Intertwined Lives and Themes among Jewish Exiles

Abstract

Few if any images capture the poignancy of the twentieth century better than that of Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin playing chess during their French exile from 1933 to 1940.1 Benjamin and Arendt already knew each other from a distance in Berlin—she was married to his cousin Günther Anders (Stern)—but they grew closer during their time in Paris, and Arendt became part of a large circle of German émigrés alongside Benjamin in the cafes of the Latin Quarter. Arendt met her second husband, Heinrich Blücher, during evenings at Benjamin’s apartment, and an affectionate friendship developed between the three of them. Benjamin and Arendt taught Blücher to play chess. “Yesterday I played chess with Benji for the first time, in a long and interesting game,” Blücher wrote. Arendt responded playfully: “I am extremely proud you beat Benji. It reflects well on my teaching.”2 As Arendt and Benjamin were playing chess, awaiting their fate as exiled Jewish intellectuals in Paris who were rendered stateless by Hitler’s Germany, a young socialist from Berlin by the name of Otto Albert Hirschmann (later to be known as Albert Hirschman), was shuttling across four countries: France, Italy, Great Britain, and Spain. From July to October 1936, he fought in the Spanish Civil War near Barcelona with the Italian and German émigré battalions of volunteers, loosely under the leadership of the leftist but antiStalinist Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM)). When Intertwined Lives and Themes