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‘When others understand the same way that I have, that gives me satisfaction, like a sense of being at home.’
Hannah Arendt is most famous for her landmark book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), which chronicles the notorious Nazi official Adolf Eichmann’s war crimes trial in 1961. Conducted at the height of her influence, Arendt’s unusually candid interview with the German journalist Günter Gaus in 1964 is a revealing window on to her biography, process and worldview. The sprawling conversation covers topics including her youth as a German Jew amid the Nazi Party’s rise; why she eschewed the label ‘philosopher’ in favour of ‘political theorist’; and how her work was driven by a need to understand rather than a desire to make an impact. The discussion provides an appropriately complex portrait of the famed thinker, placing her rigorous intellectual work in the context of her life and times.
Subtitles: Philosophy Overdose
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Archaeology
How researchers finally solved the puzzle of the oldest known map of the world
18 minutes
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Art
A prisoner in Guantánamo finds some escape in building intricate model ships
6 minutes
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Meaning and the good life
A Japanese religious community makes an unlikely home in the mountains of Colorado
9 minutes
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Making
Forging a cello from pieces of wood demands its own form of virtuosity
27 minutes
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Education
Scenes from a school year paint a refreshingly nuanced portrait of rural America
25 minutes
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Bioethics
Is it ethical to have a second child so that your first might live?
10 minutes
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Art
Watch as Japan’s surplus trees are transformed into forest-tinted crayons
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Meaning and the good life
‘Everydayness is the enemy’ – excerpts from the existentialist novel ‘The Moviegoer’
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Food and drink
Local tensions simmer amid a potato salad contest at the Czech-Polish border
14 minutes