Philosophy can seem an abstract endeavor, a realm of hypotheticals, generalizations, ideals. But it was lived experience, as much as academic studies, that fueled the thinking of Hannah Arendt, perhaps the most influential and probably the best-known political philosopher of the 20th century. Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library dramatizes one decisive incident in Arendt’s lived experience, and in so doing produces a picture of an important facet in the crystallization of a powerful mind. In parallel, it serves up a jarring image of a nightmarish phase of history and its reflection in our own time.
This is a prison-cell drama with a difference. Playwright Jenny Lyn Bader envisions what might have taken place during Arendt’s eight-day imprisonment in 1933 Berlin. The philosopher was accused of trying to expose to the world what was happening in Hitler’s Reich by disseminating anti-semitic materials published in the German press.
A Philosopher Under Fire
Karl (Brett Temple), a freshly minted member of the political police, asserts that Arendt was finding these materials in the Prussian State Library, which she frequented anyway for her academic research. Though the action takes place entirely in a jail cell of featureless whitewashed brick and too-high windows, the library becomes an unseen stand-in for Arendt’s intellectual and civic life, she still in her 20s, years yet from the writings that would make her name.
As the days pass, the two get to know one another, and despite her fear and his professed unimaginative nature, they connect in surprising ways. Through Temple’s performance the production draws a sympathetic portrait of a young, well-educated, even somewhat bookish officer burdened with the confounding task of interrogating a subject able to both outsmart him and tug on his emotional strings. Karl is an ordinary man swept into a process by which ordinary people become perpetrators of horrific crimes against humanity, an avatar of what Arendt later famously dubbed the “banality of evil.”
Drew Hirshfield is heartbreaking as Erich, a Zionist lawyer who forces Arendt to make a fraught decision by offering his services. Like her, he’s an assimilated German Jew, but being more active in the rough-and-tumble of the real world, he is seeing his hard-won status as a respected professional evaporating as the Reich’s anti-semitism solidifies into law. Yet he hopes against hope, telling himself what so many German Jews did in the 1930s: that things might be bad, but they “couldn’t get much worse.”
Ella Dershowitz is galvanizing as the budding philosopher fixed in the crosshairs of history even as she’s still finding her own way. “I get caught up and I don’t always see where I’m going,” she says of her library wanderings, but it could just as well refer to her life as her world collapses around her. Where, indeed, is she going? Her husband has already fled the country. Her mother is locked up in the same prison, and Hannah can hear the cries of mistreated prisoners. What should she do? What can she do? Will Erich’s help save her, or doom her? Dershowitz makes painstakingly real Arendt’s frustration, her mortal worry, and her will to hold herself together.
Toward a ‘Happy’ Ending
In real life as in the play, Arendt’s sympathetic interrogator will assist her and her mother to get out – of jail, and of Nazi Germany. Had he not, Hannah Arendt would likely never have been a name we know.
Now at the WP Theater (Women’s Project Theater) after a successful run at 59e59, Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library is a remarkable achievement: a talky play that demands and repays close attention and works on both an intellectual and a gut level. It spotlights the rawness of a society on the verge of violent eruption, and reflects it back on us. Bader’s Hannah and Karl show us how vicious hatred isn’t required for tremendous evil to take root, not then and not now.
This Luna Stage production runs through Jan. 12, 2025 at the WP Theater on NYC’s Upper West Side. Tickets and schedule are available online.
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