugee; Nation-state; Sovereignty; Human rights; Plurality)

From The Philosopher, vol. 113, no. 1 ("Marx and Philosophy")

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In the face of the re-emergence of Trump’s border-wall nationalism, Brexit, and increasingly strict European immigration policies, Hannah Arendt’s reflections on human rights, statelessness, and her critique of sovereignty raise crucial questions: What could it mean to be a citizen in a political context where there is no nation-state? Can democracy, or more generally politics, be confined to the nation-state? Can we imagine an alternative? Is national affiliation the only framework through which rights can be guaranteed, or can we imagine a politics grounded in human plurality rather than sovereign exclusion?

Since her early biography of Rahel Levin-Varnhagen, a German-Jewish writer and intellectual who, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, hosted one of the most important salons in Europe, Arendt reflects on what it means to live in a country as an outsider. Begun by Arendt when she was barely nineteen, interrupted eight years later, in 1933, when she was forced to leave Germany due to the Nazi regime’s anti-Semitic laws that severely limited Jewish participation in German society, the project of this book took shape over many years, finally being published in English in 1957 under the title Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman. Through Rahel Varnhagen’s biography, Arendt reflects on the existential significance of being a Jew in the hostile climate of Nazi Germany. Varnhagen’s story is one of guilt, shame, self-denial, and of continuous attempts to cover up what she calls her ‘infamous birth’, through love, marriage or assimilation. Only in extremis does she recognize herself in her origin, intended as the starting point of everyone’s life.

As Elisabeth Young-Bruehl suggests in her biography of Arendt, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982), the book on Rahel Varnhagen can be considered as an example of ‘biography as autobiography.’ For Arendt, it was not only a way to re-elaborate her own personal story, placing it at a distance, but also a laboratory, as it were, where her mature reflections on love, alienation from the world, and the solitude of the activity of thinking were coming to life. Arendt begins the reconstruction of Rahel Varnhagen’s life and inner journey with the words that, according to her husband Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, she uttered on her deathbed:

WHAT a history! - A fugitive from Egypt and Palestine, here I am and find help, love, fostering in you people. With real rapture I think of these origins of mine and this whole nexus of destiny, through which the oldest memories of the human race stand by side with the latest developments. The greatest distances in time and space are bridged. The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life - having been born a Jewess this I should on no account now wish to have missed.

This passage echoes Arendt’s own words from her correspondence with Gershom Scholem: ‘I have always regarded my Jewishness as one of the indisputable factual data of my life, and I have never had the wish to change or disclaim facts of this kind. There is such a thing as basic gratitude for everything that is as it is.’ However, as Arendt herself remarks in her 1964 interview with Günter Gaus, the recognition of her origin was not an easy task: ‘the word “Jew” never came up when I was a small child. I first met up with it through anti-Semitic remarks...from children on the street. After that, I was so to speak “enlightened”.’

Born in 1906, in Hannover, into a family of German Jews, Arendt spent her childhood in Königsberg, the city made famous by Immanuel Kant. She studied philosophy in Marburg, where she was a student of Martin Heidegger, and in Heidelberg, where she wrote her doctoral thesis on Love and St. Augustine (1929/1996) under the supervision of Karl Jaspers. In 1929, she married Günther Stern-Anders, another Heidegger student she first met in Marburg. Together they moved to Berlin. In 1933, after spending eight days in a Gestapo prison, Arendt fled from Berlin with her mother, Martha Arendt, and took refuge first in Prague, then in Paris where Stern had already moved. With the passage of the 1938 Nuremberg Laws, Arendt officially became stateless, a person with no political rights, and this would remain her status until 1951, when she obtained American citizenship. During these years, Arendt performed multiple jobs and worked for a Zionist association that helped Jewish refugees emigrate to Palestine.

Arendt’s relation to Zionism would deserve another essay, but it is worth mentioning that she was introduced to it by Kurt Blumenfeld, who had been a family friend when she lived in Königsberg and whom she met again in Heidelberg in 1926. Blumenfeld’s arguments in defence of Zionism - particularly its nationalistic logic - never fully convinced Arendt, although she actually never disclaimed it. In The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951/1958) she would acutely denounce the two dynamics that have proven so deadly to Jews and to the world at large: the embracing of the nation-state system and imperialism. Far from solving the problem of statelessness, Arendt remarks, ‘like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people.’

While in Paris, Arendt and Stern befriended Stern’s distant cousin, the literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, who, in 1934, delivered his famous lecture ‘The Author as Producer’ at L’Institut pour l’étude du fascisme that Arendt attended. As Elisabeth Young-Bruehl reports, Arendt also made acquaintance with a group of Russian political refugees thanks to the intercession of the novelist Nina Gourfinkel. This was the first time Arendt heard of the Ukrainian-French dancer, choreographer, and intellectual Rachel Bespaloff (1895-1949), a student of Lev Shestov of Jewish origin whose work deeply impressed her. The two will officially meet in American exile, in Mount Holyoke, in Massachusetts, where Bespaloff was teaching French literature and where Arendt gave a lecture on Kafka in August 1944.

Perhaps the most important Parisian encounter was that with Heinrich Blücher, a Marxist political intellectual and activist whom Arendt married after her divorce from Stern. Despite Arendt’s critical attitude toward Marxist thought, Blücher’s activism greatly inspired her political thinking. On 5^th May 1940, in anticipation of the German invasion of France, Arendt was detained by the French as an ‘enemy alien’ and sent to the Gurs internment camp. Thanks to the help of American officials, Arendt and her husband managed to obtain exit papers and visas. They were able to travel across Southern France to Spain, and then to Lisbon, where they set sail for New York. Later Arendt’s mother joined them in New York.

In 1941, Arendt and Blücher arrived in the United States. They gathered old and new friends and fellow refugees in their apartments in New York. Regular guests included Hans Jonas, Paul Tillich, Randall Jarrell, and Mary McCarthy, who would become one of Arendt’s closest friends and editor of her last, unfinished manuscript, The Life of the Mind. McCarthy translated other writings such as both Rachel Bespaloff’s and Simone Weil’s essays on Homer’s Iliad. In so doing, she connected the three as writers in exile.

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These multiple experiences of exile provided Arendt with a special perspective from which to reflect on the topics of violence, statelessness, community, and human rights in the darkest times of the twentieth century. Arendt’s multilingualism, her philosophical formation in Germany, her encounter with existentialism in interwar Paris (an encounter still largely underexplored in Arendt scholarship), and the development of her subsequent political reflections in the American context made her a complex political thinker, not attached to a specific current of thought.

Two years after emigrating to the US, Arendt explored the crushing conditions of exile in her essay “We Refugees,” first published in 1943. Here, Arendt describes the existential anxiety of the Jews of Europe who fled their homes:

We lost our home, which means the familiarity of daily life. We lost our occupation, which means the confidence that we are of some use in this world. We lost our language, which means the naturalness of reactions, the simplicity of gesture, the unaffected expression of feelings. We left our relatives in the Polish ghettos and our best friends have been killed in concentration camps, and that means the rupture of our private lives [...] We were told to forget; and we forgot quicker than anybody ever could imagine [...] But sometimes I imagine that at least nightly we think of our dead or we remember the poems we once loved.

Arendt and the other European Jews who left their countries lost everything that was familiar to them, often ending up living out ghost-like existences in their host countries. Many émigrées attempted at finding footing in these countries via assimilation, largely pursued through an almost tragicomical patriotism.

Arendt unveils how these personal and social conditions can push one to the edge of political non-existence. Previously the word ‘refugee’ was synonymous with ‘exiled’, that is, someone who was expelled from the state for a crime, someone guilty for an action. In twentieth-century Europe, however, Jews were persecuted for being ‘guilty of being’ Jews. This shift in the meaning of refugee is of profound importance, both historically and for Arendt’s thought. Guilt was no longer a consequence of some act committed, but rather was intrinsically related to the very existence of some human beings, those unwanted and undesirable. We may say that a bureaucratic contingency – being stateless – becomes an existential condition. A large number of Jews tried to escape this ‘guilt of being’, as well as the condition of being exiled from their countries and going through endless bureaucratic processes, by committing suicide. Two notable examples are Rachel Bespaloff and Walter Benjamin. The former took her life in 1949 in Mount Holyoke and the latter in 1940 in Spain after attempting to reach Portugal and set sail for New York, as Arendt and Blücher eventually did.

Guilt was no longer a consequence of some act committed, but rather was intrinsically related to the very existence of some human beings, those unwanted and undesirable.

Building on Blumenfeld and Bernard Lazare, in “We Refugees” Arendt deconstructs the optimism of the ‘social parvenus’, those Jews who, to cope with the trauma of expulsion from their countries, perform difficult and often unsuccessful attempts to assimilate and integrate into the host nation. Instead, she makes her case for the ‘social pariahs’, the outsiders who do not deny their strangeness/foreignness, but actively claim it. In Arendt’s words: 

There is something wrong with our optimism. There are those optimists among us who, having made a lot of optimistic speeches, go home and turn on the gas or make use of a skyscraper in a quite unexpected way [...] Suicides occur not only among the panic-stricken people in Berlin and Vienna, in Bucharest or Paris, but in New York and Los Angeles, in Buenos Aires and Montevideo.

The question of the ‘guilty of being’ is also inextricably related to the phenomenon of the camps, especially to extermination camps (Vernichtungslager), about which, however, Arendt did not know at that time: ‘We had very few reports at all from Poland, but we have been fairly well informed about German and French concentration camps.’ Arendt was one of the first twentieth-century philosophers reflecting on and writing about the phenomenon of the camps in The Origins. But the camp is a twentieth-century institution which is not born with German lagers or Russian gulags. As Arendt points out,  

Not even concentration camps are an invention of totalitarian movements. They emerge for the first time during the Boer War, at the beginning of the century, and continued to be used in South Africa as well as India for ‘undesirable elements’; here, too, we first find the term ‘protective custody’ which was later adopted by the Third Reich. These camps correspond in many respects to the concentration camps at the beginning of totalitarian rule; they were used for ‘suspects’ whose offenses could not be proved and who could not be sentenced by ordinary process of law.

The specific peculiarity and aim of the camp is the elimination of those who are considered unwanted/undesirable, either by expulsion or annihilation. Like other detention institutions, such as prisons and madhouses, those who are interned in a camp are condemned to invisibility and immobility, a perpetuation of the condition of the refugee, who lacks political/public visibility and whose right to travel is hindered by bureaucratic obstructions.

As scholars such as Primo Levi have stressed, the project that lies behind extermination camps inflicts a wound on the dignity not only of human life, but also, and crucially, of death. According to Michel Foucault’s definition in The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception (1963), in twentieth-century camps, we witness an exemplary shift in the configuration of political power, which begins to be understood as bio-power over bodies and lives. It is important to underline that there is a continuity between the different kinds of twentieth-century camps (labour camps, concentration camps, and extermination camps), and today’s forms of detainment such as migrant detention centres that may turn out to become as dangerous as ones in the past.

In “We Refugees”, Arendt ultimately provides a political perspective, which, in her view, most Jews at the time lacked. Twentieth-century refugees prefigure the symbol of the exiled persons in a globalized world. The refugees are aware of their exile. Arendt prophetically anticipates that uprootedness (Entwurzelung) and homelessness (Heimatlosigkeit) will become common existential and political conditions in the globalised world. These conditions can constitute a new political frame and paradigm:

Those few refugees who insist upon telling the truth, even to the point of “indecency,” get in exchange for their unpopularity one priceless advantage: history is no longer a closed book to them and politics is no longer the privilege of gentiles. They know that the outlawing of the Jewish people in Europe has been followed closely by the outlawing of most European nations. Refugees driven from country to country represent the vanguard of their peoples-if they keep their identity. For the first time Jewish history is not separate but tied up with that of all other nations. The comity of European peoples went to pieces when, and because, it allowed its weakest member to be excluded and persecuted.

Arendt extensively develops the questions of statelessness and human rights in The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951/1958), her first major work, which, as Lyndsey Stonebridge points out in her recent biography of Arendt, We Are Free to Change the World (2024), was originally set to be titled The Elements of Shame: Anti-Semitism-Imperialism-Racism and later The Burden of Our Time: Anti-Semitism-Imperialism-Totalitarianism. The final title, which gets rid of ‘imperialism’, ‘racism’ and ‘Anti-Semitism’, was suggested by her US publisher, with important consequences for how the book is still read, namely as a work primarily focused on twentieth-century European and Russian totalitarianisms. On the contrary, as Stonebridge remarks, what Arendt wanted to suggest is that ‘the elements that eventually produced totalitarianism are endemic to most modern political systems.’

The project that lies behind extermination camps inflicts a wound on the dignity not only of human life, but also, and crucially, of death

In The Origins, Arendt stresses the tension between nation-states and refugees. The starting point of her analysis is the fact that the world we live in is divided into nation-states. Unlike other interpreters, Arendt does not begin her analysis of the birth of the nation-state from the Peace of Westphalia (1648), which ended the Thirty Years’ War and brought peace to the Roman Empire. This peace treaty is often considered as the origin of principles crucial to modern international relations, including the inviolability of borders and non-interference in the domestic affairs of sovereign states. Rather, she traces it back to the end of the nineteenth century/beginning of the twentieth century, namely the dissolution of the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian empires. As these multiethnic empires disintegrated, newly formed nation-states attempted to define themselves through ethnic and cultural homogeneity, sparking violent conflicts and displacements—such as the population exchange between Greece and Turkey, the tensions in Transylvania between Hungary and Romania, and the Armenian genocide under the Turkish regime. What does not work is precisely the criterion of the nation, because of its exclusionary nature based on the principle of sovereignty, shared characteristics of genealogy, history and culture, as well as ethnic homogeneity.

Against the sovereign nation-state, Arendt proposes an alternative rooted in federalism, particularly republican council systems that emerged spontaneously in revolutionary moments. In On Revolution (1963), Arendt sees these councils not as extensions of state power but as horizontal spaces for political action—networks that link diverse communities through laws and mutual recognition, rather than ethnic sameness or territorial sovereignty. It is the constitution of these nation-states, Arendt argues, that provoked the mass phenomenon of statelessness in the twentieth century. Refugees are a product of the constitution of nation-states; people condemned to non-existence because they are outside the borders of a state. To describe these people’s condition, Arendt borrows the title the Hungarian-British author and journalist, Arthur Koestler, coined in his memoir-diary of that period: the Scum of the Earth (1941). The ‘scum’ represents what remains of the earth after this partition.

Refugees are a product of the constitution of nation-states; people condemned to non-existence because they are outside the borders of a state

Those who are not defended by a state have no ‘right to have rights’, which for Arendt means the right to belong to and to participate in a political community, however provisional. The question of human rights arises in relation to twentieth-century refugees, people migrating without being protected by a nation. Indeed, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 10 December 1948 and the 1951 Geneva Convention that acknowledges ‘refugee’ as a legal category were issued a few years after the end of the Second World War.

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In these works, Arendt invites us to consider the question of migration not from within the nation-state, but from the point of view of a globalized world, where we paradoxically witness the return of walls and a strengthening of the sovereignty principle. The tension between refugees/migrants and nation-states is far from being resolved. As Arendt has warned, this is a kind of politics that chooses to ignore the existence of human beings beyond national membership (on this topic see Donatella Di Cesare, Resident Foreigners: A Philosophy of Migration, 2020). As already mentioned, the model Arendt eventually identifies as a possible alternative to the nation-state system is the federal council system that she saw exemplified in the Resistance and other democratic movements that emerged in revolutionary moments. While Arendt did not fully develop a blueprint for post-national democracy, her vision compels us to re-imagine politics from the standpoint of plurality rather than identity. Arendt’s final call is thus not for nostalgia about lost homelands but for political innovation. In an age of renewed walls, digital surveillance, and offshore border regimes, her legacy challenges us to move beyond the false security of sovereignty, toward a global ethic rooted in plurality, mutual recognition, and shared responsibility. Only by breaking the monopoly of the nation-state over political life can we begin to build a world where rights are not the privilege of the affiliated, but the guarantee of the human.

Anna Argirò recently completed her PhD at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, London. Her dissertation develops a critical reworking of Hannah Arendt’s concept of ‘natality’ as a critical tool to challenge traditional notions of autonomy, freedom, sovereignty, power, and revolution, emphasizing the relational nature of the human condition. Anna was a visiting scholar at the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard College, New York in 2022. She co-organised academic events in London and co-edited a Special Issue of the journal Studies in the Maternal. Her work appeared in HA: The Journal of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, the CRMEP volume series, the Encyclopedia of Law and Economics, HannahArendt.Net and gender/sexuality/italy. She works mainly on continental philosophy, exile studies, feminist and decolonial theories.

First published online on 12th October 2025

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