Abstract

Hannah Arendt’s discovery of America from her chosen vantage point of New York City is compared and contrasted to those of her German émigré cohort on both Coasts. More than any of the other German émigrés, except Thomas Mann, Arendt strategically situated herself at the point of intersection of New York communities of academics, critics, writers, artists and émigré intellectual communities in the middle decades of the 20th century. Indeed, she wrote for them all. Arendt is rediscovered as a radical avant-gardiste of Modernism persuasion, in the company of her close friends among the New York Intellectuals.