ARENDT, Hannah

(b. 14 October 1906 in Hannover, Germany; d. 4 December 1975 in New York City), political philosopher, professor, and author of Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), an account and assessment of the trial of the Nazi leader.

Arendt was the only child of secular Jewish parents, Paul Arendt, an engineer, and Martha (Cohn) Arendt, a homemaker. At age fifteen Arendt entered the University of Berlin, studying classics and Christian theology. After two years she transferred to Marburg University, where she studied philosophy with the eminent philosopher Martin Heidegger. Two years later she moved to Heidelberg to study with Karl Jaspers, the existentialist philosopher. While studying with Jaspers she wrote her doctoral dissertation on the concept of love in St. Augustine's thought. She received her doctorate in 1928 at age twenty-two.

In 1930 she married Günther Stern, a Jewish philosopher, with whom she fled to Paris in 1933 when the German dictator Adolf Hitler came to power. In 1936 Arendt met Heinrich Blücher, a German political refugee. She and Stern were divorced in 1939, and she married Blücher in 1940. After the outbreak of war they were interned in a detention camp for enemy aliens. They escaped and fled to the United States in 1941.

Arendt became a U.S. citizen in 1951, the same year that saw the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism, her first major political work. Widely praised, the book firmly established her reputation as a writer and scholar. The book analyzed the two major forms of twentieth-century totalitarianism, Nazism and Communism, and sought to establish their genesis in the anti-Semitism and imperialism of the nineteenth century.

Arendt had not previously succeeded in finding teaching positions at American universities, but the stature she achieved through her book's critical acclaim changed that. Over the next two decades she taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Brooklyn College, and Columbia, Northwestern, and Cornell Universities. In 1959 she became the first woman to attain a full professorship at Princeton University. In 1967 Arendt was named university professor of political philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City, a position she held until her death.

On Revolution, published in 1963, was a rethinking of the causes and results of modern revolutions, notably those in the United States and France. Generally well received, this book was eclipsed, however, by the publication of Arendt's most influential work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963). In 1961 Arendt had accepted an assignment from the New Yorker to cover the trial in Jerusalem of Adolph Eichmann, accused of implementing the Nazi genocide of the Jews of Europe. Her coverage of the trial was serialized in the magazine and later expanded and published in book form.

Eichmann in Jerusalem was widely read and highly controversial. Many readers misinterpreted her thesis, thinking that by describing Eichmann as banal, Arendt meant he was normal, thus exonerating him. However, Arendt saw Eichmann as an illustration of the problem of a human being within a modern totalitarian system. Bruno Bettelheim, in the New Republic, pointed out that "because of her concentration on the injustice bred by totalitarianism, Arendt at times creates an ambiguity in the evaluation of guilt."

Jewish readers were particularly outraged by her criticism of the state of Israel, the Israeli prime minister David Ben-Gurion, and the Israeli attorney general Gideon Hausner, as well as her assessment that the Jews of Europe were complicit in their own slaughter during the Third Reich by passively marching to their deaths.

The Eichmann trial was widely perceived as a model of fairness and justice. Arendt took issue with that perception, delving into the nature of the judicial process and comparing the need for justice with the need for punishment.

Arendt herself asserted she was trying to calmly analyze the situation, to get beyond the emotions, even the hysteria, the trial evoked. She found that, far from being a monster of evil, Eichmann was simply a glorified clerk who was too morally stunted to perceive the impact of his actions. Those who wanted to focus on Eichmann as the principal creator of the Holocaust were disappointed in Arendt's assessment. But she held her ground, commenting, "If you kill a monster you can go to bed and sleep, for there aren't many of them. But if Eichmann was normality, then this is a far more dangerous situation."

The phrase that made her name something of a household word was "the banality of evil," which Arendt used to distinguish Eichmann's actions from a malevolent delight in murder. Rather, she believed, Eichmann arrived at his willing involvement in the Nazis' so-called final solution through a failure or absence of sound thinking and judgment.

During the last decade of her life, Arendt became increasingly concerned with thinking and judgment as political faculties, themes that had interested her throughout her career. Her projected trilogy, The Life of the Mind, was incomplete at the time of her death. The first two volumes, Thinking and Willing, were published posthumously in 1978. She had just begun work on the third volume, Judging, when she died. In 1982 her Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy were published, delineating her reflections on political judgment.

Arendt was widely recognized for her achievements. She was awarded honorary degrees from Princeton, Dartmouth, Smith, Notre Dame, Yale, and the New School. In 1975 she became the first woman and the first U.S. citizen to be awarded Denmark's Sonning Prize for contributions to European civilization.

Arendt died in 1975 of a heart attack in her New York City apartment. Her ashes are buried at Bard College, New York City. A longtime friend said of her after her death, "There was a supreme relevance in what she had to say. Whether you thought her right or wrong, what she had to say was invariably important."

See Bhikhu Parkh, Hannah Arendt and the Search for a New Political Philosophy (1981), and Dana Villa, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hannah Arendt (2000), for a deeper understanding of Arendt's political philosophy. Reviews of Eichmann in Jerusalem are in the New York Times (19 May 1963), the Christian Science Monitor (23 May 1963), the New Republic (15 June 1963), and Commentary (Sept. 1963). An obituary is in the New York Times (6 Dec. 1975).

Natalie B. Jalenak