Johanna "Hannah" Cohn Arendt (; German: [ˈaːʁənt];
Hannah Arendt Bluecher; 14 October 1906 – 4
December 1975) was a German philosopher and
political theorist. Her many books and articles
on topics ranging from totalitarianism to
epistemology have had a lasting influence
on political theory. Arendt is widely considered
one of the most important political philosophers
of the twentieth century.
Arendt was born in Hanover, but largely raised
in Königsberg in a secular merchant Jewish
culture to parents who were politically progressive,
being supporters of the Social Democrats.
Her father died when she was seven, so she
was raised by her mother and grandfather.
After completing her secondary education,
she studied at the University of Marburg under
Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a brief
affair, and who had a lasting influence on
her thinking. She obtained her doctorate in
philosophy in 1929 at the University of Heidelberg
with Karl Jaspers.
Hannah Arendt married Günther Stern in 1929,
but soon began to encounter increasing antisemitism
in 1930s Germany. Adolf Hitler came to power
in 1933, and while researching antisemitic
propaganda for the Zionist Federation of Germany
in Berlin that year, Arendt was denounced
and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo. On
release, she fled Germany, living in Czechoslovakia
and Switzerland before settling in Paris.
There she worked for Youth Aliyah, assisting
young Jews to emigrate to Palestine. Divorcing
Stern in 1937, she married Heinrich Blücher
in 1940, but when Germany invaded France in
1940 she was detained by the French as an
alien, despite having been stripped of her
German citizenship in 1937. She escaped and
made her way to the United States in 1941
via Portugal. She settled in New York, which
remained her principal residence for the rest
of her life. She became a writer and editor
and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction,
becoming an American citizen in 1950. With
the appearance of The Origins of Totalitarianism
in 1951, her reputation as a thinker and writer
was established and a series of seminal works
followed. These included The Human Condition
in 1958, and both Eichmann in Jerusalem and
On Revolution in 1963. She taught at many
American universities, while declining tenure-track
appointments. She died suddenly from a heart
attack in 1975, at the age of 69, leaving
her last work, The Life of the Mind, unfinished.
Her works cover a broad range of topics, but
she is best known for those dealing with the
nature of power and evil, as well as politics,
direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism.
In the popular mind she is best remembered
for the controversy surrounding the trial
of Adolf Eichmann, her attempt to explain
how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian
systems, which was considered an apologia,
and for the phrase "the banality of evil".
She is commemorated by institutions and journals
devoted to her thinking, the Hannah Arendt
Prize for political thinking, and on stamps,
street names and schools, amongst other things.
== Early life and education (1906–1929)
==
=== Family of origin ===
Hannah Arendt was born Johanna Cohn Arendt
in 1906 into a comfortable educated secular
family of German Jews in Linden, Prussia (now
a part of Hanover), in Wilhelmine Germany.
The family were merchants of Russian extraction
from Königsberg, the East Prussian capital.
Arendt's grandparents were part of the Reform
Jewish community there. Hannah's paternal
grandfather, Max Arendt (1843–1913), was
a prominent businessman, local politician,
one of the leaders of the Königsberg Jewish
community and a member of the Centralverein
deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens
(Central Organinzation for German Citizens
of the Jewish Faith). Like other members of
the Centralverein he saw himself primarily
as German and disapproved of the activities
of Zionists, such as the young Kurt Blumenfeld
(1884–1963), who was a frequent visitor
to their home and would later become one of
Hannah's mentors. Of Max Arendt's children,
Paul Arendt (1873–1913) was an engineer
and Henriette Arendt (1874–1922) a policewoman
who became a social worker.Hannah was the
only child of Paul and Martha (born Cohn)
Arendt (1874–1948), who were married on
April 11, 1902. She was named after her paternal
grandmother. The Cohns had originally come
to Königsberg from nearby Russian territory
(now Lithuania) in 1852, as refugees from
anti-Semitism there, and made their living
as tea importers; J. N. Cohn & Company became
the largest business in the city. The Arendts
had reached Germany from Russia a century
earlier. Hannah's extended family contained
many more women, who shared the loss of husbands
and children. Hannah's parents were better
educated and politically more to the left
than her grandparents, both being members
of the Social Democrats, rather than the German
Democratic Party that most of their contemporaries
supported. Paul Arendt was educated at the
Albertina (University of Königsberg). Though
he worked as an engineer, he prided himself
on his love of Classics. He collected a large
library, in which Hannah immersed herself.
Martha Cohn, a musician, had studied for three
years in Paris.In the first four years of
their marriage, the Arendts lived in Berlin,
where they were supporters of the socialist
journal Sozialistische Monatshefte. At the
time of Hannah's birth, Paul Arendt was employed
by an electrical engineering firm in Linden,
and they lived in a frame house on the market
square (Marktplatz). The Arendt family moved
back to Königsberg in 1909, because of Paul's
deteriorating health. Hannah's father suffered
from a prolonged illness with syphilis and
had to be institutionalized in 1911. He died
on October 30, 1913, when Hannah was seven,
leaving her mother to raise her. They lived
at Hannah's grandfather's house at Tiergartenstrasse
6, a leafy residential street adjacent to
the Königsberg Tiergarten, in the predominantly
Jewish neighborhood of Hufen. Although Hannah's
parents were non-religious, they were happy
to allow Max Arendt to take Hannah to the
Reform synagogue. She also received religious
instruction from the rabbi, Hermann Vogelstein,
who would come to her school for that purpose.
At the time the young Hannah confided that
she wished to marry him when she grew up.
Her family moved in circles that included
many intellectuals and professionals. It was
a social circle of high standards and ideals.
As she recalled it:
My early intellectual formation occurred in
an atmosphere where nobody paid much attention
to moral questions; we were brought up under
the assumption: Das Moralische versteht sich
von selbst, moral conduct is a matter of course.
This time was a particularly favorable period
for the Jewish community in Königsberg, an
important center of the Haskalah (enlightenment).
Arendt's family was thoroughly assimilated
("Germanized") and she later remembered: "With
us from Germany, the word 'assimilation' received
a 'deep' philosophical meaning. You can hardly
realize how serious we were about it." Despite
these conditions, the Jewish population lacked
full citizenship rights, and although antisemitism
was not overt, nor was it absent. Arendt came
to define her Jewish identity negatively after
encountering overt antisemitism as an adult.
She came to greatly identify with Rahel Varnhagen
(1771–1833), the Prussian socialite who
desperately wanted to assimilate into German
culture, only to be rejected because she was
born Jewish. Arendt later said of Varnhagen
that she was "my very closest woman friend,
unfortunately dead a hundred years now." Varnhagen
would later become the subject of a biography
by Hannah.
In the last two years of the First World War,
Hannah's mother organized social democratic
discussion groups and became a follower of
Rosa Luxembourg (1871-1919) as socialist uprisings
broke out across Germany. Luxembourg's writings
would later influence Hannah's political thinking.
In 1920, Martha Cohn married Martin Beerwald
(1869–1941), an ironmonger and widower of
four years, and they moved to his home, two
blocks away, at Busoldstrasse 6, providing
Hannah with improved social and financial
security. Hannah was fourteen at the time
and acquired two older stepsisters, Clara
(1901–1932) and Eva (1902–1988).
=== Education ===
==== Early education ====
Arendt enrolled in the Szittnich School, Königsberg
(Hufen-Oberlyzeum), on Bahnstrasse in August
1913, but her studies there were interrupted
by the outbreak of World War I, forcing the
family to temporarily flee to Berlin on August
23, 1914, in the face of the advancing Russian
army. There they stayed with her mother's
sister, Margarethe Fürst (1884–1942), and
her three children, while Hannah attended
school in Berlin-Charlottenburg. After ten
weeks, when Königsberg appeared to be no
longer threatened, the Arendts were able to
return, where they spent the remaining war
years at her grandfather's house. Arendt was
precocious, learning ancient Greek as a child,
writing poetry in her teenage years, and starting
both a philosophy club and Greek Graecae at
her school. She was fiercely independent in
her schooling and a voracious reader, absorbing
French and German literature and poetry (committing
large amounts of poetry to heart) and philosophy.
By the age of 16, she had read Kierkegaard,
Jaspers' Psychologie der Weltanschauungen
and Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique
of Pure Reason). Kant, whose home town was
also Königsberg, was an important influence
on her thinking, and it was Kant who had written
about Königsberg that "such a town is the
right place for gaining knowledge concerning
men and the world even without travelling".Arendt
attended the Königin-Luise-Schule for her
secondary education, a girls' Gymnasium on
Landhofmeisterstrasse. Most of her friends,
while at school, were gifted children of Jewish
professional families, generally older than
her and went on to university education. Among
them was Ernst Grumach (1902–1967), who
introduced her to his girlfriend, Anne Mendelssohn,
who would become a lifelong friend. When Anne
moved away, Ernst became Arendt's first romantic
relationship. Like Arendt, Anne would go on
to become a philosopher, obtaining her doctorate
at Hamburg, while Ernst became a philologist.
==== Higher education ====
Arendt's education at the Luise-Schule ended
in 1922 when she was expelled at the age of
fifteen for leading a boycott of a teacher
who insulted her. Instead, her mother arranged
for her to go to Berlin to be with social
democrat family friends. In Berlin she lived
in a student residence and audited courses
of her choosing at the University of Berlin
(1922–1923), including classics and Christian
theology under Romano Guardini. This enabled
her to successfully apply sit the entrance
examination (Abitur) for the University of
Marburg, where Ernst Grumach had studied under
Martin Heidegger, who had been appointed a
professor there in 1922. For the examination,
her mother engaged a private tutor, while
her Aunt Frieda Arendt, a teacher, also helped
her, and Frieda's husband Ernst Aron provided
financial assistance for her to attend university.In
Berlin, Guardini had introduced her to Kierkegaard,
and she resolved to make theology her major
field. At Marburg (1924–1926) she studied
classical languages, German literature, Protestant
theology with Rudolf Bultmann and philosophy
with Nicolai Hartmann and Heidegger. The 17-year-old
Arendt then began a long and problematic romantic
relationship with the 35-year-old Heidegger,
who was married with two young sons. Arendt
later faced criticism for this because of
Heidegger's support for the Nazi Party after
being elected rector at the University of
Freiburg in 1933. Nevertheless, he remained
one of the most profound influences on her
thinking. The details of the relationship
remained a secret until Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's
biography of Arendt appeared in 1982, by which
time Arendt and Heidegger had both died, though
Heidegger's wife, Elfride Petri (1893–1992),
was still alive. Nevertheless, the affair
was not well known until 1995, when Elzbieta
Ettinger gained access to the sealed correspondence
and published a controversial account that
was used by Arendt's detractors to cast doubt
on her integrity. That account, which caused
a scandal, was subsequently refuted.At Marburg,
Arendt lived at Lutherstrasse 4. Among her
friends there was Hans Jonas, her only Jewish
classmate. Another fellow student of Heidegger's
was Jonas' fiend, the Jewish philosopher Gunther
Siegmund Stern (1902–1992) – son of the
noted psychologist Ludwig Wilhelm Stern – who
would later become her first husband. Stern
had completed his doctoral dissertation with
Edmund Husserl at Freiburg University, and
was now working on his Habilitation thesis
with Heidegger, but Arendt, involved with
Heidegger, took little notice of him at the
time.
After a year at Marburg, Arendt spent a semester
at Freiburg, attending the lectures of Husserl.
In 1926 she moved to the University of Heidelberg,
where in 1929, she completed her dissertation
under the other leading figure of the then
new and revolutionary Existenzphilosophie,
Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), a friend of Heidegger's.
Her thesis was entitled Der Liebesbegriff
bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen
Interpretation ("On the concept of love in
the thought of Saint Augustine: Attempt at
a philosophical interpretation"). She remained
a lifelong friend of Jaspers and his wife,
Gertrud Mayer (1879–1974), developing a
deep intellectual relationship with him. At
Heidelberg, her circle of friends included
Hans Jonas, who had also moved from Marburg
to study Augustine, working on his Augustin
und das paulinische Freiheitsproblem. Ein
philosophischer Beitrag zur Genesis der christlich-abendländischen
Freiheitsidee (1930), and also a group of
three young philosophers: Karl Frankenstein,
Erich Neumann and Erwin Loewenson. Other friends
and students of Jaspers were the linguists
Benno von Wiese and Hugo Friedrich (seen with
Hannah, here), with whom she attended lectures
by Friedrich Gundolf at Jaspers' suggestion
and who kindled in her an interest in German
Romanticism. She also became reacquainted
with Kurt Blumenfeld, at a lecture, who introduced
her to Jewish politics. At Heidelberg, she
lived in the old town (Altstadt) near the
castle, at Schlossberg 16. The house was demolished
in the 1960s, but the one remaining wall bears
a plaque commemorating her time there (see
image).
On completing her dissertation, Arendt turned
to her Habilitationsschrift, initially on
German Romanticism, and hence an academic
teaching career. However 1929 was also the
year of the Depression and the end of the
golden years (Goldene Zwanziger) of the Weimar
Republic, which was to become increasingly
unstable over its remaining four years. Arendt,
as a Jew, had little if any chance of obtaining
an academic appointment in Germany. Nevertheless,
she completed most of the work before she
was forced to leave Germany.
== Career ==
=== Germany (1929–1933) ===
==== Berlin-Potsdam (1929) ====
In 1929, Arendt met Günther Stern again,
this time in Berlin at a New Year's masked
ball, and began a relationship with him. Within
a month she had moved in with him in a one-room
studio, shared with a dancing school in Berlin-Halensee.
Then they moved to Merkurstrasse 3, Nowawes,
in Potsdam and were married there on September
26. They had much in common and the marriage
was welcomed by both sets of parents. In the
summer, Hannah Arendt successfully applied
to the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft
for a grant to support her Habilitation, which
was supported by Heidegger and Jaspers among
others, and in the meantime, with Günther's
help was working on revisions to get her dissertation
published.
==== Wanderjahre (1929–1931) ====
After Arendt and Günther were married, they
began two years of what Christian Dries refers
to as the Wanderjahre (years of wandering).
They had the ultimately fruitless aim of having
Günther accepted for an academic appointment.
They lived for a while in Drewitz, a southern
neighborhood of Potsdam, before moving to
Heidelberg, where they lived with the Jaspers.
After Heidelberg, where Günther completed
the first draft of his Habilitation thesis,
the Sterns then moved to Frankfurt where Günther
hoped to finish it. There, Arendt participated
in the university's intellectual life, attending
lectures by Karl Mannheim and Paul Tillich,
among others. The Sterns collaborated intellectually,
writing an article together on Rilke's Duino
Elegies (1923) and both reviewing Mannheim's
Ideologie und Utopie (1929). The latter was
Arendt's sole contribution in sociology. In
both her treatment of Mannheim and Rilke,
Arendt found love to be a transcendent principle
"Because there is no true transcendence in
this ordered world, one also cannot exceed
the world, but only succeed to higher ranks".
In Rilke she saw a latter day secular Augustine,
describing the Elegies as the letzten literarischen
Form religiösen Dokumentes (ultimate form
of religious document). Later, she would discover
the limitations of transcendent love in explaining
the historical events that pushed her into
political action. Another theme from Rilke
that she would develop was the despair of
not being heard. Reflecting on Rilke's opening
lines, which she placed as an epigram at the
beginning of their essay
Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich den aus
der Engel Ordnungen?
(Who, if I cried out, would hear me among
the angel's hierarchies?)
Arendt and Stern begin by stating
The paradoxical, ambiguous, and desperate
situation from which standpoint the Duino
Elegies may alone be understood has two characteristics:
the absence of an echo and the knowledge of
futility. The conscious renunciation of the
demand to be heard, the despair at not being
able to be heard, and finally the need to
speak even without an answer–these are the
real reasons for the darkness, asperity, and
tension of the style in which poetry indicates
its own possibilities and its will to form
Arendt also published an article on Augustine
(354–430) in the Frankfurter Zeitung to
mark the fifteen hundredth anniversary of
his death. She saw this article as forming
a bridge between her treatment of Augustine
in her dissertation and her subsequent work
on Romanticism. When it became evident Stern
would not succeed in obtaining an appointment,
the Sterns returned to Berlin in 1931.
==== Return to Berlin (1931–1933) ====
In Berlin, where the couple initially lived
in the predominantly Jewish area of Bayerisches
Viertel (Bavarian Quarter or "Jewish Switzerland")
in Schöneberg, Stern obtained a position
as a staff-writer for the cultural supplement
of the Berliner Börsen-Courier, edited by
Herbert Ihering, with the help of Bertold
Brecht. There he started writing using the
nom-de-plume of Günther Anders, i.e. "Günther
Other". Arendt assisted Günther with his
work, but the shadow of Heidegger hung over
their relationship. While Günther was working
on his Habilitationsschrift, Arendt had abandoned
the original subject of German Romanticism
for her thesis in 1930, and turned instead
to Rahel Varnhagen and the question of assimilation.
Her work on romanticism had led her to a study
of Jewish salons and eventually to those of
Varnhagen. Back in Berlin, Arendt found herself
becoming more involved in politics and started
studying political theory, and reading Marx
and Trotsky, while developing contacts at
the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik. Despite
the political leanings of her mother and husband
she never saw herself as a political leftist,
justifying her activism as being through her
Jewishness.
Her increasing interest in Jewish politics
and her examination of assimilation in her
study of Varnhagen led her to publish her
first article on Judaism, Aufklärung und
Judenfrage ("The Enlightenment and the Jewish
Question", 1932). Blumenfeld had introduced
her to the "Jewish question", which would
be his lifelong concern. Meanwhile, her views
on German Romanticism were evolving. She wrote
a review of Hans Weil's Die Entstehung des
deutschen Bildungsprinzips (The Origin of
German Educational Principle, 1930), which
dealt with the emergence of Bildungselite
(educational elite) in the time of Rahel Varnhagen.
At the same time she began to be occupied
by Max Weber's description of the status of
Jewish people within a state as pariavolk
(pariah people) in his Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft
(1922), while borrowing Bernard Lazare's term
paria conscient (conscious pariah) with which
she identified. In both these articles she
advanced the views of Johann Herder. Another
interest of hers at the time was the status
of women, resulting in her 1932 review of
Alice Rühle-Gerstel's book Das Frauenproblem
in der Gegenwart. Eine psychologische Bilanz
(Contemporary Women's Issues: A psychological
balance sheet). Although not a supporter of
the women's movement, the review was sympathetic.
At least in terms of the status of women at
that time, she was skeptical of the movement's
ability to achieve political change. She was
also critical of the movement, because it
was a women's movement, rather than contributing
with men to a political movement, abstract
rather than striving for concrete goals. In
this manner she echoed Rosa Luxemburg. Like
Luxemburg, she would later criticize Jewish
movements for the same reason. Arendt consistently
prioritized political over social questions.By
1932, faced with a deteriorating political
situation, Arendt was deeply troubled by reports
that Heidegger was speaking at National Socialist
meetings. She wrote, asking him to deny that
he was attracted to National Socialism. Heidegger
replied that he did not seek to deny the rumors
(which were true), and merely assured her
that his feelings for her were unchanged.
As a Jew in Nazi Germany, Arendt was prevented
from making a living and discriminated against
and confided to Anne Mendelssohn that emigration
was probably inevitable. By 1933, life for
the Jewish population in Germany was becoming
precarious. Adolf Hitler became Bundeskanzler
(Chancellor) in January, and the Reichstag
was burned down (Reichstagsbrand) the following
month. This led to the suspension of civil
liberties, with attacks on the left, and,
in particular, members of the Kommunistische
Partei Deutschlands (German Communist Party:
KPD). Stern, who had communist associations,
fled to Paris, but Arendt stayed on to become
an activist. Knowing her time was limited,
she used the apartment at Opitzstrasse 6 in
Berlin-Steglitz that she had occupied with
Stern since 1932 as an underground railway
way-station for fugitives. Her rescue operation
there is now recognized with a plaque on the
wall (see image).
Arendt had already positioned herself as a
critic of the rising Nazi Party in 1932 by
publishing "Adam-Müller-Renaissance?" a critique
of the appropriation of the life of Adam Müller
to support right wing ideology. The beginnings
of anti-Jewish laws and boycott came in the
spring of 1933. Confronted with systemic antisemitism,
Arendt adopted the motiv "If one is attacked
as a Jew one must defend oneself as a Jew.
Not as a German, not as a world citizen, not
as an upholder of the Rights of Man." This
was Arendt's introduction of the concept of
Jew as Pariah that would occupy her for the
rest of her life in her Jewish writings. She
took a public position by publishing part
of her largely completed biography of Rahel
Varnhagen as "Originale Assimilation: Ein
Nachwort zu Rahel Varnhagen 100 Todestag"
("Original Assimilation: An Epilogue to the
One Hundredth Anniversary of Rahel Varnhagen's
Death") in the Kölnische Zeitung on March
7, 1933 and a little later also in Jüdische
Rundschau. In the article she argues that
the age of assimilation that began with Varnhagen's
generation had come to an end with an official
state policy of antisemitism. She opened with
the declaration:
Today in Germany it seems Jewish assimilation
must declare its bankruptcy. The general social
antisemitism and its official legitimation
affects in the first instance assimilated
Jews, who can no longer protect themselves
through baptism or by emphasizing their differences
from Eastern Judaism.
As a Jew, Arendt was anxious to inform the
world of what was happening to her people
in 1930–1933. She surrounded herself with
Zionist activists, including Kurt Blumenfeld,
Martin Buber and Salman Schocken, and started
to research antisemitism. Arendt had access
to the Prussian State Library for her work
on Varnhagen. Blumenfeld's Zionistische Vereinigung
für Deutschland (Zionist Federation of Germany)
persuaded her to use this access to obtain
evidence of the extent of antisemitism, for
a planned speech to the Zionist Congress in
Prague. This research was illegal at the time.
Her actions led to her being denounced by
a librarian for anti-state propaganda, resulting
in the arrest of both Arendt and her mother
by the Gestapo. They served eight days in
prison but her notebooks were in code and
could not be deciphered, and she was released
by a young, sympathetic arresting officer
to await trial.
=== Exile: France (1933–1941) ===
==== Paris (1933–1940) ====
On release, realizing the danger she was now
in, Arendt and her mother fled Germany following
the established escape route over the Erzgebirge
Mountains by night into Czechoslovakia and
on to Prague and then by train Geneva. In
Geneva, she made a conscious decision to commit
herself to "the Jewish cause". She obtained
work with a friend of her mother's at the
League of Nations' Jewish Agency for Palestine,
distributing visas and writing speeches.From
Geneva the Arendts traveled to Paris in the
autumn, where she was reunited with Stern,
joining a stream of refugees. While Arendt
had left Germany without papers, her mother
had travel documents and returned to Königsberg
and her husband. In Paris, she befriended
Stern's cousin, the Marxist literary critic
and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940)
and also the Jewish philosopher Raymond Aron
(1905–1983).Arendt was now an émigré,
an exile, stateless, without papers, and had
turned her back on the Germany and Germans
of the Nazizeit. Her legal status was precarious
and she was coping with a foreign language
and culture, all of which took its toll on
her mentally and physically. In 1934 she started
working for the Zionist-funded outreach program
Agriculture et Artisanat, giving lectures,
and organizing clothing, documents, medications
and education for Jewish youth seeking to
emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine,
mainly as agricultural workers. Initially
she was employed as a secretary, and then
office manager. To improve her skills she
studied French, Hebrew and Yiddish. In this
way she was able to support herself and her
husband. When the organization closed in 1935,
her work for Blumenfeld and the Zionists in
Germany brought her into contact with the
wealthy philanthropist Baroness Germaine Alice
de Rothschild (born Halphen, 1884–1975),
wife of Édouard Alphonse James de Rothschild,
becoming her assistant. In this position she
oversaw the baroness' contributions to Jewish
charities through the Paris Consistoire, although
she had little time for the family as a whole.
The Rothschilds had headed the central Consistoire
for a century but stood for everything Arendt
did not, opposing immigration and any connection
with German Jewry.Later in 1935, Arendt joined
Youth Aliyah (Youth immigration), an organization
similar to Agriculture et Artisanat that was
founded in Berlin on the day Hitler seized
power. It was affiliated with Hadassah. These
organizations saved many from the Holocaust.
There she eventually became Secretary-General
(1935–1939). Her work with Youth Aliyah
also involved finding food, clothing, social
workers and lawyers, but above all, fund raising.
She made her first visit to Palestine in 1935,
accompanying one of these groups and meeting
with her cousin Ernst Fürst there. With the
Nazi annexation of Austria and invasion of
Czechoslovakia in 1938, Paris was flooded
with refugees, and she became the special
agent for the rescue of the children from
those countries.In 1936, while in Paris, Arendt
met the self-educated Berlin poet and Marxist
philosopher Heinrich Blücher (1899–1970).
Blücher had been a Spartacist and then a
founding member of the KPD, but had been expelled
due to his work in the Versöhnler (Conciliator
faction). Although Arendt had rejoined Stern
in 1933, their marriage existed in name only,
with them having separated in Berlin. She
fulfilled her social obligations and used
the name Hannah Stern, but the relationship
effectively ended when Stern, perhaps recognizing
the danger better than her, emigrated to America
with his parents in 1936. In 1937, Arendt
was stripped of her German citizenship and
she and Stern divorced. She had begun seeing
more of Blücher, and eventually they began
living together. It was Blücher's long political
activism that began to move Arendt's thinking
towards political action. In 1938, she completed
her biography of Rahel Varnhagen, although
this was not published until 1958. In April
1939, following the devastating Kristallnacht
pogrom of November 1938, Martha Beerwald realized
her daughter would not return and made the
decision to leave her husband and join Arendt
in Paris. One stepdaughter had died and the
other had moved to England, Martin Beerwald
would not leave and she no longer had any
close ties to Königsberg. Arendt and Blücher
married on January 16, 1940, shortly after
their respective divorces were finalized.
==== Internment and escape (1940–1941) ====
On May 5, 1940, in anticipation of the Germany
invasion of France and the Low Countries that
month, the Gouverneur général of Paris issued
a proclamation ordering all "enemy aliens"
between 17 and 55 who had come from Germany
(predominantly Jews) to report separately
for internment. The women were gathered together
in the Vélodrome d'Hiver on May 15, so Hannah
Arendt's mother, being over 55, was allowed
to stay in Paris. Arendt described the process
of making refugees as "the new type of human
being created by contemporary history ... put
into concentration camps by their foes and
into internment camps by their friends". The
men, including Blücher, were sent to Camp
Vernet in southern France, close to the Spanish
border. Arendt and the other women were sent
to Camp Gurs, to the west of Gurs, a week
later. The camp had originally been set up
to accommodate refugees from Spain. On June
22, France capitulated and signed the Compiègne
armistice, dividing the country. Gurs was
in the southern Vichy controlled section.
Arendt describes how, "in the resulting chaos
we succeeded in getting hold of liberation
papers with which we were able to leave the
camp", which she did with about 200 of the
7,000 women held there, about four weeks later.
There was no Résistance then, but she managed
to walk and hitchhike north to Montauban,
near Toulouse where she knew she would find
help.Montauban had become an unofficial capital
for former detainees, and Arendt's friend
Lotta Sempell Klembort was staying there.
Blücher's camp had been evacuated in the
wake of the German advance, and he managed
to escape from a forced march, making his
way to Montauban, where the two of them led
a fugitive life. Soon they were joined by
Anne Mendelssohn and Arendt's mother. Escape
from France was extremely difficult without
official papers; their friend Walter Benjamin
had taken his own life after being apprehended
trying to escape to Spain. One of the best
known illegal routes operated out of Marseilles,
where Varian Fry, an American journalist,
worked to raise funds, forge papers and bribe
officials with Hiram Bingham, the American
vice-consul there. Fry and Bingham secured
exit papers and American visas for thousands,
and with help from Günther Stern, Arendt,
her husband, and her mother managed to secure
the requisite permits to travel by train through
Spain to Lisbon, Portugal. There, they eventually
secured a passage to New York in April 1941.
A few months later, Fry's operations were
shut down and the borders sealed.
=== New York ===
Upon arriving in New York, Arendt became active
in the German-Jewish community. From 1941
to 1945, she wrote a political column for
the New York German-language Jewish newspaper
Aufbau, writing on anti-semitism, refugees
and the need for a Jewish army. She also wrote
for other German émigré publications and
became an editor at Schocken Books, which
later published a number of her works. Beginning
in 1944, she was the director of research
and Executive Director for the Commission
of European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction,
and in that capacity traveled to Europe after
the war. In 1948 she became engaged with the
campaign of Judah Magnes for a two-state solution
in Palestine.
Together with her husband, she lived at 370
Riverside Drive in New York and at Kingston,
New York, where Blücher taught at nearby
Bard College for many years.
=== Post-war ===
In the 1950s Arendt wrote some of her most
important works, including The Origins of
Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition
(1958) and On Revolution (1963). Arendt began
corresponding with the American author Mary
McCarthy, six years her junior, in 1950 and
they soon became lifelong friends. In 1950,
Arendt also became a naturalized citizen of
the United States. The same year, she started
seeing Martin Heidegger again, and had what
the American writer Adam Kirsch called a "quasi-romance",
lasting for two years, with the man who had
previously been her mentor, teacher, and lover.
During this time, Arendt defended him against
critics who noted his enthusiastic membership
in the Nazi Party. She portrayed Heidegger
as a naïve man swept up by forces beyond
his control, and pointed out that Heidegger's
philosophy had nothing to do with National
Socialism. Her work was recognized by many
awards, including the Danish Sonning Prize
in 1975 for Contributions to European Civilization.
==== Teaching ====
Arendt taught at many institutions of higher
learning from 1951 onwards, but, preserving
her independence, consistently refused tenure-track
positions. She served as a visiting scholar
at the University of Notre Dame; University
of California, Berkeley; Princeton University
(where she was the first woman to be appointed
a full professor in 1959); and Northwestern
University. She also taught at the University
of Chicago from 1963 to 1967, where she was
a member of the Committee on Social Thought;
The New School in Manhattan where she taught
as a university professor from 1967; Yale
University, where she was a fellow; and the
Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University
(1961–62, 1962–63). She was elected a
fellow of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences in 1962 and a member of the American
Academy of Arts and Letters in 1964.In 1974,
Arendt was instrumental in the creation of
Structured Liberal Education (SLE) at Stanford
University. She wrote a letter to the president
of Stanford to persuade the university to
enact Mark Mancall's vision of a residentially
based humanities program. At the time of her
death, she was University Professor of Political
Philosophy at the New School.
== Relationships ==
In addition to her affair with Heidegger,
and her two marriages, Arendt had a number
of close friendships. Since her death, her
correspondences with many of them have been
published, revealing much information about
her thinking. To her friends she was both
loyal and generous, dedicating a number of
her works to them. Freundschaft (friendship)
she described as being one of "tätigen Modi
des Lebendigseins" (the active modes of being
alive), and, to her, friendship was central
both to her life and to the concept of politics.
Hans Jonas described her as having a "genius
for friendship", and, in her own words, "der
Eros der Freundschaft" (love of friendship).
Her philosophy-based friendships were male
and European, while her later American friendships
were more diverse, literary, and political.
Although she became an American citizen in
1950, her cultural roots remained European,
and her language remained her German "Muttersprache".
She surrounded herself with German-speaking
émigrés, sometimes referred to as "The Tribe".
To her, wirkliche Menschen (real people) were
"pariahs", not in the sense of outcasts, but
in the sense of outsiders, unassimilated,
with the virtue of "social nonconformism ... the
sine qua non of intellectual achievement",
a sentiment she shared with Jaspers.
Arendt always had a beste Freundin. In her
teens she had formed a lifelong relationship
with her Jugendfreundin, Anne Mendelssohn
Weil ("Annchen"). On emigrating to America,
Hilde Frankel, Paul Tillich's secretary and
mistress, filled that role until her death
in 1950. After the war, Arendt was able to
return to Germany and renew her relationship
with Weil, who made several visits to New
York, especially after Blücher's death in
1970. Their last meeting was in Tegna, Switzerland
in 1975, shortly before Arendt's death. With
Frankel's death, Mary McCarthy became Arendt's
closest friend and confidante.
== Final illness and death ==
While Blücher had survived a cerebral aneurysm
in 1961, he remained unwell after 1963, sustaining
a series of heart attacks. On October 31,
1970 he died of a massive heart attack. A
devastated Arendt had previously told Mary
McCarthy, "Life without him would be unthinkable".
Arendt was also a heavy smoker and was frequently
depicted with a cigarette in her hand. She
sustained a near fatal heart attack while
lecturing in Scotland in May 1974, and although
she recovered, she remained in poor health
afterwards, and continued to smoke. On the
evening of December 4, 1975, shortly after
her 69th birthday, she had a further heart
attack in her apartment while entertaining
friends, and was pronounced dead at the scene.
Her ashes were buried alongside those of Blücher
at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, New
York in May 1976.After Arendt's death the
title page of the final part of The Life of
the Mind ("Judging") was found in her typewriter,
which she had just started, consisting of
the title and two epigraphs. This has subsequently
been reproduced (see image).
== Work ==
Arendt wrote works on intellectual history
as a philosopher, using events and actions
to develop insights into contemporary totalitarian
movements and the threat to human freedom
presented by scientific abstraction and bourgeois
morality. Intellectually, she was an independent
thinker, a loner not a "joiner", separating
herself from schools of thought or ideology.
In addition to her major texts she published
a number of anthologies, including Between
Past and Future (1961), Men in Dark Times
(1968) and Crises of the Republic (1972).
She also contributed to many publications,
including The New York Review of Books, Commonweal,
Dissent and The New Yorker. She is perhaps
best known for her accounts of Adolf Eichmann
and his trial, because of the intense controversy
that it generated. She was also a minor poet,
but she kept this very private.
=== Political theory and philosophical system
===
While Arendt never developed a coherent political
theory and her writing does not easily lend
itself to categorization, the tradition of
thought most closely identified with Arendt
is that of civic republicanism, from Aristotle
to Toqueville. Her political concept is centered
around active citizenship that emphasizes
civic engagement and collective deliberation.
She believed that no matter how bad, government
could never succeed in extinguishing human
freedom, despite holding that modern societies
frequently retreat from democratic freedom
with its inherent disorder for the relative
comfort of administrative bureaucracy. Her
political legacy is her strong defense of
freedom in the face of an increasingly less
than free world. She does not adhere to a
single systematic philosophy, but rather spans
a range of subjects covering totalitarianism,
revolution, the nature of freedom and the
faculties of thought and judgment.While she
is best known for her work on "dark times",
the nature of totalitarianism and evil, she
imbued this with a spark of hope and confidence
in the nature of mankind:
That even in the darkest of times we have
the right to expect some illumination, and
that such illumination might well come less
from theories and concepts than from the uncertain,
flickering, and often weak light that some
men and women, in their lives and their works,
will kindle under almost all circumstances
and shed over the time span that was given
to them.
=== Love and Saint Augustine (1929) ===
Arendt's doctoral thesis, Der Liebesbegriff
bei Augustin. Versuch einer philosophischen
Interpretation (Love and Saint Augustine),
was published in 1929 and attracted critical
interest. Although an English translation
had been prepared by E B Ashton in the early
1960s, Arendt did not want it published without
revising it and adding new material. Although
she prepared several manuscripts, she ultimately
abandoned the task and it was not published
in English until 1996. In this, she combines
approaches of both Heidegger and Jaspers.
Arendt's interpretation of love in the work
of Augustine deals with three concepts, love
as craving or desire (Amor qua appetitus),
love in the relationship between man (creatura)
and creator (Creator - Creatura), and neighborly
love (Dilectio proximi), and is constructed
in three sections dealing with each of these.
Love as craving anticipates the future, while
love for the Creator deals with the remembered
past. Of the three, dilectio proximi or caritas
is perceived as the most fundamental, to which
the first two are oriented, which she treats
under vita socialis (social life). The second
of the Great Commandments (or Golden Rule)
"Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself"
uniting and transcending the former. Augustine's
influence (and Jaspers' views on his work)
persisted in Arendt's writings for the rest
of her life.
Already in this work some of the leitmotifs
of her canon were apparent. For instance,
she introduced the concept of Natalität (Natality)
as a key condition of human existence and
its role in the development of the individual.
She made clear, in her revisions to the English
translation, through explicit reference, that
it was "natality" that she was introducing,
and would develop further in The Human Condition
(1958). Although she did not specifically
use the word Natalität in the original German
version, she explained that the construct
of natality was implied in her discussion
of new beginnings and man's elation to the
Creator as nova creatura. The centrality of
the theme of birth and renewal is apparent
in the constant reference to Augustinian thought,
and specifically the innovative nature of
birth, from this, her first work, to her last,
The Life of the Mind.Love is another connecting
theme. In addition to the Augustinian loves
expostulated in her dissertation, the phrase
amor mundi (love of the world) is one often
associated with Arendt and both permeates
her work and was an absorbing passion from
her dissertation to The Life of the Mind (1978).
She took the phrase from Augustine's homily
on the first epistle of St John, "If love
of the world dwell in us". Amor mundi was
her original title for The Human Condition
(1958), the subtitle of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's
biography (1982), the title of a collection
of writing on faith in her work and the newsletter
of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.
=== The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
===
Arendt's first major book, The Origins of
Totalitarianism (1951), examined the roots
of Communism and Nazism. The book is structured
as three essays, "Antisemitism", "Imperialism"
and "Totalitarianism". In this book, Arendt
argues that totalitarianism was a "novel form
of government," that "differs essentially
from other forms of political oppression known
to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship"
in that it applied terror to subjugate mass
populations rather than just political adversaries.
The book was opposed by some on the left on
the grounds that it presented the two movements
as equally tyrannical. She further contends
that Jewry was not the operative factor in
the Holocaust, but merely a convenient proxy.
That totalitarianism in Germany was, in the
end, about terror and consistency, not eradicating
Jews only.A second, enlarged edition was published
in 1958, and contained two additional chapters,
replacing her original "Concluding Remarks".
Chapter Thirteen was titled "Ideology and
Terror: A novel form of government", which
she had published separately in 1963. Chapter
Fourteen dealt with the Hungarian Revolution
of 1956, entitled "Epilogue: Reflections on
the Hungarian Revolution". Subsequent editions
omitted this chapter, which was published
separately in English ("Totalitarian Imperialism:
Reflections on the Hungarian Revolution")
and German (Die ungarische Revolution und
der totalitäre Imperialismus) in 1958.
=== Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess
(1957) ===
Arendt's Habilitationsschrift on Rahel Varnhagen
was completed while she was living in exile
in Paris in 1938, but due to the deteriorating
political situation was not published till
1957, when she was living in the United States,
since she had not managed to escape with a
copy of the manuscript, but relied on a copy
she had given to Gershom Scholem. Ostensibly
a biography of this nineteenth century Jewish
socialite, it formed an important step in
her analysis of Jewish history and the subjects
of assimilation and emancipation, and introduced
her treatment of the Jewish diaspora as either
pariah or parvenu. In addition it represents
an early version of her concept of history.
She dedicated the book to Anne Mendelssohn,
who had first drawn her attention to Varnhagen's
writing.Arendt's relation to Varnhagen permeates
her subsequent work. Her examination of Varnhagen's
life is set against the background of the
catastrophic destruction of German-Jewish
culture and its demonstrations of the illusion
of any true German-Jewish "symbiosis" and
the threatened existence of her subject. In
this sense the book partially reflects Arendt's
own view of herself as a German Jewish woman
driven out of her own culture into a stateless
existence. In this sense the work has been
referred to as "biography as autobiography".
=== The Human Condition (1958) ===
In what is arguably her most influential work,
The Human Condition (1958), Arendt differentiates
political and social concepts, labor and work,
and various forms of actions; she then explores
the implications of those distinctions. Her
theory of political action, corresponding
to the existence of a public realm, is extensively
developed in this work. Arendt argues that,
while human life always evolves within societies,
the social part of human nature, political
life, has been intentionally realized in only
a few societies as a space for individuals
to achieve freedom. Conceptual categories,
which attempt to bridge the gap between ontological
and sociological structures, are sharply delineated.
While Arendt relegates labor and work to the
realm of the social, she favors the human
condition of action as that which is both
existential and aesthetic.Arendt had first
introduced the concept of "natality" in her
Love and Saint Augustine (1929) and in The
Human Condition starts to develop this further.
In this, she departs from Heidegger's emphasis
on mortality. Arendt's positive message is
one of the "miracle of beginning", the continual
arrival of the new to create action, that
is to alter the state of affairs brought about
by previous actions. Natality would go on
to become a central concept of her political
theory, and also what Karin Fry considers
its most optimistic one.
=== Between Past and Future (1961) ===
Between Past and Future is an anthology of
six essays written between 1954 and 1961,
and later expanded, and deals with a variety
of different philosophical subjects; "Tradition
and the Modern Age", "The Concept of History",
"What Is Authority?", "What Is Freedom?",
"The Crisis in Education" and "The Crisis
in Culture".
The essays share the central idea that humans
are living between the past and the uncertain
future. They must permanently think to exist,
and each man is required to learn thinking.
For a long time humans have resorted to tradition,
but in modern times, this tradition has been
abandoned; there is no more respect for tradition
and culture. In these essays, Arendt tries
to find solutions to help humans think again
today. According to her, there is no way to
live again with tradition, and modern philosophy
has not succeeded in helping humans to live
correctly.
=== On Revolution (1963) ===
Arendt's book On Revolution presents a comparison
of two of the main revolutions of the eighteenth
century, the American and French Revolutions.
She goes against a common impression of both
Marxist and leftist views when she argues
that France, while well-studied and often
emulated, was a disaster and that the largely
ignored American Revolution was a success.
The turning point in the French Revolution
occurred when the leaders rejected their goals
of freedom in order to focus on compassion
for the masses. In the United States, the
founders never betray the goal of Constitutio
Libertatis. Arendt believes the revolutionary
spirit of those men had been lost, however,
and advocates a "council system" as an appropriate
institution to regain that spirit.
=== Men in Dark Times (1968) ===
The anthology of essays Men in Dark Times
presents intellectual biographies of some
creative and moral figures of the twentieth
century, such as Walter Benjamin, Karl Jaspers,
Rosa Luxemburg, Hermann Broch, Pope John XXIII,
and Isak Dinesen.
=== Crises of the Republic (1972) ===
Crises of the Republic was the third of Arendt's
anthologies, and as the subtitle Lying in
Politics, Civil Disobedience, On Violence,
Thoughts on Politics and Revolution indicates,
consists of four interconnected essays on
contemporary American politics and the crises
it faced in the 1960s and 1970s. The first
essay, "Lying in Politics" looks for an explanation
behind the administration's deception regarding
the Vietnam War, as revealed in the Pentagon
Papers. "Civil Disobedience" examines the
opposition movements, while the final "Thoughts
on Politics and Revolution" is a commentary,
in the form of an interview on the third essay,
"On Violence".
==== "On Violence" ====
"On Violence", the third of these essays,
distinguishes between violence and power.
Arendt maintains that, although theorists
of both the left and right regard violence
as an extreme manifestation of power, the
two concepts are, in fact, antithetical. Power
comes from the collective will and does not
need violence to achieve any of its goals,
since voluntary compliance takes its place.
As governments start losing their legitimacy,
violence becomes an artificial means toward
the same end and is, therefore, found only
in the absence of power. Bureaucracies then
become the ideal birthplaces of violence since
they are defined as the "rule by no one" against
whom to argue and, therefore, recreate the
missing links with the people they rule over.
=== Posthumous publications ===
==== The Life of the Mind (1978) ====
Arendt's last major work, The Life of the
Mind remained incomplete at the time of her
death. During Arendt's tenure at the New School,
in 1974, she presented a graduate level political
philosophy class entitled, Philosophy of the
Mind. It was during these class lectures that
Arendt crystallized her concepts. The class
was based on her working draft of Philosophy
of the Mind, which was later edited to Life
of the Mind. Arendt's working draft of Philosophy
of the Mind was distributed to graduate students
at the New School during her visiting professorship
in 1974. She conceived of a trilogy based
on the mental activities of thinking, willing,
and judging. Stemming from her Gifford Lectures
at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland
(1972–1974), her last writing focused on
the first two. In a sense, Life of the Mind
went beyond her previous work concerning the
vita activa. In her discussion of thinking,
she focuses mainly on Socrates and his notion
of thinking as a solitary dialogue between
oneself. This appropriation of Socrates leads
her to introduce novel concepts of conscience—an
enterprise that gives no positive prescriptions,
but instead, tells one what I cannot do if
I would remain friends with myself when I
re-enter the two-in-one of thought where I
must render an account of my actions to myself—and
morality—an entirely negative enterprise
concerned with forbidding participation in
certain actions for the sake of remaining
friends with oneself. She died suddenly five
days after completing the second part, with
the first page of Judging, still in her typewriter.
The task then fell to McCarthy to edit the
first two parts and provide some indication
of the direction of the third.Although Arendt's
exact intentions in the third part are unknown,
she did leave manuscripts (such as Thinking
and Moral Considerations and Some Questions
on Moral Philosophy) and lectures (Lectures
on Kant's Political Philosophy) concerning
her thoughts on the mental faculty of Judging.
The first two articles were edited and published
in an anthology (Responsibility and Judgement)
by Jerome Kohn, one of Arendt's assistants
and a director of the Hannah Arendt Center
at The New School in New York, in 2003. The
last was edited and published by Ronald Beiner,
professor of political science at the University
of Toronto, in 1982.
==== Collected works ====
After Hannah Arendt's death a number of her
essays and notes have continued to be edited
and published posthumously by friends and
colleagues, including those that give some
insight into the unfinished third part of
The Life of the Mind. The Jew as Pariah: Jewish
Identity and Politics in the Modern Age (1978),
is a collection of 15 essays and letters from
the period 1943–1966 on the situation of
Jews in modern times, to try and throw some
light on her views on the Jewish world, following
the backlash to Eichmann, but proved to be
equally polarizing. A further collection of
her writings on being Jewish was published
as The Jewish Writings (2007). Other work
includes the collection of forty, largely
fugitive, essays, addresses, and reviews entitled
Essays in Understanding 1930–1934: Formation,
Exile, and Totalitarianism (1994), that presaged
her monumental The Origins of Totalitarianism,
in particular On the Nature of Totalitarianism
(1953) and The Concern with Politics in Contemporary
European Philosophical Thought (1954). The
remaining essays were published as Thinking
Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding,
1953-1975 (2018). Her notebooks which form
a series of memoirs, were published as Denktagebuch
in 2002.
==== Correspondence ====
Some further insight into her thinking is
provided in the continuing posthumous publication
of her correspondence with many of the important
figures in her life, including Karl Jaspers
(1992), Mary McCarthy (1995), Heinrich Blücher
(1996), Martin Heidegger (2004), Alfred Kazin
(2005), Walter Benjamin (2006), Gershom Scholem
(2011) and Günther Stern (2016). Other correspondence
that has been published, include those with
a number of women friends such as Hilde Fränkel
and Anne Mendelsohn Weil (see Relationships).
=== Arendt and the Eichmann trial (1961–1963)
===
On hearing of Adolf Eichmann's capture and
plans for his trial, Hannah Arendt contacted
The New Yorker and offered to travel to Israel
to cover it. The offer was accepted and in
her subsequent reporting of the 1961 trial
in 1963, which evolved into the book Eichmann
in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of
Evil (1963), Arendt was critical of the way
the trial was conducted in Israel and coined
the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe
the phenomenon of Eichmann. She was struck
by his very ordinariness and the demeanor
he exhibited of a bland bureaucrat, in contrast
to the horrific crimes he stood accused of.
She examined the question of whether evil
is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness,
a tendency of ordinary people to obey orders
and conform to mass opinion without a critical
evaluation of the consequences of their actions.
Arendt's argument was that Eichmann was not
a monster, contrasting the immensity of his
actions with the very ordinariness of the
man himself. Eichmann, she stated, not only
called himself a Zionist, having initially
opposed the Jewish persecution, but also expected
his captors to understand him. She pointed
out that his actions were not driven by malice,
but rather blind dedication to the regime
and his need to belong, to be a joiner. In
his own words:
I sensed I would have to live a leaderless
and difficult individual life, I would receive
no directives from anybody, no orders and
commands would any longer be issued to me,
no pertinent ordinances would be there to
consult—in brief, a life never known before
lay ahead of me.
What Arendt observed, during the trial was
a bourgeois sales clerk, who found a meaningful
role for himself and a sense of importance
in the Nazi movement. She noted that his addiction
to clichés and use of bureaucratic morality
clouded his ability to question his actions,
"to think". This led her to set out her most
famous, and most debated, dictum "the lesson
that this long course in human wickedness
had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome,
word-and-thought-defying banality of evil."Arendt
was also critical of the way that some Jewish
leaders associated with the Jewish Councils
(Judenräte), notably M. C. Rumkowski, acted
during the Holocaust, which she described
as a moral catastrophe. While her argument
was not to allocate blame, rather she mourns
what she considered a moral failure of compromising
the imperative that it is better to suffer
wrong than to do wrong. She describes the
cooperation of the Jewish leaders in terms
of a disintegration of Jewish morality "this
role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction
of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest
chapter in the whole dark story". Widely,
misunderstood, this caused an even greater
controversy and particularly animosity toward
her in the Jewish community and in Israel.No
other book on either Eichmann or National
Socialism has aroused so much controversy.
Arendt was profoundly shocked by the response,
writing to Karl Jaspers "People are resorting
to any means to destroy my reputation ... They
have spent weeks trying to find something
in my past that they can hang on me". Her
critics included The Anti-Defamation League
and many other Jewish groups, editors of publications
she was a contributor to, faculty at the universities
she taught at and friends from all parts of
her life. Her friend Gershom Scholem, a major
scholar of Jewish mysticism, broke off relations
with her. Arendt was criticized by many Jewish
public figures, who charged her with coldness
and lack of sympathy for the victims of the
Holocaust. Because of this lingering criticism
neither this book nor any of her other works
were translated into Hebrew, until 1999. Arendt
responded to the controversies in the book's
Postscript;
The controversy began by calling attention
to the conduct of the Jewish people during
the years of the Final Solution, thus following
up the question, first raised by the Israeli
prosecutor, of whether the Jews could or should
have defended themselves. I had dismissed
that question as silly and cruel, since it
testified to a fatal ignorance of the conditions
at the time. It has now been discussed to
exhaustion, and the most amazing conclusions
have been drawn. The well-known historico-sociological
construct of "ghetto mentality"... has been
repeatedly dragged in to explain behavior
which was not at all confined to the Jewish
people and which therefore cannot be explained
by specifically Jewish factors ... This was
the unexpected conclusion certain reviewers
chose to draw from the "image" of a book,
created by certain interest groups, in which
I allegedly had claimed that the Jews had
murdered themselves.
Arendt ended the book by writing:
Just as you Eichmann supported and carried
out a policy of not wanting to share the earth
with the Jewish people and the people of a
number of other nations—as though you and
your superiors had any right to determine
who should and who should not inhabit the
world—we find that no one, that is, no member
of the human race, can be expected to want
to share the earth with you. This is the reason,
and the only reason, you must hang.
Prior to Arendt's depiction of Eichmann, the
popular image had been, as the New York Times
put it "the most evil monster of humanity".
Roger Berkowitz, Director of the Hannah Arendt
Center at Bard, states that Arendt neither
defended Eichmann, nor denied that his actions
were evil and that he was an anti-semite,
nor that he should be executed for his actions.
But rather that we should understand that
those actions were neither monstrous, nor
sadistic. In understanding Eichmann, Arendt
argues, we come to understand a greater truth
about the nature of evil, that individuals
participate in atrocities from an inability
to critically examine blind allegiance to
ideologies that provide a sense of meaning
in a lonely and alienating world. Thus, she
concludes, thoughtless zealotry is the face
of evil in the modern world. Nor was Arendt
alone in raising concerns about the role played
by the Judenräte.Rejections of Arendt's characterization
of Eichmann and allegations of racism against
her have persisted ever since, though much
of this is based on information that was not
available at the time of the trial. Issues
around factual accuracy have been disputed,
as well as whether Eichmann was merely dissembling.
Irving Howe, one of her critics, described
how the Eichmann issue engendered what approached
"civil war" amongst New York intellectuals.
Howe rightly surmised that "such controversies
are never settled. They die down, simmer,
and erupt again". Thus the appearance of the
2012 film Hannah Arendt reignited the controversy.
Berkowitz states that claiming Arendt exonerated
Eichmann as simply a man who followed orders,
is a misreading of the book. In fact she argued
that Eichmann acted equally out of conviction,
and even at times disobeyed orders, such as
those of Himmler. Eichmann was, as Berkowitz
states, "someone convinced that he was sacrificing
an easy morality for a higher good". What
has emerged following this revisiting of the
controversy, is a consensus that whether Arandt
was right or wrong about Eichmann, she was
correct about the nature of evil, in that
events of horror can too easily arise from
origins that are mundane. Arendt's depiction
of the nature of evil has proved both tenacious
and timeless in its relevance.While much has
been made of Arendt's treatment of Eichmann,
Ada Ushpiz, in her 2015 documentary Vita Activa:
The Spirit of Hannah Arendt placed it in a
much broader context of the use of rationality
to explain seemingly irrational historical
events..
==== Niemand hat das Recht zu gehorchen ====
In an interview with Joachim Fest in 1964,
Arendt was asked about Eichmann's defense
that he had made Kant's principle of duty
his guiding principle all his life. Arendt
replied that that was outrageous and that
Eichmann was misusing Kant, by not considering
the element of judgement required in assessing
one's own actions - "Kein Mensch hat das Recht
zu gehorchen bei Kant" (No man has the right
of obedience to Kant), she stated. The reference
was to Kant's Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen
der bloßen Vernunft (Religion within the
Bounds of Bare Reason 1793) in which he states:
Der Satz 'man muß Gott mehr gehorchen, als
den Menschen' bedeutet nur, daß, wenn die
letzten etwas gebieten, was an sich böse
(dem Sittengesetz unmittelbar zuwider) ist,
ihnen nicht gehorcht werden darf und soll
(The saying, "We must hearken to God, rather
than to man," signifies no more than this,
viz. that should any earthly legislation enjoin
something immediately contradictory of the
moral law, obedience is not to be rendered)
Kant clearly defines a higher moral duty than
rendering merely unto Caesar. Arendt's reply
was subsequently corrupted to read Niemand
hat das Recht zu gehorchen (No one has the
right to obey), which has been widely reproduced,
although it does encapsulate an aspect of
her moral philosophy.The phrase Niemand hat
das Recht zu gehorchen has become one of her
iconic images, appearing on the wall of the
house in which she was born (see Commemorations),
among other places. A fascist bas-relief on
the Palazzo degli Uffici Finanziari (1942),
in the Piazza del Tribunale, Bolzano, Italy
celebrating Mussolini, read Credere, Obbedire,
Combattere (Believe, Obey, Combat). In 2017
it was altered to read Hannah Arendt's original
words on obedience in the three official languages
of the region.The phrase has been appearing
in other artistic work featuring political
messages, such as the 2015 installation by
Wilfried Gerstel, which has evoked the concept
of resistance to dictatorship, as expressed
in her essay "Personal Responsibility under
Dictatorship" (1964).
=== List of selected publications ===
== Views ==
In 1961, while covering the trial of Adolf
Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt wrote a letter
to Karl Jaspers that Adam Kirsch described
as reflecting "pure racism" toward Sephardic
Jews from the Middle East and Ashkenazi Jews
from Eastern Europe. She wrote:
On top, the judges, the best of German Jewry.
Below them, the prosecuting attorneys, Galicians,
but still Europeans. Everything is organized
by a police force that gives me the creeps,
speaks only Hebrew, and looks Arabic. Some
downright brutal types among them. They would
obey any order. And outside the doors, the
oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or
some other half-Asiatic country.
Although Arendt remained a Zionist both during
and after World War II, she made it clear
that she favored the creation of a Jewish-Arab
federated state in Palestine, rather than
a purely Jewish state. She believed that this
was a way to address Jewish statelessness
and to avoid the pitfalls of nationalism.It
was not just Arendt's analysis of the Eichmann
trial that drew accusations of racism. In
her 1958 essay in Dissent entitled Reflections
on Little Rock she expressed opposition to
desegregation following the 1957 Little Rock
Integration Crisis in Arkansas. As she explains
in the preface, for a long time the magazine
was reluctant to print her contribution, so
far did it appear to differ from the publication's
liberal values. Eventually it was printed
alongside critical responses. Later the New
Yorker would express similar hesitancy over
the Eichmann papers. So vehement was the response,
that Arendt felt obliged to defend herself
in a sequel. The debate over this essay has
continued since. William Simmons devotes a
whole section of his 2011 text on human rights
(Human Rights Law and the Marginalized Other)
to a critique of Arendt's position and in
particular on Little Rock. While a number
of critics feel she was fundamentally racist,
many of those who have defended Arendt's position
have pointed out that her concerns were for
the welfare of the children, a position she
maintained throughout her life. She felt that
the children were being subjected to trauma
in order to serve a broader political strategy
of forcible integration. While over time Arendt
conceded some ground to her critics, namely
that she argued as an outsider, she remained
committed to her central critique that children
should not be thrust into the front-lines
of geopolitical conflict.
=== Feminism ===
Embraced by feminists, as a pioneer in a world
dominated by men up to her time, she would
be very surprised to hear herself described
as a feminist, remaining opposed to the social
dimensions of Women's Liberation, urging independence,
but always keeping in mind Viva la petite
différence! On becoming the first woman to
be appointed a professor at Princeton, the
media were much engaged in this achievement,
but she never wanted to be seen as an exception,
either as a woman (an "exception woman") or
a Jew, stating emphatically "I am not disturbed
at all about being a woman professor, because
I am quite used to being a woman". She rather
enjoyed what she saw as the privileges of
being feminine as opposed to feminist, "Intensly
feminine and therefore no feminist", stated
Hans Jonas. Arendt considered some professions
and positions unsuitable for women, particularly
those involving leadership, telling Güunter
Gaus "It just doesn't look good when a woman
gives orders". Despite these views, and having
been labelled "anti-feminist", much space
has been devoted to examining Arendt's place
in relation to feminism. In the last year's
of her life, Virginia Held noted that Arendt's
views evolved with the emergence of a new
feminism in America in the 1970s to recognize
the importance of the women's movement.
=== Critique of human rights ===
In The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah
Arendt devotes a lengthy chapter (The Decline
of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights
of Man) to a critical analysis of human rights,
in what has been described as "the most widely
read essay on refugees ever published". Arendt
is not skeptical of the notion of political
rights in general, but instead defends a national
or civil conception of rights. Human rights,
or the Rights of Man as they were commonly
called, are universal, inalienable, and possessed
simply by virtue of being human. In contrast,
civil rights are possessed by virtue of belonging
to a political community, most commonly by
being a citizen. Arendt's primary criticism
of human rights is that they are ineffectual
and illusory because their enforcement is
in tension with national sovereignty. She
argued that since there is no political authority
above that of sovereign nations, state governments
have little incentive to respect human rights
when such policies conflict with national
interests. This can be seen most clearly by
examining the treatment of refugees and other
stateless people. Since the refugee has no
state to secure their civil rights, the only
rights they have to fall back on are human
rights. In this way Arendt uses the refugee
as a test case for examining human rights
in isolation from civil rights.Arendt's analysis
draws on the refugee upheavals in the first
half of the twentieth century along with her
own experience as a refugee fleeing Nazi Germany.
She argued that as state governments began
to emphasize national identity as a prerequisite
for full legal status, the number of minority
resident aliens increased along with the number
of stateless persons whom no state was willing
to recognize legally. The two potential solutions
to the refugee problem, repatriation and naturalization,
both proved incapable of solving the crisis.
Arendt argued that repatriation failed to
solve the refugee crisis because no government
was willing to take them in and claim them
as their own. When refugees were forcibly
deported to neighboring countries, such immigration
was deemed illegal by the receiving country,
and so failed to change the fundamental status
of the migrants as stateless. Attempts at
naturalizing and assimilating refugees also
had little success. This failure was primarily
the result of resistance from both state governments
and the majority of citizens, since both tended
to see the refugees as undesirables who threatened
their national identity. Resistance to naturalization
also came from the refugees themselves who
resisted assimilation and attempted to maintain
their own ethnic and national identities.
Arendt contends that neither naturalization
nor the tradition of asylum was capable of
handling the sheer number of refugees. Instead
of accepting some refugees with legal status,
the state often responded by denaturalizing
minorities who shared national or ethnic ties
with stateless refugees.Arendt argues that
the consistent mistreatment of refugees, most
of whom were placed in internment camps, is
evidence against the existence of human rights.
If the notion of human rights as universal
and inalienable is to be taken seriously,
the rights must be realizable given the features
of the modern liberal state. She concluded
"The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable,
proved to be unenforceable–even in countries
whose constitutions were based upon them–whenever
people appeared who were no longer citizens
of any sovereign state". Arendt contends that
they are not realizable because they are in
tension with at least one feature of the liberal
state—national sovereignty. One of the primary
ways in which a nation exercises sovereignty
is through control over national borders.
State governments consistently grant their
citizens free movement to traverse national
borders. In contrast, the movement of refugees
is often restricted in the name of national
interests. This restriction presents a dilemma
for liberalism because liberal theorists typically
are committed to both human rights and the
existence of sovereign nations.In one of her
most quoted passages, she puts forward the
concept that human rights are little more
than an abstraction:
The conception of human rights based upon
the assumed existence of a human being as
such broke down at the very moment when those
who professed to believe in it were for the
first time confronted with people who had
indeed lost all other qualities and specific
relationships - except that they were still
human. The world found nothing sacred in the
abstract nakedness of being human.
== In popular culture ==
Several authors have written biographies that
focus on the relationship between Hannah Arendt
and Martin Heidegger. In 1999, the French
feminist philosopher Catherine Clément wrote
a novel, Martin and Hannah, speculating on
the trianglular relationship between Heidegger
and the two women in his life, Arendt and
Heidegger's wife Elfriede Petri. In addition
to the relationships, the novel is a serious
exploration of philosophical ideas, that centers
on Arendt's last meeting with Heidegger in
Freiburg in 1975. The scene is based on Elisabeth
Young-Bruehl's description in Hannah Arendt:
For Love of the World (1982), but reaches
back to their childhoods, and Heidegger's
role in encouraging the relationship between
the two women. The novel explores Heidegger's
embrace of Nazism as a proxy for that of Germany
and, as in Arendt's treatment of Eichmann,
the difficult relationship between collective
guilt and personal responsibility. Clément
also brings Hannah's other mentor and confidante,
Karl Jaspers, into the matrix of relationships.
=== Hannah Arendt (2012) ===
Arendt's life remains part of current culture
and thought. In 2012 the German film, Hannah
Arendt, directed by Margarethe von Trotta
was released. The film, with Barbara Sukowa
in the title role, depicted the controversy
over Arendt's coverage of the Eichmann trial
and subsequent book, in which she was widely
misunderstood as defending Eichmann and blaming
Jewish leaders for the Holocaust.
== Legacy ==
Hannah Arendt is widely considered one of
the most influential political philosophers
of the twentieth century. As a political theorist,
moral philosopher and polemicist, she is unmatched
in both range and rigor. In 1998 Walter Laqueur
stated "No twentieth-century philosopher and
political thinker has at the present time
as wide an echo", as philosopher, historian,
sociologist and also journalist. In popular
imagination she is known primarily for the
reaction to her work on Adolf Eichmann, and
in particular for the one phrase "the banality
of evil". Arendt's legacy has been described
as a cult, yet she shunned publicity, never
expecting, as she explained to Karl Jaspers
in 1951, to see herself as a "cover girl"
on the newsstands. In Germany, there are tours
available of sites associated with her life.The
study of the life and work of Hannah Arendt,
and of her political and philosophical theory
is described as Arendtian. In her will she
established the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary
Trust as the custodian of her writings and
photographs. Her personal library was deposited
at Bard College at the Stevenson Library in
1976, and includes approximately 4,000 books,
ephemera, and pamphlets from Arendt's last
apartment as well as her desk (in McCarthy
House). The college has begun archiving some
of the collection digitally, which is available
at The Hannah Arendt Collection. Most of her
papers were deposited at the Library of Congress
and her correspondence with her German friends
and mentors, such as Heidegger, Blumenfeld
and Jaspers, at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv
in Marbach. The Library of Congress listed
more than 50 books written about her in 1998,
and that number has continued to grow, as
have the number of scholarly articles, estimated
as 1000 at that time.Her life and work is
recognized by the institutions most closely
associated with her teaching, by the creation
of Hannah Arendt Centers at both Bard (Hannah
Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities)
and The New School, both in New York State.
In Germany, her contributions to understanding
authoritarianism is recognised by the Hannah-Arendt-Institut
für Totalitarismusforschung (Hannah Arendt
Institute for the Research on Totalitarianism)
in Dresden. There are Hannah Arendt Associations
(Hannah Arendt Verein) such as the Hannah
Arendt Verein für politisches Denken in Bremen
that awards the annual Hannah-Arendt-Preis
für politisches Denken (Hannah Arendt Prize
for Political Thinking) established in 1995.
In Oldenburg, the Hannah Arendt Center at
Carl von Ossietzky University was established
in 1999, and holds a large collection of her
work (Hannah Arendt Archiv), and administers
the internet portal HannahArendt.net (A Journal
for Political Thinking) as well as a monograph
series, the Hannah Arendt-Studien. In Italy,
the Hannah Arendt Center for Political Studies
is situated at the University of Verona for
Arendtian studies.In 2017 a journal, Arendt
Studies, was launched to publish articles
related to the study of the life, work, and
legacy of Hannah Arendt. Many places associated
with her, have memorabilia of her on display,
such as her student card at the University
of Heidelberg (see image). 2006, the anniversary
of her birth, saw commemorations of her work
in conferences and celebrations around the
world.In 2015, the filmmaker Ada Ushpiz produced
a documentary on Hannah Arendt, Vita Activa:
The Spirit of Hannah Arendt. The New York
Times designated it a New York Times critics
pick. Of the many photographic portraits of
Arendt, that taken in 1944 by Fred Stein (see
image), whose work she greatly admired, has
become iconic, and has been described as better
known than the photographer himself, having
appeared on a German postage stamp.(see image)
Among organizations that have recognized Arendt's
contributions to civilization and human rights,
is the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
=== Contemporary relevance ===
The rise of nativism, such as the election
of Donald Trump in America, and concerns regarding
an increasing authoritarian style of governance
has led to radio broadcasts and writers, including
Jeremy Adelman and Zoe Williams, to revisit
Arendt's ideas to seek the extent to which
they inform our understanding of such movements.
At the same time Amazon reported that it had
sold out of copies of The Origins of Totalitarianism
(1951). In particular Michiko Kakutani has
addressed what she refers to as "The Death
of Truth". In her book, she argues that the
rise of totalitarianism has been founded on
the violation of truth. She begins her book
with an extensive quote from The Origins of
Totalitarianism
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is
not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist,
but people for whom the distinction between
fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience)
and the distinction between true and false
(i.e., the standards of thought) no longer
exist
Kakutani believed that Arendt's words speak
not just events of a previous century but
apply equally to the contemporary cultural
landscape populated with fake news and lies.
She also draws on Arendt's essay "Lying in
Politics" from Crises in the Republic pointing
to the lines:
The historian knows how vulnerable is the
whole texture of facts in which we spend our
daily life; it is always in danger of being
perforated by single lies or torn to shreds
by the organized lying of groups, nations,
or classes, or denied and distorted, often
carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods
or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts
need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy
witnesses to be established in order to find
a secure dwelling place in the domain of human
affairs
Arendt drew attention to the critical role
that propaganda plays in gaslighting populations,
Kakutani observes, citing the passage:
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world
the masses had reached the point where they
would, at the same time, believe everything
and nothing, think that everything was possible
and that nothing was true . ... The totalitarian
mass leaders based their propaganda on the
correct psychological assumption that, under
such conditions, one could make people believe
the most fantastic statements one day, and
trust that if the next day they were given
irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they
would take refuge in cynicism; instead of
deserting the leaders who had lied to them,
they would protest that they had known all
along that the statement was a lie and would
admire the leaders for their superior tactical
cleverness
But it is also relevant that Arendt took a
broader perspective on history than merely
totalitarianism in the early twentieth century,
stating "the deliberate falsehood and the
outright lie have been used as legitimate
means to achieve political ends since the
beginning of recorded history". Contemporary
relevance is also reflected in the increasing
use of the phrase, attributed to her, "No
one has the right to obey" to reflect that
actions result from choices, and hence judgement,
and that we cannot disclaim responsibility
for that which we have the power to act upon.
In addition those centers established to promote
Arendtian studies continue to seek solutions
to a wide range of contemporary issues in
her writing.Arendt's teachings on obedience
have also been linked to the controversial
psychology experiments by Stanley Milgram,
that implied that ordinary people can easily
be induced to commit atrocities. Milgram himself
drew attention to this in 1974, stating that
he was testing the theory that Eichmann like
others would merely follow orders, but unlike
Milgram she argued that actions involve responsibility.Another
Arendtian theme that finds an echo in contemporary
society is her observation, inspired by Rilke,
of the despair of not being heard, the futility
of tragedy that finds no listener that can
bring comfort, assurance and intervention.
An example of this being gun violence in America
and the resulting political inaction.
=== Commemorations ===
Many of the houses in which Hannah Arendt
lived, bear commemorative plaques (Gedenktafeln),
such as that shown on this page for Heidelberg,
and also Marburg and Berlin. In 2017, Babelsberg
announced it would erect a plaque on her home
there. Her birth town of Linden, Hannover
celebrates her name in a variety of ways,
including a plaque. The city library has a
Hannah Arendt Room, exhibiting her personal
possessions. Her house bears a plaque, two
schools and a road (Hannah-Arendt-Weg) near
the town hall are named after her, as is the
square in front of the state parliament (Hannah-Arendt-Platz).
There is a Hannah Arendt Fellowship and a
Hannah Arendt Chair at the Helene-Lange-Schule,
while Hannover celebrates Hannah Arendt Days
(Hannah Arendt Tagen). Her birthplace also
has a mural on a wall in the courtyard, bearing
the inscription Niemand hat das Recht zu gehorchen
(No one has the right to obey), a saying often
attributed to her as summarizing her verdict
on Adolf Eichmann. Her contributions to resistance
and rescue are commemorated at the Gedenkstätte
Deutscher Widerstand (German Resistance Memorial
Center) in Berlin.Hannah Arendt has been honoured
by the use of her name in many contexts, including:
The asteroid 100027 Hannaharendt (1990)
The Hannah Arendt Intercity Express train
between Karlsruhe and her birthplace, Hanover
Several streets, areas and parks are named
after Arendt in Germany and Austria, including
Hannah-Arendt Straße in Berlin-Mitte, which
runs beside the Holocaust memorial, Berlin
near the Brandenburg Gate (shown here), Hannah-Arendt
Straße in Marburg and Hannah-Arendt-Park
(Vienna). In France there is a Place Hannah-Arendt
(Paris) and many streets named Rue Hannah
Arendt, including Strasbourg and Tours.
In addition to Hanover, a number of schools
in Germany have been named after Hannah Arendt,
including those at Haßloch, Barsinghausen,
Lengerich (Westphalia) and Berlin.
In 1988 Deutsche Post issued a 170 Pf stamp
(see image), as part of its Frauen der deutschen
Geschichte series, and another was issued
in 2006 to celebrate the centennial of her
birth.(see image)
In 2014, Google Doodle celebrated the 108th
anniversary of her birth
In 2014, the French philosopher Michel Onfray
devoted a series of lectures, broadcast on
the national French radio station France Culture,
to an analysis of the work of Arendt.
In 2017, the former Casa del Fascio in Bolzano,
adorned with a monumental fascist bas-relief,
has been recontextualized with a superimposed
incription quoting Hannah Arendt.
== Family tree ==
== See also ==
== 
Notes ==
== References ==
== Bibliography ==
=== Bibliographic notes ===
== External links ==
