- Person
- Hannah Arendt
- Lived
- 1906–1975
- Field
- Political Theory
- From
- German-American
The story
Hannah Arendt died suddenly of a heart attack in her New York apartment on 4 December 1975, shortly after her 69th birthday, while entertaining friends. Her last work, The Life of the Mind, was unfinished: the title page of its final part, "Judging", was found in her typewriter. Her friend Mary McCarthy edited the first two parts for publication. Arendt's ashes were buried beside those of her husband Heinrich Blücher at Bard College, where he had taught for many years.
Her influence has only grown since. Her personal library of about 5,000 books, along with her writing desk, is held at Bard, while most of her papers are at the Library of Congress. By 1998 the Library of Congress listed more than 50 books about her, and the number keeps rising. Her essays, lectures and letters have continued to be published, and her collected poems first appeared in 2025.
Bard College and the New School, the institutions most closely associated with her teaching, each created a Hannah Arendt Center. In Germany, the country she was forced to flee, the Hannah Arendt Institute for the Research on Totalitarianism was established in Dresden, and since 1995 an association in Bremen has awarded the annual Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking. The Hannah Arendt Center at the University of Oldenburg, founded in 1999, holds a large archive of her work and publishes an online journal, and the University of Verona hosts a centre for political studies in her name. A journal, Arendt Studies, was launched in 2017.
In 2006 the centenary of her birth was marked by conferences around the world, and Fred Stein's 1944 portrait of her appeared on a German postage stamp. Her birthplace holds a Hannah Arendt Day, and the United Nations Refugee Agency is among the organisations that have recognised her contribution to human rights.
Interest in her work has surged in recent years as readers turn to her analysis of totalitarianism, propaganda and lying in politics to understand the present. These institutions keep her questions about freedom, responsibility and judgement at the centre of public debate.
Why it matters
These institutions keep Arendt's questions about freedom, responsibility and totalitarianism at the centre of public debate.
About Hannah Arendt
Political theorist; "The Origins of Totalitarianism," "Eichmann in Jerusalem," and the phrase "the banality of evil."
More about Hannah Arendt
- Arendt was jailed by the Gestapo for exposing antisemitismIn 1933 Hannah Arendt secretly gathered evidence of Nazi antisemitism for the Zionist Federation of Germany. The Gestapo jailed her for eight days but could not read her coded notes.
- 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.
- 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.