Hannah Arendt

153
Hannah Arendt bigraphy, stories - Jewish-American political theorist

Hannah Arendt : biography

October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975

Johanna "Hannah" Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was a German-American political theorist. Though often described as a philosopher, she rejected that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular" and instead described herself as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world."Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Second ed. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998. Print. Arendt’s work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism.

Commemoration

  • The asteroid 100027 Hannaharendt is named in her honor.
  • The German railway authority operates a Hannah Arendt Express between Karlsruhe and Hannover.
  • The German post office has issued a Hannah Arendt commemorative stamp.
  • Numerous streets in German cities, including one in the Mitte district of Berlin, are named Hannah-Arendt-Straße in her honor.
  • The Hannah Arendt Institute for the Research on Totalitarianism is named in her honor.
  • Numerous gymnasiums (German high schools) have been dedicated to Hannah Arendt.

Life and career

Arendt was born into a family of secular German Jews in the city of Linden (now part of Hanover). She was the daughter of Martha (née Cohn) and Paul Arendt. She grew up in Königsberg (renamed Kaliningrad and annexed to the Soviet Union in 1946) and Berlin.

At the University of Marburg, she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. According to Hans Jonas, her only German-Jewish classmate, Arendt embarked on a long and stormy romantic relationship with Heidegger, for which she later was criticized because of Heidegger’s support for the Nazi party when he was rector of Freiburg University."Ron Rosenbaum, the author of Explaining Hitler, even extended the argument [of Heidegger’s critic Emmanuel Faye that Heidegger’s thought is thoroughly tainted by Nazism] to the German Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, a former student and lover of Heidegger’s. Citing a recent essay by the historian Bernard Wasserstein, Mr. Rosenbaum wrote on Slate.com that Arendt’s thinking about the Holocaust and her famous formulation, "the banality of evil," were contaminated by Heidegger and other anti-Semitic writings." Cohen, Patricia. , The New York Times, November 8, 2009.

In the wake of one of their breakups, Arendt moved to Heidelberg, where she wrote her dissertation, under the existentialist philosopher-psychologist Karl Jaspers, on the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine. In 1929, in Berlin, she married Günther Stern, later known as Günther Anders; they divorced in 1937.

The dissertation was published in 1929. Although she was an agnostic, Arendt was prevented from habilitating – a prerequisite for teaching in German universities – because she was Jewish. She researched anti-Semitism for some time before being interrogated by the Gestapo. Thereupon Arendt fled Germany for Paris. There she befriended the Marxist literary critic and philosopher, Walter Benjamin, her first husband’s cousin. While in France, Arendt worked to support and aid Jewish refugees. In 1937, she was stripped of her German citizenship.

In 1940, she married the German poet and Marxist philosopher Heinrich Blücher, by then a former member of the Communist Party. Later that year, in spite of now being stateless, she was interned in Camp Gurs as an "enemy alien", but was able to escape after a few weeks.

With the German military occupation of northern France during World War II and the deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps by the Vichy collaborator regime in the unoccupied south, Arendt was compelled to leave France. In 1941, Arendt escaped with her husband and her mother to the United States. They relied on the life-saving visas, illegally issued by the American diplomat Hiram Bingham IV, who aided in this way approximately 2,500 other Jewish refugees. Another American, Varian Fry, paid for their travels and helped in securing the visas. Upon arrival in New York, Arendt became active in the German-Jewish community. From 1941 to 1945, she wrote a column for the German-language Jewish newspaper, Aufbau. From 1944, she directed research for the Commission of European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction and traveled frequently to Germany in this capacity.