Hannah Arendt (born Johanna Arendt; 14 October 19064 December 1975) was a German and American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century.
Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of wealth, power, fame, and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, tradition, and totalitarianism. She is also remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, for her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, and for the phrase "the banality of evil". Her name appears in the names of journals, schools, scholarly prizes, humanitarian prizes, think-tanks, and streets; appears on stamps and monuments; and is attached to other cultural and institutional markers that commemorate her thought.
Hannah Arendt was born to a Jewish family in Linden in 1906. Her father died when she was seven. Arendt was raised in a politically progressive, secular family, her mother being an ardent Social Democrat. After completing secondary education in Berlin, Arendt studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger, with whom she engaged in a romantic affair that began while she was his student. She obtained her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg in 1929. Her dissertation was entitled Love and Saint Augustine, and her supervisor was the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers.
In 1933, Arendt was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism. On release, she fled Germany, settling in Paris. There she worked for Youth Aliyah, assisting young Jews to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. When Germany invaded France she was detained as an alien by the French government. She escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941. She became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming an American citizen in 1950. With the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, her reputation as a thinker and writer was established, and a series of works followed. These included the books The Human Condition in 1958, as well as Eichmann in Jerusalem and On Revolution in 1963. She taught at many American universities while declining tenure-track appointments. She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, leaving her last work, The Life of the Mind, unfinished.
Early life and education (1906–1929) Family
Hannah Arendt was born Johanna Arendt in 1906, in the Wilhelmine period. Her secular, educated, and well-established Jewish family lived comfortably in Linden, Prussia. They were merchants from Königsberg. Her grandparents were members of the Reform Jewish community. Her paternal grandfather, , was a prominent businessman, local politician, and leader of the Königsberg Jewish community, a member of the Central Organization for German Citizens of Jewish Faith (). Like other members of the he primarily saw himself as German, disapproving of Zionists and Zionist activities, including Kurt Blumenfeld, a frequent visitor and later one of Hannah's mentors. Her lifelong best-friend, Anne Mendelssohn, was likewise connected to a dynasty of philosophers and musicians. Of Max Arendt's children, Paul Arendt was an engineer and Henriette Arendt a policewoman and social worker.
Hannah was the only child of Paul and Martha Arendt (née Cohn), who were married on 11 April 1902. She was named after her paternal grandmother. The Cohns had originally come to Königsberg from nearby Russian territory of Lithuania in 1852, as refugees from antisemitism, and made their living as tea importers, J. N. Cohn & Company being the largest business in the city. The Arendts reached Germany from Russia a century earlier. Hannah's extended family contained many more women, who shared the loss of husbands and children. Hannah's parents were more educated and politically more to the left than her grandparents. The young couple were Social Democrats, rather than the German Democrats that most of their contemporaries supported. Paul Arendt was educated at the Albertina (University of Königsberg). Though he worked as an engineer, he prided himself on his love of Classics, with a large library that Hannah immersed herself in. Martha Cohn, a musician, had studied for three years in Paris.
In the first four years of their marriage, the Arendts lived in Berlin, and were supporters of the socialist journal Socialist Monthly Bulletins (). At the time of Hannah's birth, Paul Arendt was employed by an electrical engineering firm in Linden, and they lived in a frame house on the market square (). They moved back to Königsberg in 1909 because of Paul's deteriorating health. He suffered from chronic syphilis and was institutionalized in the Königsberg psychiatric hospital in 1911. For years afterward, Hannah had to have annual WR tests for congenital syphilis. He died on 30 October 1913, when Hannah was seven, leaving her mother to raise her. They lived in a house on Tiergartenstraße 51, a leafy residential street adjacent to the Königsberg Tiergarten, in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Hufen. Although Hannah's parents were non-religious, they were happy to allow Max Arendt to take Hannah to the Reform synagogue. She also received religious instruction from the rabbi, Hermann Vogelstein, who would come to her school for that purpose. Her family moved in circles that included many intellectuals and professionals. It was a social circle of high standards and ideals. As she recalled it:
This time was a particularly favorable period for the Jewish community in Königsberg, an important center of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment). Arendt's family was thoroughly assimilated ("Germanized") and she later remembered: "With us from Germany, the word 'assimilation' received a 'deep' philosophical meaning. You can hardly realize how serious we were about it." Despite these conditions, the Jewish population lacked full citizenship rights, and although antisemitism was not overt, it was not absent. Arendt came to define her Jewish identity negatively after encountering overt antisemitism as an adult. She came to greatly identify with Rahel Varnhagen, the Prussian socialite who desperately wanted to assimilate into German culture, only to be rejected because she was born Jewish. Arendt later said of Varnhagen that she was "my very closest woman friend, unfortunately dead a hundred years now".
In the last two years of the First World War, Hannah's mother organized social democratic discussion groups and became a follower of Rosa Luxemburg as socialist uprisings broke out across Germany. Luxemburg's writings would later influence Hannah's political thinking. In 1920, Martha Cohn married Martin Beerwald, an ironmonger and widower of four years, and they moved to his home, two blocks away, at Busoldstrasse 6, providing Hannah with improved social and financial security. Hannah was 14 at the time and acquired two older stepsisters, Clara and Eva.
Education Early education
Hannah Arendt's mother, who considered herself progressive, brought her daughter up on strict Goethean lines. Among other things this involved the reading of Goethe's complete works, summed up as (And just what is your duty? The demands of the day). Goethe was then considered the essential mentor of (), the conscious formation of mind, body and spirit. The key elements were considered to be self-discipline, constructive channeling of passion, renunciation and responsibility for others. Hannah's developmental progress () was carefully documented by her mother in a book, she called (), measuring her against the benchmark of what was then considered ().
Arendt attended kindergarten from 1910 where her precocity impressed her teachers and enrolled in the Szittnich School, Königsberg (Hufen-Oberlyzeum), on in August 1913, but her studies there were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, forcing the family to temporarily flee to Berlin on 23 August 1914, in the face of the advancing Russian army. There they stayed with her mother's younger sister, Margarethe Fürst, and her three children, while Hannah attended a girl's school in Berlin-Charlottenburg. After ten weeks, when Königsberg appeared to be no longer threatened, the Arendts were able to return, where they spent the remaining war years at her grandfather's house. Arendt's precocity continued, learning ancient Greek as a child, writing poetry in her teenage years, and starting both a Graecae (reading group for studying classical literature) and philosophy club at her school. She was fiercely independent in her schooling and a voracious reader, absorbing French and German literature and poetry (committing large amounts to memory) and philosophy. By the age of 14, she had read Kierkegaard, Jaspers' and Kant's (Critique of Pure Reason). Kant, whose hometown was also Königsberg, was an important influence on her thinking, and it was Kant who had written about Königsberg that "such a town is the right place for gaining knowledge concerning men and the world even without travelling".
Arendt attended the Königin-Luise-Schule for her secondary education, a girls' Gymnasium on Landhofmeisterstraße. Most of her friends, while at school, were gifted children of Jewish professional families, generally older than she was, and who went on to university education. Among them was , who introduced her to his girlfriend, Anne Mendelssohn, who would become a lifelong friend. When Anne moved away, Ernst became Arendt's first romantic relationship.
Higher education (1922–1929)
Berlin (1922–1924) Arendt was expelled from the Luise-Schule in 1922, at the age of 15, for leading a boycott of a teacher who insulted her. Her mother sent her to Berlin to Social Democrat family friends. She lived in a student residence and audited courses at the University of Berlin (1922–1923), including classics and Christian theology under Romano Guardini. She successfully sat for the entrance examination () for the University of Marburg, where Ernst Grumach had studied with Martin Heidegger (appointed as a professor in 1923). Her mother had engaged a private tutor, and her aunt Frieda Arendt, a teacher, also helped, while Frieda's husband Ernst Aron provided financial tuition assistance.
Marburg (1924–1926) In Berlin, Guardini had introduced her to Kierkegaard, and she resolved to make theology her major field. At Marburg (1924–1926) she studied classical languages, German literature, Protestant theology with Rudolf Bultmann and philosophy with Nicolai Hartmann and Heidegger. She arrived in the fall in the middle of an intellectual revolution led by the young Heidegger, of whom she was in awe, describing him as "the hidden king [who] reigned in the realm of thinking".
Heidegger had broken away from the intellectual movement started by Edmund Husserl, whose assistant he had been at University of Freiburg before coming to Marburg. This was a period when Heidegger was preparing his lectures on Kant, which he would develop in the second part of his (Being and Time) in 1927 and (1929). In his classes, he and his students struggled with the meaning of "Being" as they studied Aristotle's and Plato's Sophist concept of truth, to which Heidegger opposed the pre-Socratic term ἀλήθεια. Many years later Arendt would describe these classes, how people came to Marburg to hear him, and how, above all he imparted the idea of ("thinking") as activity, which she qualified as "passionate thinking".
Arendt was restless, finding her studies neither emotionally nor intellectually satisfying. She was ready for passion, finishing her poem (Consolation, 1923) with the lines:
(The hours run down.The days pass on.One achievement remains:merely existing.)