Background

Hannah Arendt, the daughter of Paul and Martha Arendt, was born in Hanover on 14th October 1906. Her father was a successful businessman but held progressive political opinions. Paul and Martha were both members of the German Social Democratic Party. Paul had been suffering from syphilis for many years and died in a psychiatric hospital in 1913 when Hannah was only seven. It has been claimed by Derwent May that "those who knew her well could see that Hannah kept a deep sorrow buried inside her."

In 1920, when Hannah was thirteen, her mother married again. Her new husband, Martin Beerwald, a successful Jewish businessman, had two teenage daughters (his first wife had died a few years before), Clara, who was now twenty, and Eva who was nineteen. They were all supporters of the Social Democratic Party and Hannah enjoyed the political discussions that took place in the family.

Education

Hannah Arendt enrolled in the Szittnich School, Königsberg (Hufen-Oberlyzeum), on Bahnstrasse in August 1913, but the family was forced to move to Berlin, where Hannah attended a girl's Lyzeum school in Berlin-Charlottenburg.

Hannah Arendt was an extremely intelligent teenager and became interested in Greek philosophy. "Headstrong and independent, she displayed a precocious aptitude for the life of the mind. And while she might risk confrontation with a teacher who offended her with an inconsiderate remark - she was briefly expelled for leading a boycott of the teacher's classes."

At the age of sixteen, Martha Arendt, arranged for her to spend two terms studying in Berlin, where the family had friends. Hannah lived in a student residence and took classes in Latin and Greek at the university, where she was introduced to theology by Romano Guardini, a Christian existentialist, who introduced her to the work of Søren Kierkegaard and Karl Jaspers.

Beginning in 1924 Arendt studied philosophy at the University of Marburg, the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, and the University of Heidelberg. She studied with the finest and most original scholars of that time: with Rudolf Bultmann in New Testament and Martin Heidegger in philosophy at Marburg, with the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl at Freiburg, and with the existentialist Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg. She remained close friends with Heidegger and Jaspers throughout her life. In 1928 Arendt received her doctoral degree in philosophy the University of Heidelberg.

Career

After receiving her Ph. D. in 1929 Arendt worked on a biography of Rahel Varnhagen, a noted 19th-century hostess, which analyzed Varnhagen's relationship to her Jewish heritage. In 1933 she was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for gathering evidence of Nazi anti-Semitism. She fled to France where she worked for Jewish refugee organizations until 1940 when she and her second husband, Heinrich Blücher, were interned in southern France. They escaped and made their way to New York in 1941.

Throughout the war years, Arendt wrote a political column for the Jewish weekly Aufbau and began publishing articles in leading Jewish journals. As her circle of friends expanded to include leading American intellectuals, her writings found a wider audience. Her first major book, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), argued that modern totalitarianism was a new and distinct form of government which used ideology and terror to control the mass society that emerged as European nation-states were undermined by anti-Semitism, racism, and imperialism. As the first major effort to analyze the historical conditions that had given rise to Hitler and Stalin, Origins was highly acclaimed and widely studied in the 1950s.

A second major work, The Human Condition, followed in 1958. Here and in a companion volume of essays, Between Past and Future (1961), Arendt gave explicit and systematic treatment to themes which had been present in her earlier work and which were to characterize all her mature writings. First was the radical character of the modern situation. In the face of unprecedented problems such as totalitarianism, mass society, automation, the possibility of travels through space, and the eclipse of public life, humans were no longer able to find solutions in established traditions of political authority, philosophy, religion, or even common sense. Her solution was as radical as the problem: "to think what we are doing."

The Human Condition established Arendt's academic reputation and led to a visiting appointment at Princeton - the first woman full professor there. Her Princeton lectures became On Revolution (1963), a volume which expressed her enthusiasm at becoming an American citizen by exploring the historical background and institutional requirements of political freedom.

In 1961 she attended the trial in Jerusalem of Adolf Eichmann, a Nazi functionary who had been involved in the murder of large numbers of Jews during the Holocaust. Her reports, which appeared first in The New Yorker and then as Eichmann in Jerusalem (1964), were frequently misunderstood and rejected, especially her claim that Eichmann was more bureaucratic and banal rather than radically evil. Her public reputation among even some former friends never recovered from this controversy.

At the University of Chicago (1963-1967) and the New School for Social Research in New York City (1967-1975) her brilliant lectures and affectionate concern inspired countless students in social thought, philosophy, religious studies, and history. During the later 1960s she devoted herself to a variety of projects: essays on current political issues (the Pentagon Papers, violence, civil disobedience) published as Crises of the Republic (1972); portraits of men and women who offered some illumination even in the dark times of the 20th century, which became Men in Dark Times (1968); and a two-volume English edition of Karl Jaspers' The Great Philosophers (1962 and 1966).

In 1973 and 1974 she delivered the prestigious Gifford Lectures in Scotland, which were subsequently published as The Life of the Mind (1979). Conceived as a volume on the contemplative life parallel to The Human Condition on the active life, it too was intended to focus on three human capacities: thinking, willing, and judging. While all three were independent of the active life, the political role of each was also examined, from the role of thinking in opposing evil to the ability of judging to measure the achievements and failures of our public life. Only the first two topics were actually addressed in the lectures she delivered; she died of a heart attack in New York City on December 4, 1975, as she was beginning work on the third.

Fortunately, earlier lectures on Kant's Critique of Judgment suggested what her approach to judging would have been, and these were published posthumously as Lectures in Kant's Political Philosophy (1982).

Achievements

• Arendt was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. She is best known for two works that had a major impact both within and outside the academic community, The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition. In addition to these two important works, Arendt published a number of influential essays on topics such as the nature of revolution, freedom, authority, tradition, and the modern age. At the time of her death she had completed the first two volumes of her last major philosophical work, The Life of the Mind, which examined the three fundamental faculties of the vita contemplativa (thinking, willing, judging).

Works

More photos

• book

  • Responsibility and Judgment

    (Responsibility and Judgment gathers together unpublished ...)

    2003
  • Crises of the Republic

    (A collection of studies in which Arendt, from the standpo...)

  • On Revolution

    (Hannah Arendt's penetrating observations on the modern wo...)

    1963
  • The Life of the Mind

    (The author's final work, presented in a one-volume editio...)

    1977
  • The Human Condition

    (In her study of the state of modern humanity, Hannah Aren...)

    1958
  • The Origins of Totalitarianism

    (Hannah Arendt's definitive work on totalitarianism and an...)

    1951
  • The Jewish Writings

    (Arendt's original conception of political freedom cannot ...)

    2007
  • On Violence

    (An analysis of the nature, causes, and significance of vi...)

    1970

Religion

Hannah's mother had no religious faith but she brought her daughter up to be proud of her Jewish heritage. She had little interest in tradition or ritual. Hannah felt that her dark brown eyes made her look a little different than other children. There was an odd anti-Semitic comment but anti-Semitism was not a serious problem in her early years.

Politics

Hannah Arendt was interested in politics. Unlike her parents, she had not been active in the German Social Democratic Party. Arendt responded to the increase in anti-Semitism by saying "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, or whatever."

Many of Arendt's friends were Zionists, but she refused to join the movement as she disapproved of their impulse to withdraw into a culture of their own. "Arendt... resented the politics of Jewish leadership, which, having always feared the anti-Semitism of the mob, preferred to play ball with anyone in power rather than forging alliances with other people at the bottom. She rejected the underlying (sometimes unspoken) postulate of the Zionist call for a homeland as antagonistic to pluralism in so far as it proposed a benign ethnic cleansing... The judgment Arendt made was that Jews should not look only for a solution to their own problems, but rather that they should show solidarity with all oppressed people to look for solutions that would promote justice everywhere."

Arendt helped the German Zionist Federation in collecting materials that would show the extent of anti-Semitism in all aspects of German society. Her research involved risk as the new government had already passed a law that criminalized criticism of the state. Her activities were detected and she was arrested in the spring of 1933 and held at police headquarters for eight days.

As a political theorist, Hannah Arendt wrote several influential books, including The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and On Revolution (1963), which reflect on the circumstances and challenges of modern life; to the general public, she is best known as the author of Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), which became a magnet for controversies over the nature and meaning of the Holocaust.

Views

Hannah Arendt was a complex and wide-ranging thinker whose work cannot easily be summarized. She was a critic of modern mass society which, with its tendency to atomization, alienation, anomie, and diffusion of responsibility, was fertile ground for what she called "totalitarianism," in which individual human life becomes meaningless and freedoms are eroded. To counteract this tendency she advocated the separation of public life from social and economic life. She looked back to the Greek polis and, to a lesser extent, the early United States of America as models for what public life should be. In these societies, individual citizens sought to excel in service to the community, and authority was vested in institutions to which they were committed. Arendt’s ideas have been extensively discussed and they have been widely influential. Her critics have, however, doubted their philosophical underpinning. One commentator questions her identification of the broad notion of "the public" with the comparatively narrow notion of "the political." Without that identification, it is not so clear that political action is as central a part of a proper human life as Arendt maintained.

Arendt thought that the public provided the space of appearances among humans which speech and action required, and the private protected labor, the interaction of humans with nature and their bodies, from public view. When this distinction breaks down, as it has in modern times, mass society results in which neither true individuality nor true common action is possible.

The world, comprised of all fabricated things from houses to works of art, Arendt saw as providing a specifically human habitation that protected us and our creations from the ravaging processes of nature. Since this world existed before and continued after the appearance of each individual in it, it offered the possibility of worldly immortality such that the character and achievements of humans could be remembered after they pass from the world.

Quotations: "Forgiveness is the key to action and freedom."

"There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous."

"Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it."

"This is the precept by which I have lived: Prepare for the worst; expect the best; and take what comes."

"The most radical revolutionary will become a conservative the day after the revolution."

"Under conditions of tyranny, it is far easier to act than to think."

"The Third World is not a reality but an ideology."

"War has become a luxury that only small nations can afford."

"Action without a name, a who attached to it, is meaningless."

"Only the mob and the elite can be attracted by the momentum of totalitarianism itself. The masses have to be won by propaganda."

Personality

Frequently ill-at-ease in public, Arendt was an energetic conversationalist in smaller gatherings. Even among friends, though, she might sometimes excuse herself and become totally absorbed in some new line of thought that had occurred to her.

Physical Characteristics: Hannah's fellow students found her a very attractive young woman. Hannah was described as having "striking looks: thick, dark hair, a long, oval face, and brilliant eyes". One student claimed that she had "lonely eyes" but "starry when she was happy and excited". Another friend described them as "deep, dark, remote pools of inwardness."

Interests

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Martin Heidegger, Karl Marx, Søren Kierkegaard, Immanuel Kant

Connections

Arendt was married twice. In 1929 she married Günther Stern, later known as Günther Anders. They divorced in 1937. Her second husband was Heinrich Blücher, a philosophy professor, whom she married in 1940.

Father:

Paul Arendt

Mother:

Martha (Cohn) Arendt

Spouse:

Günther Stern

Günther Stern was an Austrian journalist, philosopher and anti-nuclear activist.

ex-spouse:

Heinrich Blücher

Hannah Arendt fell in love with Heinrich Blücher in the spring of 1936. "Arendt was twenty-nine, Blücher thirty-seven... They fell in love almost at first sight. Both were still formally married but separated from their spouses... Blücher came from a poor, non-Jewish Berlin working-class background. He was an autodidact who had gone to night school but never graduated... Their attraction was at once intellectual and erotic. Blücher was an autodidact but a highly learned one... Arendt was fascinated by his intellect. Their relationship now ripened in an atmosphere of intense eroticism."

He encouraged his wife to become involved with Marxism and political theory.

Friend:

Martin Heidegger

Hannah Arendt was in love with her former teacher, Martin Heidegger. A few days before her wedding, Arendt wrote to Heidegger telling him that the continuity of love between the two of them was still the most meaningful thing in her life: "Do not forget how much and how deeply I know that our love has become the blessing of my life. This knowledge cannot be shaken, not even today... I would indeed so like to know - almost tormentingly so, how you are doing, what you are working on, and how Freiburg is treating you."

Friend:

Karl Jaspers

Friend:

Alexandre Koyre

Friend:

Raymond Aron

Arendt was sympathetic to Aron's anti-Stalinism; and his early recognition of fundamental similarities in the new political systems that had emerged in the twentieth century influenced the development of her thinking about totalitarianism.

Friend:

Walter Benjamin

Walter Benjamin was attracted to Marxism because of its "messianic identification with the oppressed and its promise of justice." Arendt loved "both his character of his thinking and the beauty of his language and recognized him as a polymath genius, an erudite literary stylist who dabbled in philosophy, history, theology, textual interpretation, and literary and cultural criticism, producing minor masterpieces wherever he went." Arendt saw in Benjamin a mixture of "merit, great gifts, clumsiness, and misfortune."

Acquaintance:

Bethsabée de Rothschild

While in Paris Arendt worked as an assistant to Baroness Germaine de Rothschild, the daughter of Édouard de Rothschild, overseeing contributions to Jewish charities. Hannah got on well with the baroness but was fairly hostile to the rest of her illustrious family.

Friend:

Theodor Herzl

References

• Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World
• Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times
• Hannah Arendt: A Critical Introduction
• Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of her Political Thought