If you watch the interview today, you will see that the man looks quite tense. It’s not easy for him. His interviewee was already a famous thinker, an older woman, a Jewish woman who had found a new home in New York. He, 23 years her junior, is one of Germany’s most respected journalists, at the beginning of a great journalistic and political career. The curtain rises and the show begins. 

In the prologue the Jewish woman claims that she is not a philosopher. Our journalist plays the confused one, insisting that she is. Viewers might think that this is not a good way to start a conversation. The woman explains herself and tries to enlighten our journalist about what she thinks it means to be a thinking person in the world. She emphasizes that politics is about acting in the world, while philosophy is about thinking about the world. This may be difficult for him to understand, but the tension between thinking and acting determines the woman’s existence. This is the basic tenor of her life. That is what this conversation is about.

A few weeks later, on October 26, 1964, at 9:30 p.m., the newly established ZDF broadcast the interview. There was no mention of it in the newspapers.

“Zur Person” is the name of the later legendary program, the first version of which was broadcast between April ‘63 and April ‘66. Hannah Arendt was the 17th guest, the first woman after 16 men, in a series of interviews conducted by Günter Gaus, who later went into politics. Both are smoking during the show, so we know it is an older program. The two talk about philosophy, writing, the role of women, Arendt’s Jewish childhood, emigration, the Holocaust, and her infamous Eichmann book, which had just been translated into German. This German translation was actually the reason why she was in Germany and why Gaus interviewed her.

Arendt rarely talked about herself. Here she makes an exception. She is visibly nervous, but her nervousness only makes her more focused in her language and in her answers. She speaks very clearly, her German sharper than ever. Like everyone else, Hannah Arendt carries her personal, family and collective history with her. Every single sentence bears witness to this. Born Jewish in 1906, she was only 27 when the Nazis seized power. She fled from the Nazis to France and from there, via Lisbon, to the United States in 1941. She lived through the war and the so-called post-war period in New York. But there is no post-war period for Jews. The time after the Shoah is never ‘after’, it is always in the here and now.

Arendt knows that she is already famous at the time of the interview. Her books have been published, the book on totalitarianism, the book on Rahel Varnhagen, the book on the Eichmann trial. In 1959 she was awarded the Lessing Prize of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg. She wanted to be seen and heard. Jews had not been heard in Germany for a long time. At first, she was flattered by the attention. As a Jew, it was not a matter of course to be invited. Arendt and Gauss are gifted actors, they both play their roles. It is not a monologue, but a dialogue between generations. Gaus, born in 1929, embodies the new Germany after the Nazi era. He was a left-liberal journalist, part of the new West German elite. He believed that, as a German, he could speak freely with a Jewish woman.  

But this is about more than the German-Jewish conversation. Arendt is the first woman to take part in this ZDF discussion series. We are witness to an unusual conversation between a man and a woman. Arendt speaks openly about the role of women, which she hadn’t done very often, perhaps it was the first time she had done it in public. She was not exactly known as a feminist. She sneers at the male desire for importance. But behind the dialogue between generations and genders, there is another layer that is more difficult to recognize; it is a dialogue between a German man and a Jewish woman. The language may be deceptive; both speak brilliant German. Arendt was educated in Germany, and it shows. At first glance she could be mistaken for a German woman.