- Person
- Hannah Arendt
- Lived
- 1906–1975
- Field
- Political Theory
- From
- German-American
The story
After fleeing Nazi Germany in 1933, Hannah Arendt resolved in Geneva to commit herself to the Jewish cause, and by the autumn she had settled in Paris as a stateless refugee. Her legal status was precarious and she was coping with a foreign language and culture, but she found work helping others in the same position.
In 1934 she began working for Agriculture et Artisanat, a Zionist-funded programme that prepared Jewish young people for emigration to the British Mandate of Palestine, mainly as agricultural workers. She organised clothing, documents, medicine and education for them, rising from secretary to office manager, and studied French, Hebrew and Yiddish to do the job better. When the programme closed in 1935, her Zionist contacts led to a post as assistant to the philanthropist Baroness Germaine de Rothschild, overseeing the baroness's donations to Jewish charities in Paris.
Later in 1935 she joined Youth Aliyah, an organisation founded in Berlin on the day Hitler took power to help Jewish young people leave Europe and build new lives in Palestine. It was affiliated with Hadassah, and it went on to save many young people from the Holocaust. Arendt rose to become its Secretary-General, serving from 1935 to 1939. The work involved finding food, clothing, social workers and lawyers for the young people, and above all raising money. In 1935 she made her first visit to Palestine, accompanying one of the groups herself and meeting her cousin Ernst Fürst there.
When Nazi Germany annexed Austria and invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, Paris was flooded with refugees, and Arendt became the special agent for the rescue of the children from those countries. In 1939 her own mother left Königsberg to join her in Paris.
Arendt carried the experience of those years into her later work. Her writing on refugees, statelessness and human rights grew directly from what she had seen as she helped young people escape Nazi-dominated Europe to safety.
Why it matters
Before she became a famous thinker, Arendt helped Jewish children escape Nazi-dominated Europe to safety.
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.
- 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.
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.