Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was born on 14 October 1906 in Linden, a suburb of Hannover, Germany, the only child of Paul Arendt, an engineer with a passion for classical culture, and Martha Cohn Arendt. The family moved to Königsberg (Kant's city) when she was three, and her father died of syphilis-related paralysis when she was seven. Her mother, a politically aware Social Democrat, raised her with rigorous intellectual discipline; Hannah read Greek, Latin, and German literature in her teens. She enrolled at the University of Marburg in 1924, where she attended Martin Heidegger's seminars on Aristotle and fell into a passionate, clandestine affair with him. She was eighteen, he thirty-five and married. Heidegger's influence on her thinking — his insistence on the political dimensions of philosophical concepts — was lasting, though she later confronted directly his collaboration with the Nazi regime. She continued her studies at Freiburg under Edmund Husserl and then moved to Heidelberg to write her dissertation on the concept of love in Saint Augustine under Karl Jaspers, who became her most important intellectual mentor and lifelong friend. Her dissertation was published in 1929. She converted from academic philosophy to political activism in 1933. On the night of the Reichstag fire in February 1933, Arendt helped collect material on Nazi propaganda at the request of the German Zionist Organization; she was arrested and held for eight days, then released. She fled to Paris. In exile, she worked for Youth Aliyah, organising the emigration of Jewish children to British-Mandate Palestine, and married the German-Jewish Marxist poet Heinrich Blücher in 1940. When the Germans occupied France, she and Blücher were briefly interned at the Gurs camp in the Pyrenees as 'enemy aliens.' They escaped during the chaos of the armistice and made their way to Lisbon and then New York in May 1941. In America, Arendt wrote for the German-language weekly Aufbau, worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction organization to recover looted books and cultural artifacts, and began the thirteen years of reading and research that produced The Origins of Totalitarianism. Published in March 1951, on the same day Arendt was naturalized as an American citizen, it argued that Nazism and Stalinism were not simply extreme versions of familiar political evils but a genuinely new form of domination: one that atomized society, destroyed political life, reduced human beings to superfluous material, and relied on terror as its organizing principle. The work was reviewed on the front page of the New York Times Book Review and made Arendt famous. The Human Condition (1958) developed her distinction between labour (the biological cycle of production and consumption), work (the fabrication of durable things), and action (political life in the public realm), arguing that modernity had degraded politics by subordinating it to economic imperatives. Her 1961 report for The New Yorker on the Adolf Eichmann trial in Jerusalem — later published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) — created one of the great controversies in twentieth-century intellectual life. Arendt's argument was not that Eichmann was innocent but that he was not a monster: he was a bureaucratic functionary who had stopped thinking, who had replaced moral judgment with organizational loyalty. The phrase 'the banality of evil' outraged many Jewish intellectuals, who read it as an exculpation of Eichmann; Arendt maintained it was the most damning indictment possible — that the greatest crimes could be committed by ordinary people who had simply ceased to think. She taught at the University of Chicago from 1963 and then at the New School for Social Research in New York from 1967, where she was beloved by students for the precision and audacity of her seminars. She was in the middle of dictating the third volume of The Life of the Mind — a late return to pure philosophy — when she died of a heart attack at her dinner table in New York City on 4 December 1975.

Unlock Hannah Arendt's full archive.

Contemporaries

Themes