Men in Dark Times

“Dark times” is Brecht’s phrase, and Hannah Arendt uses it not to suggest that the routine repetitive horrors of our century form the substance of the dark, illuminated by the lives of the people she writes about here - Lessing (included as though he belonged to the twentieth century), Rosa Luxemburg, Pope John XXIII, Karl Jaspers, Isak Dinesen, Hermann Broch, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Waldemar Gurian, and Randall Jarrell.

Dr. Arendt believes that “Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time-span that was given them on earth.”