The Department of German at NYU and Deutsches Haus at NYU present a talk by Barbara Hahn on "The Burden of Our Time. Hannah Arendt on Totalitarianism." 

What a burden it was to write this book. Hitler in Germany – Stalin in the Soviet Union. How did, how could that happen? In Parisian exile, Hannah Arendt tried to reconstruct the history of Antisemitism; soon after her arrival in the USA, the focus of her attention shifted. She now thought that the atrocities, committed in the century of imperialism, paved the way for those committed in her time. After 1945, she added a third part – a study of totalitarianism. The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was addressed to “each one of those who rightly is in despair”, as Arendt wrote in the last chapter. After genocide in the middle of Europe, after the most devastating war in human history.