Unemployment lines stretched around city blocks.

Parliament deadlocked.

And the academic colleagues who had once debated Kant and Kierkegaard with her

began rationalizing the necessity of a strong man,

viewing the rising Nazi movement through detached theoretical lenses that blinded them

completely to the violence happening in the streets.

Then, on the 30th of January, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany.

Less than a month later, on the night of the 27th of February, the sky over the Tiergarten

Park glowed orange.

The Reichstag, the German Parliament building, was burning.

And the fire was the pretext Hitler had been waiting for to seize absolute dictatorial

power. Within 24 hours, civil liberties were suspended.

Freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, all of it gone overnight. By morning,

communists, socialists, and opponents of the regime were being dragged from their beds into the

cellars of the SA the Nazi stormtroopers where the first torture centers had

already been improvised and then came the betrayal that broke her perhaps

permanently with philosophy itself her professors her, the German intellectual establishment did not resist.

They participated. They aligned themselves through what the regime called

Gleischaltung, forced coordination, the systematic process by which every institution in Germany, the universities,

the courts, the professional associations, was brought into line with Nazi ideology. Her own

teachers found sophisticated historical justifications for anti-Semitism. She would later put it

with uncompromising clarity.

...