Visible Spaces: Hannah Arendt and the German-Jewish Experience »

Dagmar Barnouw is a professor of German and comparative literature at the University of Southern California, Los Angeles. Her books include Weimar Intellectuals and the Threat of Modernity and Critical Realism: History, Photography, and the Work of Siegfried Kracauer, the latter available from Johns Hopkins.

An exploration of the origins and implications of Hannah Arendt's political thought. Barnouw discusses Arendt's work chronologically, from The Origins of Totalitarianism to Life of the MInd. She reassesses Eichmann in Jerusalem, arguing that the book questions the ahistorical understanding of German guilt and the wisdom of linking that guilt to the founding of the Jewish state.