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The most important friendship during my years in New York was of course with Hannah Arendt. During the war, I had visited her in Paris from London when she was still married to Gunther Stern.1 He had already adopted the penname Gunther Anders, because with the name Stern he was instantly pegged as the son of the well-known psychologist William Stern. Someone had said to him: "You can go by a different [a-nderen] name." To which he responded: "All right, then I call myself Anders." Beginning as his nom de plume, it then became his official name.
Arendt and Anders had married in Heidelberg, but then lived in Berlin for the last few years before Hitler's seizure of power. The collaboration between them was intense yet friendly, even though Hannah took a somewhat auxiliary position and helped him with his work (while at the same time quietly writing her important study of Rahel Varnhagen).2 Gunther imagined that he had found in her a wonderful companion, but he failed to notice that she had outgrown him intellectually and was becoming more independent. This situation became evident in Paris where Hannah quickly became a well-respected figure among the Parisian émigrés. At that time she was working with Jewish organizations facilitating the emigration of German Jews. She was active for several years with Youth Aliyah, whose director was Henrietta Szold. Gunther's sister, Eva Michaelis-Stern, moved to London and worked with Youth Aliyah from there, while Hannah kept herself busy at the Paris subcommittee. Gunther stood somewhat aloof and began to play the role of the prince consort, which, as an ambitious and vain man, made him difficult to bear.
Before long, Heinrich Blucher surfaced. He was a German refugee who had been involved in the Spartacist Uprising? and had played a role in the intellectual wing of Berlin's leftist-Marxist movement. A highly talented autodidact, Blucher had shaped himself into a most interesting intellectual.
Later on, in the course of her Zionist activity, Hannah spent a few weeks with me in Jerusalem. After the disastrous fall of France, I learned that she had arrived safely in America with Gunther Stern. During the war years, we didn't exchange letters. As soon as I arrived in Canada, in the winter of...