“We Refugees”: Life Without Rights

Hannah Arendt

1943

In the first place, we don’t like to be called “refugees.” We ourselves call each other “newcomers” or “immigrants.” [ . . . ] Before this war broke out we were even more sensitive about being called refugees. We did our best to prove to other people that we were just ordinary immigrants. We declared that we had departed of our own free will to…

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In 1937, Nazi Germany began stripping German Jews abroad of their citizenship, leaving them stateless. Among them was philosopher Hannah Arendt, exiled in Paris and later interned by French authorities before escaping to New York in 1941. Still stateless, she wrote “We Refugees,” an essay reflecting on the despair and resilience of Jewish exiles. Drawing from her own experience, Arendt exposed a deeper problem: the modern system of nation-states, which left refugees without rights or protection—a condition she called one of the defining tragedies of the twentieth century.

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Creator Bio

Hannah Arendt

1906–1975

Born and educated in Germany, the political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt was influenced during her university education by the German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher Karl Jaspers (1883–1969) and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). She fled to France after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, and then escaped to the United States in 1941, where she remained until her death. She was an editor for Schocken Books and a correspondent for The New Yorker, reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. She taught at various American universities, including the University of Chicago, and the New School for Social Research. Arendt won a reputation as an erudite and provocative writer on political, historical, and philosophical themes. While she worked for Jewish communal organizations in France and in New York before finding a university post, her relations with the Jewish community were often prickly, as a result of her views on Zionism and Jewish responses to Nazi persecution.