- Person
- Hannah Arendt
- Lived
- 1906–1975
- Field
- Political Theory
- From
- German-American
The story
Hannah Arendt grew up in a secular, assimilated Jewish family in Königsberg and studied philosophy at Marburg, Freiburg and Heidelberg, where she completed her doctorate in 1928. By the early 1930s she was living in Berlin, writing a biography of the Jewish salon hostess Rahel Varnhagen and becoming increasingly involved in Jewish politics through the Zionist leader Kurt Blumenfeld. As a Jew, she had little hope of an academic post in Germany.
When Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, her husband Günther Stern fled to Paris, but Arendt stayed to resist. She used her Berlin apartment as a way station for fugitives escaping the regime, work now marked by a plaque on the building. Facing open state antisemitism, she declared that if one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew, not as a German or a world citizen.
She was determined to tell the world what was happening to Germany's Jews. Working with Zionist activists including Blumenfeld, Martin Buber and Salman Schocken, she agreed to a request from the Zionist Federation of Germany to use her access to the Prussian State Library to collect evidence of the extent of antisemitism, for a planned speech to the Zionist Congress in Prague.
The research was illegal. A librarian denounced her for anti-state propaganda, and the Gestapo arrested Arendt and her mother. They spent eight days in prison, but her notebooks were written in code and could not be deciphered. A young, sympathetic officer released her to await trial. The episode later inspired a play, Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library, first staged in 2019.
Arendt did not wait for the trial. With her mother she crossed the Ore Mountains by night into Czechoslovakia and travelled on to Prague and Geneva, where she resolved to commit herself to the Jewish cause, before settling in Paris. She remained a stateless refugee until she became an American citizen in 1951. Her experience of persecution and exile shaped her lifelong work on antisemitism, totalitarianism and the rights of refugees.
Why it matters
Arendt risked her freedom to document Nazi persecution at a time when much of the world preferred not to look.
About Hannah Arendt
Political theorist; "The Origins of Totalitarianism," "Eichmann in Jerusalem," and the phrase "the banality of evil."
More about Hannah Arendt
- Arendt wrote the most widely read essay on refugeesHannah Arendt's chapter on the decline of the nation-state and the end of the rights of man, drawn from her own statelessness, has been called the most widely read essay on refugees ever.
- Hannah Arendt explained how ordinary people enable evilRefugee philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 and later coined "the banality of evil", ideas still used to understand how ordinary people take part in atrocity.
- Arendt's Human Condition found hope in every new birthIn The Human Condition (1958), Hannah Arendt argued that natality, the capacity of each newborn person to begin something new, is the miracle that saves the world.
- Institutes in America and Germany carry Arendt's nameHannah Arendt's legacy lives on in Hannah Arendt Centers at Bard College and the New School, an institute for totalitarianism research in Dresden, and an annual prize for political thinking.
- Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism explained NazismHannah Arendt's The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) traced the roots of Nazism and Stalinism through antisemitism and imperialism, and established her as a major thinker.
- Hannah Arendt helped Jewish children escape to PalestineIn Paris from 1935 to 1939, Hannah Arendt worked for Youth Aliyah, helping young Jews emigrate to Palestine, and became its special agent for rescuing refugee children.
Sources
- Hannah Arendt Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.