These women wrote through the darkest times. As times get darker again, 80 to 90 years later, we need to read them.
The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Salvation of Philosophy (Allen Lane 2023) in Shaun Whiteside’s English translation caught my eye in the Economist. So I went to find the German original. Feuer der Freiheit: Die Rettung Der Philosophie in finsteren Zeiten 1933–1943 (Klett-Cotta 2020) by Wolfram Eilenberger is a bestseller in Germany and I hope it does as well in English.
My frustration with the book is amount of space given to the men around the women, whether Beauvoir and Sartre or Arendt and Walter Benjamin. One could choose to cite these much-cited men less and the protagonists, more. But this book makes you want to read what they wrote.
For Hannah Arendt to be utterly present was to do philosophy. I was struck that in 1942, she wrote any Jewish national state would be dependent on strong nations or need to reach concord with its neighbours. On 30 November, Arendt’s On Violence comes out in Penguin Modern Classics. Arendt wrote in English soon after moving to the US; now I want to read more of her work in German.
Reading Ayn Rand translated into German felt surprising and made me view her differently. Rand’s libertarianism make much more sense as a visceral reaction to totalitarianism. She lived through communism from her birth in St Petersburg as Alissa Rosenbaum. We The Living (Penguin Modern Classics 2020) explores those themes.
Simone de Beauvoir resisted assimilation into women’s social roles as it would mean internalizing misogyny. For her, each conscious being needed both freedom and recognition. Her What is Existentialism? is in Penguin Great Ideas series (2020). But the translator is not named. If you know which translation of The Second Sex I should read, tell me!
Simone Weil’s star blazed out too soon. Her turn from social activism to mysticism reminded me of Józef Czapski. Just after finishing this, I discovered Ros Schwarz’s new translation of Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots (Penguin Classics 2023). I’ll be reading that next.
Dennis Scheck said Feuer der Freiheit/The Visionaries should be under every Christmas tree. Lea Ylpi called it an “intellectual feast.” Will you wrap it for someone this year, or devour it yourself?
Translator, editor, writer, reader
found in translation 
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