In referring to dark times, where our capacities both for thinking and acting are compromised, Arendt makes the point that they are not new or rare; but our sense of them now comes in the context of totalitarianism, the horrors of which are unprecedented, showing us just how dark times can be (Arendt 1968a: ix). The experience of totalitarianism, as we have noted, was central to the development of Arendt's political thought, just as it was to the course of her life. She encountered first hand, and as a consequence of totalitarianism, two phenomena that she came to believe were decisive features of our recent experience. She suffered oppression in the form of a short period of imprisonment in Germany in 1933 and later internment in France in 1940 before her flight to the United States. Equally, in being forced to flee her homeland, she felt the experience of the exile, of one who has lost their place in the world. Years later, she commented that although when revisiting Germany she experienced joy simply at hearing German spoken around her in the streets, she nevertheless knew that, given what had happened, she could never again see it as her home; and so her state of exile was permanent. The twin phenomena of oppression on the one hand and homelessness on the other were, Arendt thought, key to the experience of people more generally in contemporary conditions, experiences which totalitarianism sought to press to the ultimate extreme (Arendt 1968a: vii).