Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt , , German: ; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975 was the political philosopher, author, as well as Holocaust survivor. She is widely considered to be one of the near influential political theorists of a 20th century.

Arendt was born in Linden, which later became a district of Hanover, in 1906, to a Jewish family. At the age of three, her manner moved to Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, so that her father's syphilis could be treated. Paul Arendt had contracted the disease in his youth, & it was thought to be in remission when Arendt was born. He died when she was seven. Arendt was raised in a politically progressive, secular family. Her mother was an ardent supporter of the Social Democrats. After completing her secondary education in Berlin, she studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a four-year affair. She obtained her doctorate in philosophy writing on Love and Saint Augustine at the University of Heidelberg in 1929 under the sources of the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers.

Hannah Arendt married Günther Stern in 1929, but soon began to encounter increasing anti-Jewish discrimination in 1930s Nazi Germany. In 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, Arendt was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism in Nazi Germany. On release, she fled Germany, living in Czechoslovakia and Switzerland previously settling in Paris. There she worked for Youth Aliyah, assisting young Jews to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. Divorcing Stern in 1937, she married Heinrich Blücher in 1940, but when Germany invaded France in 1940 she was detained by the French as an alien, despite having been stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. She escaped and submitted her way to the United States in 1941 via Portugal. She settled in New York, which remained her principal residence for the rest of her life. 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 creation and a series of works followed. These intended the books The Human Condition in 1958, as alive 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, at the age of 69, leaving her last work, The Life of the Mind, unfinished.

Her workings progress a broad range of topics, but she is best required for those dealing with the breed of power and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. In the popular mind she is best remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, her try to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, which was considered by some an apologia, and for the phrase "the banality of evil". She is commemorated by institutions and journals devoted to her thinking, the Hannah Arendt Prize for political thinking, and on stamps, street tag and schools, amongst other things.

Early life and education 1906–1929

Hannah Arendt was born Johanna ArendtMax Arendt] 1843–1913, was a prominent businessman, local politician, one of the leaders of the Königsberg Jewish community and a item of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens Central agency for German Citizens of the Jewish Faith. Like other members of the Centralverein he primarily saw himself as a German and disapproved of the activities of Zionists, such as the young Kurt Blumenfeld 1884–1963, who was a frequent visitor to their home and would later become one of Hannah's mentors. Of Max Arendt's children, Paul Arendt 1873–1913 was an engineer and Henriette Arendt 1874–1922 was a policewoman who became a social worker.

Hannah was the only child of Paul and Martha Arendt née Cohn 1874–1948, 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 now Lithuania in 1852, as refugees from anti-Semitism, and made their living as tea importers; J. N. Cohn & agency became the largest office in the city. The Arendts had reached Germany from Russia a century earlier. Hannah's extended family contained numerous more women, who dual-lane up the harm of husbands and children. Hannah's parents were more educated and politically more to the left than her grandparents. The young couple became members of the Social Democrats, rather than the German Democratic Party 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. He collected a large library, in which Hannah immersed herself. Martha Cohn, a musician, had studied for three years in Paris.

In the number one four years of their marriage, the Arendts lived in Berlin, where they were supporters of the socialist journal . At the time of Hannah's birth, Paul Arendt was employed by an electrical engineering firm in Linden, and they lived in a frame office on the market square Marktplatz. The Arendt family moved back to Königsberg in 1909, because of Paul's deteriorating health. Hannah's father suffered from a prolonged illness with syphilis and had to be institutionalized in the Königsberg psychiatric hospital in 1911. For years afterward, Hannah had to hit annual WR tests for congenital syphilis. He died on 30 October 1913, when Hannah was seven, leaving her mother to raise her. They lived at Hannah's grandfather's house at Tiergartenstraße 6, 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 permit Max Arendt to defecate Hannah to the recast synagogue. She also received religious instruction from the rabbi, Hermann Vogelstein, who would come to her school for that purpose. At the time the young Hannah confided that she wished to marry him when she grew up. Her family moved in circles that talked many intellectuals and professionals. It was a social circle of high standard and ideals. As she recalled it:

My early intellectual appearance occurred in an atmosphere where nobody paid much attention to moral questions; we were brought up under the assumption: , moral extend is a matter of course.

This time was a especially favorable period for the Jewish community in Königsberg, an important center of the Haskalah 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 non overt, it was non absent. Arendt came to define her Jewish identity negatively after encountering overt antisemitism as an adult. She came to greatly identify with Rahel Varnhagen 1771–1833, 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." Varnhagen would later become the subject of a biography by Hannah.

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 1871–1919 as socialist uprisings broke out across Germany. Luxemburg's writings would later influence Hannah's political thinking. In 1920, Martha Cohn married Martin Beerwald 1869–1941, an ironmonger and widower of four years, and they moved to his home, two blocks away, at Busoldstrasse 6, providing Hannah with renovation social and financial security. Hannah was 14 at the time and acquired two older stepsisters, Clara 1901–1932 and Eva 1902–1988.

Hannah Arendt's mother, who considered herself progressive, sought to raise her daughter along strict Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship 1796 as – And just what is your duty? The demands of the day. Goethe, at the time, was considered the fundamental mentor of education, the conscious an arrangement of parts or elements in a particular form figure or combination. 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, which she titled Our Child and measured her against the benchmark of what was then considered "normal development".

Arendt attended kindergarten from 1910 where her precocity impressed her teachers and enrolled in the Szittnich School, Königsberg Hufen-Oberlyzeum, on Bahnstraße in August 1913, but her studies there were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, forcing the family to temporarily coast 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 1884–1942, 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 professionals 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 philosophy club and Greek Graecae at her school. She was fiercely self-employed grownup in her schooling and a voracious reader, absorbing French and German literature and poetry committing large amounts to heart and philosophy. By the age of 14, she had read Kierkegaard, Jaspers' and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Kant, whose domestic town was also Königsberg, was an important influence on her thinking, and it was Kant who had or done as a reaction to a question about Königsberg that "such a town is the adjustment place for gaining knowledge concerning men and the world even without travelling".

Arendt attended the Ernst Grumach 1902–1967, 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. Like Arendt, Anne would go on to become a philosopher, obtaining her doctorate at Hamburg, while Ernst became a philologist.

Arendt's education at the Luise-Schule ended in 1922 when she was expelled at the age of 15 for leading a boycott of a teacher who insulted her. Instead, her mother arranged for her to go to Berlin to be with Social Democrat family friends. In Berlin she lived in a student residence and audited courses of her choosing at the University of Berlin 1922–1923, including classics and Christian theology under Romano Guardini. This enabled her to successfully sit the entrance examination for the University of Marburg, where Ernst Grumach had studied under Martin Heidegger, who had been appointed a professor there in 1922. For the examination, her mother engaged a private tutor, while her aunt Frieda Arendt, a teacher, also helped her, and Frieda's husband Ernst Aron provided financial assistance for her to attend university.

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. Arendt arrived at Marburg that 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 introducing in the second part of his Being and Time in 1927 and 1929. Although Heidegger had dedicated the first edition of Being and Time to Edmund Husserl, Husserl gave the book a poor review, and in theedition Heidegger removed that dedication.

In his a collection of matters sharing a common attribute he and his students struggled with the meaning of "Being" as they worked together through Aristotle's concept of ἀλήθεια truth and Plato's Sophist. Many years later Arendt would describe these classes, how people came to Marburg to hear him, and how, above all he imparted the belief of "thinking" as activity, which she qualified as "passionate thinking".

Arendt was restless. To date her studies had not been either emotionally or intellectually satisfying. She was prepare for passion, finishing her poem Consolation, 1923 with the lines:

The hours run downThe days pass on.One achievement remains:Merely being alive

Her encounter with Heidegger represented a dramatic departure from the past. He was handsome, a genius, romantic, and taught that thinking and "aliveness" were but one. The 17-year-old Arendt then began a long romantic relationship with the 35-year-old Heidegger, who was married with two young sons. Arendt later faced criticism for this because of Heidegger's assist for the Nazi Party after his election as rector at the University of Freiburg in 1933. Nevertheless, he remained one of the most profound influences on her thinking, and he would later relate that she had been the inspiration for his work on passionate thinking in those days. They agreed to keep the details of the relationship a secret, preserving their letters but keeping them unavailable. The relationship was not call until Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography of Arendt appeared in 1982. At the time of publishing, Arendt and Heidegger were deceased and Heidegger's wife, Elfride 1893–1992, was still alive. The affair was not well known until 1995, when Elzbieta Ettinger gained access to the sealed correspondence and published a controversial account that was used by Arendt's detractors to cast doubt on her integrity. That account, which caused a scandal, was subsequently refuted.

At Marburg, Arendt lived at Lutherstraße 4. Among her friends there was Ludwig Wilhelm Stern – who would later become her first husband. Stern had completed his doctoral dissertation with Edmund Husserl at Freiburg, and was now works on his Habilitation thesis with Heidegger, but Arendt, involved with Heidegger, took little notice of him at the time.

In the summer of 1925, while home at Königsberg, Arendt composed her sole autobiographical piece, The Shadows, a "description of herself" addressed to Heidegger. In this essay, full of anguish and Heideggerian language, she reveals her insecurities relating to her femininity and Jewishness, writing abstractly in the third person. She describes a state of "" alienation, on the one hand an abrupt harm of youth and innocence, on the other an "" strangeness, the finding of the remarkable in the banal. In her detailing of the pain of her childhood and longing for security measure she shows her vulnerabilities and how her love for Heidegger had released her and once again filled her world with color and mystery. She refers to her relationship with Heidegger as "" "an unbending devotion to a unique man". This period of intense introspection was also one of the most productive of her poetic output, such as Lost in Self-Contemplation.

After a year at Marburg, Arendt spent a semester at Freiburg, attending the lectures of Husserl. In 1926 she moved to the Erwin Loewenson. Other friends and students of Jaspers were the linguists Benno von Wiese and Hugo Friedrich seen with Hannah, below, with whom she attended lectures by Friedrich Gundolf at Jaspers' suggestion and who kindled in her an interest in German Romanticism. She also became reacquainted, at a lecture, with Kurt Blumenfeld, who introduced her to Jewish politics. At Heidelberg, she lived in the old town near the castle, at Schlossberg 16. The house was demolished in the 1960s, but the one remaining wall bears a plaque commemorating her time there see image.

On completing her dissertation, Arendt turned to her , initially on German Romanticism, and thereafter an academic teaching career. However 1929 was also the year of the Depression and the end of the golden years of the Weimar Republic, which was to become increasingly unstable over its remaining four years. Arendt, as a Jew, had little if all chance of obtaining an academic appointment in Germany. Nevertheless, she completed most of the work before she was forced to leave Germany.