Arendt, Hannah 1906-1975

ARENDT, HANNAH 1906-1975

Philosopher, political theorist

A Philosopher of Her Times

Hannah Arendt is best known for her groundbreaking book The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), an influential study of anti-Semitism, imperialism, and authoritarianism. Her historical analysis of Nazism, the Holocaust, and the nature of evil established her reputation as an important philosopher and political thinker.

Early Years

Born to middle-class Jewish parents in Hannover, Germany, Arendt grew up in Königsberg and Berlin and began her university studies in Marburg in 1924. There she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger, who became a close friend. She also studied at Freiburg with Edmund Husserl and went on to Heidelberg, where she received her doctorate in philosophy in 1929, having written her dissertation under the supervision of Karl Jaspers. Jaspers and Heidegger profoundly influenced Arendt's later philosophical work.

Life in Nazi Germany

Arendt married writer Gunther Stern in 1929 and began writing Rachel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1957), a biography of an eighteenth-century Berlin salon hostess. Her work on the book was interrupted in 1933, afer the Nazis imprisoned her briefly for Zionist activities. Released a week later, Arendt escaped with Stern to Paris. There she worked for various Jewish organizations. Her marriage to Stern ended in 1936, when she met Heinrich Blücher, a working-class, gentile Jewish Berliner who was a Communist until 1939. Arendt and Blücher were married in 1940, and soon thereafter they managed to escape during the German invasion of France and made their way to New York in the spring of 1941.

The War Years in New York

In New York Arendt wrote columns on Jewish history. Other European expatriates, including philosopher Paul Tillich, helped Arendt place her articles in journals such as Jewish Social Studies, Jewish Frontier, and Review of Politics. As Arendt and Blücher learned English, they became friends with American intellectuals including Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, and Philip Rahv.

The Origins of Totalitarianism.

In the late 1940s Arendt worked as a director of research at the Conference on Jewish Relations (1944-1946), taught history parttime at Brooklyn College, and was senior editor at Schocken Books (1946-1948). During those years she published articles on political philosophy in Partisan Review, Review of Politics, and The Nation. She also worked on locating Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and retrieving Jewish property taken by the Nazis and served on a campaign supporting the establishment of a binational Arab-Jewish state in Palestine. She also began developing her published essays into The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). The work was the first major study to examine authoritarianism in the light of the Holocaust, and it received immediate acclaim.

The "Banality of Evil."

Arendt became a U.S. citizen in 1951. In spring 1961, as a reporter for The New Yorker magazine, she attended the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann, who was on trial in Jerusalem for his role in planning and overseeing the deportation and execution of Jews in Nazi death camps. Her account, published in book form as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1964), portrayed Eichmann not as a psychopath or innately evil but as banal and thoughtless. According to Arendt's radical reformulation, Eichmann was not unlike the rest of humankind, and all people are capable of such evil. Arendt spent her later years writing and teaching about the evils of authoritarianism and bureaucracy.

Sources:

Derwent May, Hannah Arendt (Harmondsworth, U.K. & New York: Penguin, 1986);

Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Entry on Arendt, in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, A Biographical Dictionary, edited by Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green with llene Kantrov and Harriette Walker (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University Press, 1980), pp. 33-37;

Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, For Love of the World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982).