Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy - Scenes from a friedship in the 1940s and 1950s

To celebrate Hannah Arendt's centenary in autumn 2006 numerous books and articles have been published. So far as biographical details of Arendt's life are concerned, these publications seem to underestimate her relationships to women as good frieds. In contrast the article features the friendship between Arendt and McCarthy in the 1940s and 1950s as an increasingly close personal and intellectual relationship. What had these two women with such different pasts and temperaments in common? If Arendt represented for McCarthy the wealth of European erudition, and became her "intellectual conscience", McCarthy in turn possessed the seriousness and honesty that Arendt admired as civic virtues in the New World. They read and admired each other's work, but also exchanged political ideas and shared sympathies and antipathies for members of the New York intellectual circles, where Arendt became known as a political philosopher with her book The Origins of Totalitarianism. In times of the beginning Cold War and McCarthyism both women were struggling for independent political judgement and action.-To speak about "scenes" not only means to confine the presentation to certain aspects of the friendship between the two women, but also to communicate their gestures of feeling and thinking.