In June 1940, a little less than a year before Arendt was to flee France and two months after the “phoney war” between France and Germany became all too real, a detachment of the German army surprised a small group of French soldiers who were more or less hiding in the small village of Padoux, in northern France. The French hardly constituted a cohesive fighting force; they had been wandering around in confusion and despair for several days. Most pathetic of all, perhaps, was their meteorologist. He was certainly an odd-looking soldier. Barely five feet tall, he had bulging eyes, the right of which was cocked up and to the right. He had with him a number of notebooks, which he had filled up with all sorts of ruminations. In one of them he had written: “Whatever men feel I can guess out, explain, put it down in black and white. But not feel it. I concoct illusions, I have the appearance of a feeling person and I am a desert” (quoted in Bertholet 2000: 208).

This human desert enjoyed captivity as a German prisoner, for his little group of prisoners was the first non-hierarchical community he had ever been a member of. Family, school and church all had been authoritarian structures; only now, at the age of thirty-four, did he encounter fellowship. At the prison camp, he was able to wangle a room in the infirmary, where he continued to write.