Correspondence, speeches and writings, subject files, family papers, clippings, and other papers primarily concerning Arendt's intellectual, social, and professional life as a lecturer and writer after World War II. Subjects include the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, Jewish response to the Holocaust, totalitarianism in Germany, and Zionism. Manuscripts of her works include Between Past and Future; Six Exercises in Political Thought (1961), Eichmann in Jerusalem; A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), Men in Dark Times (1968), and The Life of the Mind (1978). Family papers include correspondence and unpublished writings of her husband, Heinrich Blücher. Many of the letters and papers are in German and other European languages.

Correspondents include W.H. Auden, Hanan J. Ayalti (Hanan Klenbort), Saul Bellow, Walter Benjamin, Rosalie Littell Colie, Joachim C. Fest, Carl J. Friedrich, Elke Gilbert, Robert Gilbert, J. Glenn Gray, Waldemar Gurian, Rolf Hochhuth, Randall Jarrell, Hans Jonas, William Jovanovich, Alfred Kazin, Lotte Köhler, Robert Lowell, Mary McCarthy, Dwight MacDonald, Judah Leon Magnes, Hans Joachim Morgenthau, David Riesman, Ruth H. Rosenau, Gershom Gerhard Scholem, William Shawn, Robert Silvers, Stephen Spender, Paul Tillich, Eric Voegelin, Ernst Vollrath, Anne Weil, Helen Wolff, Kurt Wolff, and University of Chicago faculty members.