Originally published: 1st ed. New York : Harcourt, Brace & Co., c1994.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"What remains? The language remains": a conversation with Gèèunter Gaus -- Augustine and Protestantism -- Philosophy and sociology -- S²ren Kierkegaard -- Friedrich von Gentz -- Berlin Salon -- On the emancipation of women -- Franz Kafka: a revaluation -- Foreign affairs in the foreign-language press -- Approaches to the "German problem" -- Organized guilt and universal responsibility -- Nightmare and flight -- Dilthey as philosopher and historian -- The seeds of a fascist international -- Christianity and revolution -- Power politics triumphs -- No longer and not yet -- What is existential philosophy? -- French Existentialism -- The ivory tower of common sense -- The image of hell -- The Nation -- Dedication of Karl Jaspers -- Rand School lecture -- Religion and the intellectuals -- Social science techniques and the study of concentration camps -- The aftermath of Nazi rule: report from Germany -- The eggs speak up -- At table with Hitler -- Mankind and terror -- Understanding and politics (the difficulties of understanding) -- On the nature of Totalitarianism: an essay in understanding -- Heidegger the fox -- Understanding Communism -- Religion and politics -- The ex-Communists -- A reply to Eric Voegelin -- Dream and nightmare -- Europe and the atom bomb -- The threat of conformism -- Concern with politics in recent European philosophical thought.

"Few thinkers have addressed the political horrors and ethical complexities of the twentieth century with the insight and passionate intellectual integrity of Hannah Arendt. She was irresistibly drawn to the activity of understanding, in an effort to endow historical, political, and cultural events with meaning. Essays in Understanding assembles many of Arendt's writings from the 1930s, 1940s, and into the 1950s. Included here are illuminating discussions of St. Augustine, existentialism, Kafka, and Kierkegaard; relatively early examinations of Nazism, responsibility and guilt, and the place of religion in the modern world; and later investigations into the nature of totalitarianism that Arendt set down after The Origins of Totalitarianism was published in 1951. The body of work gathered in this volume gives us a portrait of Arendt's development as a thinker - and confirms why her ideas and judgments remain as seminal today as they were when she first set them down."--BOOK JACKET.