73 Reading Arendt from the start has been the exception rather than the norm. 1 While some studies emphasize the centrality of the German-Jewish experi- ence for the development of her thought, paying particular attention to her biography of Rahel Varnhagen begun in the early 1930s, 2 few go back to Arendt’s earliest writings and in particular to her dissertation on the concept of love in Augustine. 3 In part this is due to the fact that Arendt’s dissertation remained untranslated until 1996, which meant that even for German readers the only statement of her youthful writing was a version “printed in Gothic script, filled with . . . Latin and Greek quotations, and written in Heideg- gerian prose.” 4 More importantly, however, the failure to incorporate the dissertation into the Arendt canon seems today to be due to a neglect of the theological sources of her thought. This applies even for—indeed especially for—Heidegger, who, as is now well known, “would never have arrived on the path of thinking” without his theological background. 5 Thus, while it has been noted for decades now that Arendt’s thinking developed out of a critical engagement with Heidegger, 6 there are no studies of their relation to date that take into account his theological concerns and in particular his close collabo- ration with the New Testament theologian Rudolph Bultmann, who mentored Arendt in theological questions. This way of reading Arendt has led to the view that, as Peter Gordon has recently put it, “what Leo Strauss termed ‘the theological-political predica- ment’ . . . left virtually no imprint upon [her] thinking.” 7 In what follows I shall argue that this is a mistaken presumption that conceals far more than it reveals of Arendt’s deepest political and philosophical insights. These insights grew out of an unfamiliar source, namely, Arendt’s encoun- ter of 1920s neo-orthodox “dialectical theology.” The importance of neo- Chapter 4 Hannah Arendt in Weimar Beyond the Theological-Political Predicament? Rodrigo Chacón