Marion Detjen, Roger Berkowitz, Thomas Wild, and Tristram Wolff explore the extraordinary friendship of Helen Wolff and Hannah Arendt. 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.
New York City, NY; NYC