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Hannah Arendt (born Johanna Arendt; 14 October 1906 â€“ 4 December 1975) was a German and American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential
political theorist A political theorist is someone who engages in constructing or evaluating political theory, including political philosophy. Theorists may be academics or independent scholars. Ancient * Aristotle * Chanakya * Cicero * Confucius * Mencius * ...
s 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 Wealth is the abundance of valuable financial assets or physical possessions which can be converted into a form that can be used for transactions. This includes the core meaning as held in the originating Old English word , which is from an ...
, power, and
evil Evil, as a concept, is usually defined as profoundly immoral behavior, and it is related to acts that cause unnecessary pain and suffering to others. Evil is commonly seen as the opposite, or sometimes absence, of good. It can be an extreme ...
, as well as politics,
direct democracy Direct democracy or pure democracy is a form of democracy in which the Election#Electorate, electorate directly decides on policy initiatives, without legislator, elected representatives as proxies, as opposed to the representative democracy m ...
,
authority Authority is commonly understood as the legitimate power of a person or group of other people. In a civil state, ''authority'' may be practiced by legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government,''The New Fontana Dictionary of M ...
,
tradition A tradition is a system of beliefs or behaviors (folk custom) passed down within a group of people or society with symbolic meaning or special significance with origins in the past. A component of cultural expressions and folklore, common e ...
, and
totalitarianism Totalitarianism is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition from political parties, disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and completely controls the public s ...
. She is also remembered for the controversy surrounding the
trial In law, a trial is a coming together of parties to a dispute, to present information (in the form of evidence) in a tribunal, a formal setting with the authority to adjudicate claims or disputes. One form of tribunal is a court. The tribunal, w ...
of
Adolf Eichmann Otto Adolf Eichmann ( ;"Eichmann"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''. ; 19 March 1906 â€“ 1 Ju ...
, for her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, which was considered by some an
apologia An apologia (Latin for ''apology'', from , ) is a formal defense of an opinion, position or action. The term's current use, often in the context of religion, theology and philosophy, derives from Justin Martyr's '' First Apology'' (AD 155–157) ...
, and for the phrase "
the banality of evil ''Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil'' is a 1963 book by the philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on Eichmann trial, the trial of Adolf E ...
." Her name appears in the names of journals,
schools A school is the educational institution (and, in the case of in-person learning, the building) designed to provide learning environments for the teaching of students, usually under the direction of teachers. Most countries have systems of ...
, 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 Jews (, , ), or the Jewish people, are an ethnoreligious group and nation, originating from the Israelites of History of ancient Israel and Judah, ancient Israel and Judah. They also traditionally adhere to Judaism. Jewish ethnicity, rel ...
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 Social democracy is a Social philosophy, social, Economic ideology, economic, and political philosophy within socialism that supports Democracy, political and economic democracy and a gradualist, reformist, and democratic approach toward achi ...
. After completing secondary education in Berlin, Arendt studied at the
University of Marburg The Philipps University of Marburg () is a public research university located in Marburg, Germany. It was founded in 1527 by Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, which makes it one of Germany's oldest universities and the oldest still operating Prote ...
under
Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger (; 26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) was a German philosopher known for contributions to Phenomenology (philosophy), phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. His work covers a range of topics including metaphysics, art ...
, 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 Heidelberg University, officially the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg (; ), is a public university, public research university in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Founded in 1386 on instruction of Pope Urban VI, Heidelberg is List ...
in 1929. Her dissertation was entitled '' Love and Saint Augustine'', and her supervisor was the
existentialist Existentialism is a family of philosophical views and inquiry that explore the human individual's struggle to lead an authentic life despite the apparent absurdity or incomprehensibility of existence. In examining meaning, purpose, and value ...
philosopher
Karl Jaspers Karl Theodor Jaspers (; ; 23 February 1883 – 26 February 1969) was a German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry, and philosophy. His 1913 work ''General Psychopathology'' influenced many ...
. In 1933, Arendt was briefly imprisoned by the
Gestapo The (, ), Syllabic abbreviation, abbreviated Gestapo (), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of F ...
for performing illegal research into
antisemitism Antisemitism or Jew-hatred is hostility to, prejudice towards, or discrimination against Jews. A person who harbours it is called an antisemite. Whether antisemitism is considered a form of racism depends on the school of thought. Antisemi ...
. On release, she fled Germany, settling in Paris. There she worked for
Youth Aliyah Youth Aliyah (Hebrew: עלית הנוער, ''Aliyat Hano'ar'', German: Jugend-Alijah, Youth Immigration) is a Jewish organization that rescued thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis during the Third Reich. Youth Aliyah arranged for their r ...
, assisting young Jews to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. When Germany invaded France she was detained as an alien. 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 ''The Origins of Totalitarianism'', published in 1951, was Hannah Arendt's first major work, where she describes and analyzes Nazism and Stalinism as the major totalitarian political movements of the first half of the 20th century. History '' ...
'' 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 ''Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil'' is a 1963 book by the philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of ...
'' and '' On Revolution'' in 1963. She taught at many American universities while declining
tenure-track Tenure is a type of academic appointment that protects its holder from being fired or laid off except for cause, or under extraordinary circumstances such as financial exigency or program discontinuation. Academic tenure originated in the United ...
appointments. She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, leaving her last work, ''
The Life of the Mind ''The Life of the Mind'' was the final work of Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), and was unfinished at the time of her death. Designed to be in three parts, only the first two had been completed and the first page of the third part was in her typewrit ...
'', 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 of Russian extraction from
Königsberg Königsberg (; ; ; ; ; ; , ) is the historic Germany, German and Prussian name of the city now called Kaliningrad, Russia. The city was founded in 1255 on the site of the small Old Prussians, Old Prussian settlement ''Twangste'' by the Teuton ...
. Her grandparents were members of the
Reform Jewish Reform Judaism, also known as Liberal Judaism or Progressive Judaism, is a major Jewish denomination that emphasizes the evolving nature of Judaism, the superiority of its ethical aspects to its ceremonial ones, and belief in a continuous rev ...
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 Zionism is an ethnocultural nationalist movement that emerged in Europe in the late 19th century that aimed to establish and maintain a national home for the Jewish people, pursued through the colonization of Palestine, a region roughly cor ...
and Zionist activities, including Kurt Blumenfeld, a frequent visitor and later one of Hannah's mentors. Her lifelong best-friend, Anne Mendehlsohn, was likewise connected to a dynasty of philosophers and musicians. Of Max Arendt's children, Paul Arendt was an engineer and
Henriette Arendt Henriette Arendt (11 November 1874 – 22 August 1922) was a German writer and policewoman. She is known because she was one of the earliest women to be a police officer, being a policewoman in 1903. She was the aunt of philosopher and historian ...
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 Lithuania, officially the Republic of Lithuania, is a country in the Baltic region of Europe. It is one of three Baltic states and lies on the eastern shore of the Baltic Sea, bordered by Latvia to the north, Belarus to the east and south, P ...
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 Social democracy is a social, economic, and political philosophy within socialism that supports political and economic democracy and a gradualist, reformist, and democratic approach toward achieving social equality. In modern practice, s ...
, rather than the German Democrats that most of their contemporaries supported. Paul Arendt was educated at the Albertina (
University of Königsberg The University of Königsberg () was the university of Königsberg in Duchy of Prussia, which was a fief of Poland. It was founded in 1544 as the world's second Protestant Reformation, Protestant academy (after the University of Marburg) by Duke A ...
). Though he worked as an engineer, he prided himself on his love of
Classics Classics, also classical studies or Ancient Greek and Roman studies, is the study of classical antiquity. In the Western world, ''classics'' traditionally refers to the study of Ancient Greek literature, Ancient Greek and Roman literature and ...
, 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 Syphilis () is a sexually transmitted infection caused by the bacterium ''Treponema pallidum'' subspecies ''pallidum''. The signs and symptoms depend on the stage it presents: primary, secondary, latent syphilis, latent or tertiary. The prim ...
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 A rabbi (; ) is a spiritual leader or religious teacher in Judaism. One becomes a rabbi by being ordained by another rabbi—known as ''semikha''—following a course of study of Jewish history and texts such as the Talmud. The basic form of t ...
, 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 The ''Haskalah'' (; literally, "wisdom", "erudition" or "education"), often termed the Jewish Enlightenment, was an intellectual movement among the Jews of Central Europe, Central and Eastern Europe, with a certain influence on those in Wester ...
'' (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 Rahel Antonie Friederike Varnhagen () (née Levin, later Robert; 19 May 1771 – 7 March 1833) was a German writer who hosted one of the most prominent salons in Europe during the late-18th and early-19th centuries. She is the subject of a celebr ...
, 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 World War I or the First World War (28 July 1914 – 11 November 1918), also known as the Great War, was a World war, global conflict between two coalitions: the Allies of World War I, Allies (or Entente) and the Central Powers. Fighting to ...
, Hannah's mother organized social democratic discussion groups and became a follower of
Rosa Luxemburg Rosa Luxemburg ( ; ; ; born Rozalia Luksenburg; 5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Polish and naturalised-German revolutionary and Marxist theorist. She was a key figure of the socialist movements in Poland and Germany in the early 20t ...
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 Johann Wolfgang (von) Goethe (28 August 1749 – 22 March 1832) was a German polymath who is widely regarded as the most influential writer in the German language. His work has had a wide-ranging influence on literary, political, and philosophi ...
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 (education), 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 (Our Child), measuring 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 flee to
Berlin Berlin ( ; ) is the Capital of Germany, capital and largest city of Germany, by both area and List of cities in Germany by population, population. With 3.7 million inhabitants, it has the List of cities in the European Union by population withi ...
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 Charlottenburg () is a Boroughs and localities of Berlin, locality of Berlin within the borough of Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf. Established as a German town law, town in 1705 and named after Sophia Charlotte of Hanover, Queen consort of Kingdom ...
. 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 Ancient Greek (, ; ) includes the forms of the Greek language used in ancient Greece and the classical antiquity, ancient world from around 1500 BC to 300 BC. It is often roughly divided into the following periods: Mycenaean Greek (), 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 Immanuel Kant (born Emanuel Kant; 22 April 1724 â€“ 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Born in Königsberg, Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, et ...
's (''
Critique of Pure Reason The ''Critique of Pure Reason'' (; 1781; second edition 1787) is a book by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in which the author seeks to determine the limits and scope of metaphysics. Also referred to as Kant's "First Critique", it was foll ...
''). 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 Ernst Grumach, 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 The Humboldt University of Berlin (, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin, Germany. The university was established by Frederick William III on the initiative of Wilhelm von Humbol ...
(1922–1923), including classics and
Christian theology Christian theology is the theology – the systematic study of the divine and religion – of Christianity, Christian belief and practice. It concentrates primarily upon the texts of the Old Testament and of the New Testament, as well as on Ch ...
under Romano Guardini. She successfully sat for the entrance examination () for the
University of Marburg The Philipps University of Marburg () is a public research university located in Marburg, Germany. It was founded in 1527 by Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, which makes it one of Germany's oldest universities and the oldest still operating Prote ...
, where Ernst Grumach had studied with
Martin Heidegger Martin Heidegger (; 26 September 1889 – 26 May 1976) was a German philosopher known for contributions to Phenomenology (philosophy), phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. His work covers a range of topics including metaphysics, art ...
(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 Rudolf Karl Bultmann (; ; 20 August 1884 – 30 July 1976) was a German Lutheran theologian and professor of the New Testament at the University of Marburg. He was one of the major figures of early 20th-century biblical studies. A prominent c ...
and philosophy with
Nicolai Hartmann Paul Nicolai Hartmann (; 20 February 1882 – 9 October 1950) was a German philosopher. He is regarded as a key representative of critical realism and as one of the most important twentieth-century metaphysicians. Biography Hartmann was born a ...
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 horeigned in the realm of thinking". Heidegger had broken away from the intellectual movement started by
Edmund Husserl Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (; 8 April 1859 – 27 April 1938) was an Austrian-German philosopher and mathematician who established the school of Phenomenology (philosophy), phenomenology. In his early work, he elaborated critiques of histori ...
, whose assistant he had been at
University of Freiburg The University of Freiburg (colloquially ), officially the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg (), is a public university, public research university located in Freiburg im Breisgau, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The university was founded in 1 ...
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 Existence is the state of having being or reality in contrast to nonexistence and nonbeing. Existence is often contrasted with essence: the essence of an entity is its essential features or qualities, which can be understood even if one do ...
" as they studied
Aristotle Aristotle (; 384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosophy, Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, a ...
's and
Plato Plato ( ; Greek language, Greek: , ; born  BC, died 348/347 BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher of the Classical Greece, Classical period who is considered a foundational thinker in Western philosophy and an innovator of the writte ...
's ''
Sophist A sophist () was a teacher in ancient Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Sophists specialized in one or more subject areas, such as philosophy, rhetoric, music, athletics and mathematics. They taught ''arete'', "virtue" or "excellen ...
'' concept of
truth Truth or verity is the Property (philosophy), property of being in accord with fact or reality.Merriam-Webster's Online Dictionarytruth, 2005 In everyday language, it is typically ascribed to things that aim to represent reality or otherwise cor ...
, 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.)
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 18-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 support for the
Nazi Party The Nazi Party, officially the National Socialist German Workers' Party ( or NSDAP), was a far-right politics, far-right political party in Germany active between 1920 and 1945 that created and supported the ideology of Nazism. Its precursor ...
after his election as rector at Freiburg University 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 while preserving their letters. The relationship was unknown until Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography of Arendt appeared in 1982. At the time of publishing, Arendt and Heidegger were deceased but Heidegger's wife, Elfride, 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 was
Hans Jonas Hans Jonas (; ; 10 May 1903 – 5 February 1993) was a German-born American philosopher. From 1955 to 1976 he was the Alvin Johnson Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Biography Jonas was born in M ...
, a Jewish classmate. Another fellow student of Heidegger's was Jonas' friend, the Jewish philosopher Günther Siegmund Stern, who would later become her first husband. Stern had completed his doctoral dissertation with Edmund Husserl at Freiburg, and was now working on his ''
Habilitation Habilitation is the highest university degree, or the procedure by which it is achieved, in Germany, France, Italy, Poland and some other European and non-English-speaking countries. The candidate fulfills a university's set criteria of excelle ...
'' thesis with Heidegger, but Arendt, involved with Heidegger, took little notice of him at the time.


''Die Schatten'' (1925)

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 feelings toward her femininity and Jewishness, writing abstractly in the third person. She describes a state of "" (alienation), on the one hand an abrupt loss 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 protection 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).


= Freiburg and Heidelberg (1926–1929)

= After a year at Marburg, Arendt spent a semester at Freiburg, attending the lectures of Husserl. In 1926 she moved to the
University of Heidelberg Heidelberg University, officially the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg (; ), is a public university, public research university in Heidelberg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. Founded in 1386 on instruction of Pope Urban VI, Heidelberg is List ...
, completing her dissertation in 1929 under Karl Jaspers. Jaspers, a friend of Heidegger, was the other leading figure of the then-new and revolutionary '' Existenzphilosophie''. Her thesis was entitled '' Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation'' (On the concept of love in the thought of
Saint Augustine Augustine of Hippo ( , ; ; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430) was a theologian and philosopher of Berbers, Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia (Roman province), Numidia, Roman North Africa. His writings deeply influenced th ...
: Attempt at a philosophical interpretation). She remained a lifelong friend of Jaspers and his wife, Gertrud Mayer, developing a deep intellectual relationship with him. At Heidelberg, her circle of friends included Hans Jonas, who had also moved from Marburg to study
Augustine Augustine of Hippo ( , ; ; 13 November 354 – 28 August 430) was a theologian and philosopher of Berber origin and the bishop of Hippo Regius in Numidia, Roman North Africa. His writings deeply influenced the development of Western philosop ...
, working on his (1930), and also a group of three young philosophers: Karl Frankenstein, Erich Neumann and 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 German Romanticism () was the dominant intellectual movement of German-speaking countries in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, influencing philosophy, aesthetics, literature, and criticism. Compared to English Romanticism, the German vari ...
. 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 A castle is a type of fortification, fortified structure built during the Middle Ages predominantly by the nobility or royalty and by Military order (monastic society), military orders. Scholars usually consider a ''castle'' to be the private ...
, at Schlossberg 16. The house was demolished in the 1960s, but the one remaining wall bears a plaque commemorating her time there. 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 The Weimar Republic, officially known as the German Reich, was the German Reich, German state from 1918 to 1933, during which it was a constitutional republic for the first time in history; hence it is also referred to, and unofficially proclai ...
, which was to become increasingly unstable over its remaining four years. Arendt, as a Jew, had little if any chance of obtaining an academic appointment in Germany. Nevertheless, she completed most of the work before she was forced to leave Germany.


Career


Germany (1929–1933)


Berlin-Potsdam (1929)

In 1929, Arendt met Günther Stern again, this time in Berlin at a New Year's masked ball, and began a relationship with him. Within a month she had moved in with him in a one-room studio, shared with a dancing school in Berlin-Halensee. Then they moved to Merkurstraße 3, Nowawes, in
Potsdam Potsdam () is the capital and largest city of the Germany, German States of Germany, state of Brandenburg. It is part of the Berlin/Brandenburg Metropolitan Region. Potsdam sits on the Havel, River Havel, a tributary of the Elbe, downstream of B ...
and were married there on 26 September. They had much in common and the marriage was welcomed by both sets of parents. In the summer, Hannah Arendt successfully applied to the for a grant to support her ''Habilitation'', which was supported by Heidegger and Jaspers among others, and in the meantime, with Günther's help was working on revisions to get her dissertation published.


''Wanderjahre'' (1929–1931)

After Arendt and Stern were married, they began two years of what Christian Dries refers to as the (years of wandering) with the ultimately fruitless aim of having Stern accepted for an academic appointment. They lived for a while in Drewitz, a southern neighborhood of Potsdam, before moving to Heidelberg, where they lived with the Jaspers. After Heidelberg, where Stern completed the first draft of his thesis, the two then moved to Frankfurt where Stern hoped to finish his writing. There, Arendt participated in the university's intellectual life, attending lectures by
Karl Mannheim Karl Mannheim (born Károly Manheim, 27 March 1893 – 9 January 1947) was a Hungarian sociologist and a key figure in classical sociology as well as one of the founders of the sociology of knowledge. Mannheim is best known for his book '' Id ...
and
Paul Tillich Paul Johannes Tillich (; ; August 20, 1886 â€“ October 22, 1965) was a German and American Christian existentialist philosopher, religious socialist, and Lutheran theologian who was one of the most influential theologians of the twenti ...
, among others. The couple collaborated intellectually, writing an article together on Rilke's (1923) and both reviewing Mannheim's (1929). The latter was Arendt's sole contribution to sociology. In both her treatment of Mannheim and Rilke, Arendt found love to be a transcendent principle "Because there is no true transcendence in this ordered world, one also cannot exceed the world, but only succeed to higher ranks". In Rilke she saw a latter day secular Augustine, describing the as the (ultimate form of religious document). Later, she would discover the limitations of transcendent love in explaining the historical events that pushed her into political action. Another theme from Rilke that she would develop was the despair of not being heard. Reflecting on Rilke's opening lines, which she placed as an epigram at the beginning of their essay

(Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?)
Arendt and Stern begin by stating:
The paradoxical, ambiguous, and desperate situation from which standpoint the ''Duino Elegies'' may alone be understood has two characteristics: the absence of an echo and the knowledge of futility. The conscious renunciation of the demand to be heard, the despair at not being able to be heard, and finally the need to speak even without an answer–these are the real reasons for the darkness, asperity, and tension of the style in which poetry indicates its own possibilities and its will to form
Arendt also published an article on Augustine (354–430) in the ''
Frankfurter Zeitung The ''Frankfurter Zeitung'' (, ) was a German-language newspaper that appeared from 1856 to 1943. It emerged from a market letter that was published in Frankfurt. In Nazi Germany, it was considered the only mass publication not completely control ...
'' to mark the 1500th anniversary of his death. She saw this article as forming a bridge between her treatment of Augustine in her dissertation and her subsequent work on Romanticism. When it became evident Stern would not succeed in obtaining an appointment, the Sterns returned to Berlin in 1931.


Return to Berlin (1931–1933)

In Berlin, where the couple initially lived in the predominantly Jewish area of (Bavarian Quarter or "Jewish Switzerland") in Schöneberg, Stern obtained a position as a staff-writer for the cultural supplement of the ''
Berliner Börsen-Courier The ''Berliner Börsen-Courier'' (Berlin stock exchange courier, BBC) was a German left-liberal daily newspaper published from 1868 to 1933. It focused primarily on prices of securities traded on the stock exchanges and securities information abo ...
'', edited by Herbert Ihering, with the help of
Bertold Brecht Eugen Berthold Friedrich Brecht (10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956), known as Bertolt Brecht and Bert Brecht, was a German theatre practitioner, playwright, and poet. Coming of age during the Weimar Republic, he had his first successes as a ...
. There he started writing using the pen name Günther Anders, i.e. "Günther Other". Arendt assisted Günther with his work, but the shadow of Heidegger hung over their relationship. While Günther was working on his , Arendt had abandoned the original subject of German Romanticism for her thesis in 1930, and turned instead to
Rahel Varnhagen Rahel Antonie Friederike Varnhagen () (née Levin, later Robert; 19 May 1771 – 7 March 1833) was a German writer who hosted one of the most prominent salons in Europe during the late-18th and early-19th centuries. She is the subject of a celebr ...
and the question of assimilation. Anne Mendelssohn had accidentally acquired a copy of Varnhagen's correspondence and excitedly introduced her to Arendt, donating her collection to her. A little later, Arendt's work on Romanticism led her to a study of Jewish salons and eventually to those of Varnhagen. In Rahel, she found qualities she felt reflected her own, particularly those of sensibility and vulnerability. Rahel, like Hannah, found her destiny in her Jewishness. Hannah Arendt would come to call Rahel Varnhagen's discovery of living with her destiny as being a "conscious pariah". This was a personal trait that Arendt had recognized in herself, although she did not embrace the term until later. Back in Berlin, Arendt found herself becoming more involved in politics and started studying political theory, and reading
Marx Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...
and
Trotsky Lev Davidovich Bronstein ( – 21 August 1940), better known as Leon Trotsky,; ; also transliterated ''Lyev'', ''Trotski'', ''Trockij'' and ''Trotzky'' was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and political theorist. He was a key figure ...
, while developing contacts at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik. Despite the political leanings of her mother and husband she never saw herself as a political leftist, justifying her activism as being through her Jewishness. Her increasing interest in Jewish politics and her examination of assimilation in her study of Varnhagen led her to publish her first article on Judaism, ("The Enlightenment and the Jewish Question", 1932). Blumenfeld had introduced her to the "
Jewish question The Jewish question was a wide-ranging debate in 19th- and 20th-century Europe that pertained to the appropriate status and treatment of Jews. The debate, which was similar to other " national questions", dealt with the civil, legal, national, ...
", which would be his lifelong concern. Meanwhile, her views on German Romanticism were evolving. She wrote a review of Hans Weil's (''The Origin of German Educational Principle'', 1930), which dealt with the emergence of (educational elite) in the time of Rahel Varnhagen. At the same time she began to be occupied by
Max Weber Maximilian Carl Emil Weber (; ; 21 April 186414 June 1920) was a German Sociology, sociologist, historian, jurist, and political economy, political economist who was one of the central figures in the development of sociology and the social sc ...
's description of the status of Jewish people within a state as ( pariah people) in his '' Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft'' (1922), while borrowing Bernard Lazare's term ''paria conscient'' (conscious pariah) with which she identified. In both these articles she advanced the views of Johann Herder. Another interest of hers at the time was the status of women, resulting in her 1932 review of Alice Rühle-Gerstel's book (Contemporary Women's Issues: A psychological balance sheet). Although not a supporter of the women's movement, the review was sympathetic. At least in terms of the status of women at that time, she was skeptical of the movement's ability to achieve political change. She was also critical of the movement, because it was a women's movement, rather than contributing with men to a political movement, and abstract rather than striving for concrete goals. In this manner she echoed
Rosa Luxemburg Rosa Luxemburg ( ; ; ; born Rozalia Luksenburg; 5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Polish and naturalised-German revolutionary and Marxist theorist. She was a key figure of the socialist movements in Poland and Germany in the early 20t ...
. Like Luxemburg, she would later criticize Jewish movements for the same reason. Arendt consistently prioritized political over social questions. By 1932, faced with a deteriorating political situation, Arendt was deeply troubled by reports that Heidegger was speaking at
National Socialist Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During Hitler's rise to power, it was frequen ...
meetings. She wrote, asking him to deny that he was attracted to National Socialism. Heidegger replied that he did not seek to deny the rumors (which were true), and merely assured her that his feelings for her were unchanged. As a Jew in Nazi Germany, Arendt was prevented from making a living and discriminated against and confided to Anne Mendelssohn that emigration was probably inevitable. Jaspers had tried to persuade her to consider herself as a German first, a position she distanced herself from, pointing out that she was a Jew and that "" (For me, Germany is the mother tongue, philosophy and poetry), rather than her identity. By 1933, life for the Jewish population in Germany was becoming precarious.
Adolf Hitler Adolf Hitler (20 April 1889 – 30 April 1945) was an Austrian-born German politician who was the dictator of Nazi Germany from 1933 until Death of Adolf Hitler, his suicide in 1945. Adolf Hitler's rise to power, He rose to power as the lea ...
became (Chancellor) in January, and the Reichstag was burned down () the following month. This led to the suspension of
civil liberties Civil liberties are guarantees and freedoms that governments commit not to abridge, either by constitution, legislation, or judicial interpretation, without due process. Though the scope of the term differs between countries, civil liberties of ...
, with attacks on the left, and, in particular, members of the
Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands The Communist Party of Germany (, ; KPD ) was a major far-left political party in the Weimar Republic during the interwar period, German resistance to Nazism, underground resistance movement in Nazi Germany, and minor party in Allied-occupied ...
(German Communist Party: KPD). Stern, who had communist associations, fled to Paris, but Arendt stayed on to become an activist. Knowing her time was limited, she used the apartment at Opitzstraße 6 in Berlin-Steglitz that she had occupied with Stern since 1932 as an underground railway way-station for fugitives. Her rescue operation there is now recognized with a plaque on the wall. Arendt had already positioned herself as a critic of the rising Nazi Party in 1932 by publishing "''Adam-Müller-Renaissance?''" a critique of the appropriation of the life of
Adam Müller Adam Heinrich Müller (30 June 1779 – 17 January 1829; after 1827 Ritter von Nitterdorf) was a German-Austrian conservative philosopher, literary critic, and political economist, working within the romantic tradition. Biography Early life ...
to support right wing ideology. The beginnings of anti-Jewish laws and boycott came in the spring of 1933. Confronted with systemic antisemitism, Arendt adopted the '' motiv'' "If one is attacked as a Jew one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man." This was Arendt's introduction of the concept of Jew as Pariah that would occupy her for the rest of her life in her Jewish writings. She took a public position by publishing part of her largely completed biography of Rahel Varnhagen as "" ("Original Assimilation: An Epilogue to the One Hundredth Anniversary of Rahel Varnhagen's Death") in the on 7 March 1933 and a little later also in . In the article she argues that the age of assimilation that began with Varnhagen's generation had come to an end with an official state policy of antisemitism. She opened with the declaration:
Today in Germany it seems Jewish ''assimilation'' must declare its bankruptcy. The general social antisemitism and its official legitimation affects in the first instance assimilated Jews, who can no longer protect themselves through baptism or by emphasizing their differences from Eastern Judaism.
As a Jew, Arendt was anxious to inform the world of what was happening to her people in 1930–1933. She surrounded herself with Zionist activists, including Kurt Blumenfeld,
Martin Buber Martin Buber (; , ; ; 8 February 1878 – 13 June 1965) was an Austrian-Israeli philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of existentialism centered on the distinction between the I and Thou, I–Thou relationship and the I� ...
and Salman Schocken, and started to research antisemitism. Arendt had access to the
Prussian State Library The Berlin State Library (; officially abbreviated as ''SBB'', colloquially ''Stabi'') is a universal library in Berlin, Germany, and a property of the German public cultural organization the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (). Founded i ...
for her work on Varnhagen. Blumenfeld's ''Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland'' ( Zionist Federation of Germany) persuaded her to use this access to obtain evidence of the extent of antisemitism, for a planned speech to the
Zionist Congress The Zionist Congress was established in 1897 by Theodor Herzl as the supreme organ of the Zionist Organization (ZO) and its legislative authority. In 1960 the names were changed to World Zionist Congress ( ''HaKongres HaTsioni HaOlami'') and Wor ...
in Prague. This research was illegal at the time. Her actions led to her being denounced by a librarian for anti-state propaganda, resulting in the arrest of both Arendt and her mother by the ''
Gestapo The (, ), Syllabic abbreviation, abbreviated Gestapo (), was the official secret police of Nazi Germany and in German-occupied Europe. The force was created by Hermann Göring in 1933 by combining the various political police agencies of F ...
''. They served eight days in prison but her notebooks were in code and could not be deciphered, and she was released by a young, sympathetic arresting officer to await trial. This incident is the subject of the play ''Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library'', by Jenny Lyn Bader, which premiered in 2019 in West Orange, New Jersey.


Exile: France (1933–1941)


Paris (1933–1940)

On release, realizing the danger she was now in, Arendt and her mother fled Germany following the established escape route over the
Ore Mountains The Ore Mountains (, or ; ) lie along the Czech–German border, separating the historical regions of Bohemia in the Czech Republic and Saxony in Germany. The highest peaks are the Klínovec in the Czech Republic (German: ''Keilberg'') at ab ...
by night into Czechoslovakia and on to Prague and then by train to
Geneva Geneva ( , ; ) ; ; . is the List of cities in Switzerland, second-most populous city in Switzerland and the most populous in French-speaking Romandy. Situated in the southwest of the country, where the Rhône exits Lake Geneva, it is the ca ...
. In Geneva, she made a conscious decision to commit herself to "the Jewish cause". She obtained work with a friend of her mother's at the
League of Nations The League of Nations (LN or LoN; , SdN) was the first worldwide intergovernmental organisation whose principal mission was to maintain world peace. It was founded on 10 January 1920 by the Paris Peace Conference (1919–1920), Paris Peace ...
'
Jewish Agency for Palestine The Jewish Agency for Israel (), formerly known as the Jewish Agency for Palestine, is the largest Jews, Jewish non-profit organization in the world. It was established in 1929 as the operative branch of the World Zionist Organization (WZO). ...
, distributing visas and writing speeches. From Geneva the Arendts traveled to Paris in the autumn, where she was reunited with Stern, joining a stream of refugees. While Arendt had left Germany without papers, her mother had travel documents and returned to Königsberg and her husband. In Paris, she befriended Stern's cousin, the
Marxist Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflic ...
literary critic and philosopher
Walter Benjamin Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin ( ; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Jewish mysticism, Western M ...
and also the Jewish French philosopher
Raymond Aron Raymond Claude Ferdinand Aron (; ; 14 March 1905 – 17 October 1983) was a French philosopher, sociologist, political scientist, historian and journalist, one of France's most prominent thinkers of the 20th century. Aron is best known for his ...
. Arendt was now an ''
émigré An ''émigré'' () is a person who has emigrated, often with a connotation of political or social exile or self-exile. The word is the past participle of the French verb ''émigrer'' meaning "to emigrate". French Huguenots Many French Hugueno ...
e'', an exile, stateless, without papers, and had turned her back on the Germany and Germans of the . Her legal status was precarious and she was coping with a foreign language and culture, all of which took its toll on her mentally and physically. In 1934 she started working for the Zionist-funded outreach program Agriculture et Artisanat, giving lectures and organizing clothing, documents, medications and education for Jewish youth seeking to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine, mainly as agricultural workers. Initially she was employed as a secretary, and then office manager. To improve her skills she studied French,
Hebrew Hebrew (; ''ʿÎbrit'') is a Northwest Semitic languages, Northwest Semitic language within the Afroasiatic languages, Afroasiatic language family. A regional dialect of the Canaanite languages, it was natively spoken by the Israelites and ...
, and
Yiddish Yiddish, historically Judeo-German, is a West Germanic language historically spoken by Ashkenazi Jews. It originated in 9th-century Central Europe, and provided the nascent Ashkenazi community with a vernacular based on High German fused with ...
. In this way she was able to support herself and her husband. When the organization closed in 1935, her work for Blumenfeld and the Zionists in Germany brought her into contact with the wealthy philanthropist Baroness Germaine Alice de Rothschild (born Halphen, 1884–1975), wife of
Édouard Alphonse James de Rothschild Édouard Alphonse James de Rothschild (24 February 1868 – 30 June 1949), also known as Baron Édouard de Rothschild was an aristocrat, French financier and a member of the prominent Rothschild banking family of France. Early life Born in Pari ...
, becoming her assistant. In this position she oversaw the baroness' contributions to Jewish charities through the Paris Consistoire, although she had little time for the family as a whole. Later in 1935, Arendt joined
Youth Aliyah Youth Aliyah (Hebrew: עלית הנוער, ''Aliyat Hano'ar'', German: Jugend-Alijah, Youth Immigration) is a Jewish organization that rescued thousands of Jewish children from the Nazis during the Third Reich. Youth Aliyah arranged for their r ...
(Youth immigration), an organization similar to Agriculture et Artisanat that was founded in Berlin on the day Hitler seized power. It was affiliated with Hadassah, which later saved many from the
Holocaust The Holocaust (), known in Hebrew language, Hebrew as the (), was the genocide of History of the Jews in Europe, European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy ...
, and there Arendt eventually became Secretary-General (1935–1939). Her work with Youth Aliyah also involved finding food, clothing, social workers, and lawyers, but above all, fund raising. She made her first visit to British Mandate of Palestine in 1935, accompanying one of these groups and meeting with her cousin Ernst Fürst there. With the Nazi
annexation of Austria The (, or , ), also known as the (, ), was the annexation of the Federal State of Austria into Nazi Germany on 12 March 1938. The idea of an (a united Austria and Germany that would form a " Greater Germany") arose after the 1871 unifica ...
and invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Paris was flooded with refugees, and she became the special agent for the rescue of the children from those countries. In 1938, Arendt completed her biography of Rahel Varnhagen, although this was not published until 1957. In April 1939, following the devastating ''
Kristallnacht ( ) or the Night of Broken Glass, also called the November pogrom(s) (, ), was a pogrom against Jews carried out by the Nazi Party's (SA) and (SS) paramilitary forces along with some participation from the Hitler Youth and German civilia ...
''
pogrom A pogrom is a violent riot incited with the aim of Massacre, massacring or expelling an ethnic or religious group, particularly Jews. The term entered the English language from Russian to describe late 19th- and early 20th-century Anti-Jewis ...
of November 1938, Martha Beerwald realized her daughter would not return and made the decision to leave her husband and join Arendt in Paris. One stepdaughter had died and the other had moved to England, Martin Beerwald would not leave and she no longer had any close ties to Königsberg.


= Heinrich Blücher

= In 1936, Arendt met the self-educated Berlin poet and
Marxist Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a dialectical and materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as historical materialism, to analyse class relations, social conflic ...
philosopher Heinrich Blücher in Paris. Blücher had been a Spartacist and then a founding member of the KPD, but had been expelled due to his work in the ( Conciliator faction). Although Arendt had rejoined Stern in 1933, their marriage existed in name only, with their having separated in Berlin. She fulfilled her social obligations and used the name Hannah Stern, but the relationship effectively ended when Stern, perhaps recognizing the danger better than she, emigrated to America with his parents in 1936. In 1937, Arendt was stripped of her
German citizenship German nationality law details the conditions by which an individual is a national of Germany. The primary law governing these requirements is the Nationality Act, which came into force on 1 January 1914. Germany is a member state of the Euro ...
and she and Stern divorced. She had begun seeing more of Blücher, and eventually they began living together. It was Blücher's long political activism that began to move Arendt's thinking toward political action. Arendt and Blücher married on 16 January 1940, shortly after their divorces were finalized.


Internment and escape (1940–1941)

On 5 May 1940, in anticipation of the German invasion of France and the
Low Countries The Low Countries (; ), historically also known as the Netherlands (), is a coastal lowland region in Northwestern Europe forming the lower Drainage basin, basin of the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta and consisting today of the three modern "Bene ...
that month, the
military governor of Paris The military governor of Paris is a post within the French Army. He commands the garrison of Paris and represents all the military based in Paris at high state occasions. He is also responsible (subordinate to the President of France) for organiz ...
issued a proclamation ordering all "enemy aliens" between 17 and 55 who had come from Germany (predominantly Jews) to report separately for
internment Internment is the imprisonment of people, commonly in large groups, without Criminal charge, charges or Indictment, intent to file charges. The term is especially used for the confinement "of enemy citizens in wartime or of terrorism suspects ...
. The women were gathered together in the Vélodrome d'Hiver on 15 May, so Hannah Arendt's mother, being older than 55, was allowed to stay in Paris. Arendt described the process of making
refugees A refugee, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), is a person "forced to flee their own country and seek safety in another country. They are unable to return to their own country because of feared persecution as ...
as "the new type of human being created by contemporary history ... put into concentration camps by their foes and into internment camps by their friends". The men, including Blücher, were sent to Camp Vernet in southern France, close to the Spanish border. Arendt and the other women were sent to Camp Gurs, to the west of
Gurs Gurs () in the Pyrénées-Atlantiques department in south-western France. History Gurs was the site of the Gurs internment camp. Nothing remains of the camp; after World War II, a forest was planted on the site where it stood. Geography Gurs ...
, a week later. The camp had earlier been set up to accommodate refugees from Spain. On 22 June, France capitulated and signed the Compiègne armistice, dividing the country. Gurs was in the southern
Vichy Vichy (, ; ) is a city in the central French department of Allier. Located on the Allier river, it is a major spa and resort town and during World War II was the capital of Vichy France. As of 2021, Vichy has a population of 25,789. Known f ...
controlled section. Arendt describes how, "in the resulting chaos we succeeded in getting hold of liberation papers with which we were able to leave the camp", which she did with approximately 200 of the 7,000 women held there, about four weeks later. There was no Résistance then, but she managed to walk and hitchhike north to
Montauban Montauban (, ; ) is a commune in the southern French department of Tarn-et-Garonne. It is the capital of the department and lies north of Toulouse. Montauban is the most populated town in Tarn-et-Garonne, and the sixth most populated of Oc ...
, near
Toulouse Toulouse (, ; ; ) is a city in southern France, the Prefectures in France, prefecture of the Haute-Garonne department and of the Occitania (administrative region), Occitania region. The city is on the banks of the Garonne, River Garonne, from ...
where she knew she would find help. Montauban had become an unofficial capital for former detainees, and Arendt's friend Lotta Sempell Klembort was staying there. Blücher's camp had been evacuated in the wake of the German advance, and he managed to escape from a forced march, making his way to Montauban, where the two of them led a fugitive life. Soon they were joined by Anne Mendelssohn and Arendt's mother. Escape from France was extremely difficult without official papers; their friend
Walter Benjamin Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin ( ; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Jewish mysticism, Western M ...
had taken his own life, fearing that he would be apprehended trying to escape to Spain. One of the best-known illegal routes operated out of
Marseille Marseille (; ; see #Name, below) is a city in southern France, the Prefectures in France, prefecture of the Departments of France, department of Bouches-du-Rhône and of the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur Regions of France, region. Situated in the ...
, where Varian Fry, an American journalist, worked to raise funds, forge papers, and bribe officials with Hiram Bingham, the American vice-consul there. Fry and Bingham secured exit papers and American visas for thousands, and with help from Günther Stern, Arendt, her husband, and her mother managed to secure the requisite permits to travel by train in January 1941 through Spain to Lisbon, Portugal, where they rented a flat at Rua da Sociedade Farmacêutica, 6b. They eventually secured passage to New York in May on the
Companhia Colonial de Navegação The Companhia Colonial de Navegação (CCN) (literally "Colonial Navigation Company") was a Portugal, Portuguese shipping company that was founded in 1922 and merged into another company in 1974. Its ships carried freight as well as passengers. ...
's S/S ''Guiné II''. A few months later, Fry's operations were shut down and the borders sealed.


New York (1941–1975)


World War II (1941–1945)

Upon arriving in New York City on 22 May 1941 with very little, Hannah's family received assistance from the
Zionist Organization of America The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA; ) is an American nonprofit pro-Israel organization. Founded in 1897, as the Federation of American Zionists, it was the first official Zionist organization in the United States. Early in the 20th century ...
and the local German immigrant population, including
Paul Tillich Paul Johannes Tillich (; ; August 20, 1886 â€“ October 22, 1965) was a German and American Christian existentialist philosopher, religious socialist, and Lutheran theologian who was one of the most influential theologians of the twenti ...
and neighbors from Königsberg. They rented rooms at 317 West 95th Street and Martha Arendt joined them there in June. There was an urgent need to acquire English, and it was decided that Hannah Arendt should spend two months with an American family in
Winchester, Massachusetts Winchester is a town in Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States, located 8.2 miles (13.2 km) north of downtown Boston as part of the Greater Boston metropolitan area. It is also one of the List of Massachusetts locations by per capit ...
, through Self-Help for Refugees, in July. She found the experience difficult but formulated her early appraisal of American life, (The fundamental contradiction of the country is political freedom coupled with social slavery). On returning to New York, Arendt was anxious to resume writing and became active in the German-Jewish community, publishing her first article, "From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today" (in translation from her German) in July 1941. While she was working on this article, she was looking for employment and in November 1941 was hired by the New York German-language Jewish newspaper ' and from 1941 to 1945, she wrote a political column for it, covering antisemitism, refugees and the need for a Jewish army. She also contributed to the ''
Menorah Journal ''The Menorah Journal'' (1915–1962) was a Jewish-American magazine, founded in New York City. Some have called it "the leading English-language Jewish intellectual and literary journal of its era." The journal lasted from 1915 until ...
'', a Jewish-American magazine, and other German ''émigré'' publications. Arendt's first full-time salaried job came in 1944, when she became the director of research and executive director for the newly emerging Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, a project of the Conference on Jewish Relations. She was recruited "because of her great interest in the Commission's activities, her previous experience as an administrator, and her connections with Germany". There she compiled lists of Jewish cultural assets in Germany and Nazi occupied Europe, to aid in their recovery after the war. Together with her husband, she lived at
370 Riverside Drive 370 Riverside Drive is a building on Riverside Drive (Manhattan), Riverside Drive and the north side of West 109th Street on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, New York City. A number of notable people have lived here, including Hannah Arendt and ...
in New York City and at
Kingston, New York Kingston is the only Administrative divisions of New York#City, city in, and the county seat of, Ulster County, New York, United States. It is north of New York City and south of Albany, New York, Albany. The city's metropolitan area is grou ...
, where Blücher taught at nearby
Bard College Bard College is a private college, private Liberal arts colleges in the United States, liberal arts college in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. The campus overlooks the Hudson River and Catskill Mountains within the Hudson River Historic District ...
for many years.


Post-war (1945–1975)

In July 1946, Arendt left her position at the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction to become an editor at
Schocken Books Schocken Books is a book publishing imprint of Penguin Random House that specializes in Jewish literary works. Originally established in 1931 by Salman Schocken as Schocken Verlag in Berlin, the company later moved to Israel and then the Unit ...
, which later published some of her works. In 1948, she became engaged with the campaign of
Judah Magnes Judah Leon Magnes (; July 5, 1877 – October 27, 1948) was a prominent Reform rabbi in both the United States of America and Mandatory Palestine. He is best remembered as a leader in the pacifist movement of the World War I period, his advocacy ...
for a solution to the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is an ongoing military and political conflict about Territory, land and self-determination within the territory of the former Mandatory Palestine. Key aspects of the conflict include the Israeli occupation ...
. She famously opposed the establishment of a Jewish nation-state in Palestine and initially also opposed the establishment of a binational Arab-Jewish state. Instead, she advocated for the inclusion of Palestine into a multi-ethnic federation. Only in 1948 in an effort to forestall partition did she support a binational
one-state solution The one-state solution is a proposed approach to the Israeli–Palestinian peace process. It stipulates the establishment of a single state within the boundaries of what was Mandatory Palestine between 1920 and 1948, today consisting of the co ...
. She returned to the Commission in August 1949. In her capacity as executive secretary, she traveled to Europe, where she worked in Germany, Britain, and France (December 1949 to March 1950) to negotiate the return of archival material from German institutions, an experience she found frustrating, but provided regular field reports. In January 1952, she became secretary to the Board, although the work of the organization was winding down and she was simultaneously pursuing her own intellectual activities; she retained this position until her death. Arendt's work on cultural restitution provided further material for her study of totalitarianism. In the 1950s Arendt published ''
The Origins of Totalitarianism ''The Origins of Totalitarianism'', published in 1951, was Hannah Arendt's first major work, where she describes and analyzes Nazism and Stalinism as the major totalitarian political movements of the first half of the 20th century. History '' ...
'' (1951) and '' The Human Condition'' (1958), followed by '' On Revolution'' (1963). Arendt became a
naturalized citizen Naturalization (or naturalisation) is the legal act or process by which a non-national of a country acquires the nationality of that country after birth. The definition of naturalization by the International Organization for Migration of the ...
of the United States on December 10, 1951. Arendt had begun corresponding with the American author Mary McCarthy, six years her junior, in 1950 and they soon became lifelong friends. She had started seeing Martin Heidegger again, and had what the American writer
Adam Kirsch Adam Kirsch (born 1976) is an American poet and literary critic. He is on the seminar faculty of Columbia University's Center for American Studies, and has taught at YIVO. Life and career Kirsch was born in Los Angeles in 1976. He is the son of ...
called a "quasi-romance", lasting for two years, with the man who had previously been her mentor, teacher, and lover. During this time, Arendt defended him against critics who noted his enthusiastic membership in the Nazi Party. She portrayed Heidegger as a naïve man swept up by forces beyond his control, and pointed out that Heidegger's philosophy had nothing to do with National Socialism. She suspected that loyal followers of Horkheimer and
Adorno Theodor W. Adorno ( ; ; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; 11 September 1903 – 6 August 1969) was a German philosopher, musicologist, and social theorist. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come ...
in Frankfurt were plotting against Heidegger. For Adorno she had a real aversion: "Half a Jew and one of the most repugnant men I know". According to Arendt, the
Frankfurt School The Frankfurt School is a school of thought in sociology and critical theory. It is associated with the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, Institute for Social Research founded in 1923 at the University of Frankfurt am Main ...
was willing, and quite capable of doing so, to destroy Heidegger: "For years they have branded anti-Semitism on anyone in Germany who opposes them, or have threatened to raise such an accusation". In 1961 she traveled to
Jerusalem Jerusalem is a city in the Southern Levant, on a plateau in the Judaean Mountains between the Mediterranean Sea, Mediterranean and the Dead Sea. It is one of the List of oldest continuously inhabited cities, oldest cities in the world, and ...
to report on Eichmann's trial for ''
The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...
''. This report strongly influenced her popular recognition, and raised much controversy (''see
below Below may refer to: *Earth *Ground (disambiguation) *Soil *Floor * Bottom (disambiguation) *Less than *Temperatures below freezing *Hell or underworld People with the surname * Ernst von Below (1863–1955), German World War I general * Fred Belo ...
''). Her work was recognized by many awards, including the Danish
Sonning Prize The Sonning Prize () is a Danish culture prize awarded biennially for outstanding contributions to European culture. It is named after the Danish editor and author Carl Johan Sonning (1879–1937), who established the prize by his will. A prize ...
in 1975 for Contributions to European Civilization. A few years later she spoke in New York City on the legitimacy of violence as a political act: "Generally speaking, violence always rises out of impotence. It is the hope of those who have no power to find a substitute for it and this hope, I think, is in vain. Violence can destroy power, but it can never replace it."


= Teaching

= Arendt taught at many institutions of higher learning from 1951 onward, but, preserving her independence, consistently refused
tenure-track Tenure is a type of academic appointment that protects its holder from being fired or laid off except for cause, or under extraordinary circumstances such as financial exigency or program discontinuation. Academic tenure originated in the United ...
positions. She was a
visiting scholar In academia, a visiting scholar, visiting scientist, visiting researcher, visiting fellow, visiting lecturer, or visiting professor is a scholar from an institution who visits a host university to teach, lecture, or perform research on a topic fo ...
at
Princeton University Princeton University is a private university, private Ivy League research university in Princeton, New Jersey, United States. Founded in 1746 in Elizabeth, New Jersey, Elizabeth as the College of New Jersey, Princeton is the List of Colonial ...
(where she was the first woman to be appointed a full professor in 1959),
University of California at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after the Anglo-Irish philosopher George Berkele ...
,
Columbia University Columbia University in the City of New York, commonly referred to as Columbia University, is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New York City. Established in 1754 as King's College on the grounds of Trinity Churc ...
,
Northwestern University Northwestern University (NU) is a Private university, private research university in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Established in 1851 to serve the historic Northwest Territory, it is the oldest University charter, chartered university in ...
, and
Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...
. She also taught at the
University of Chicago The University of Chicago (UChicago, Chicago, or UChi) is a Private university, private research university in Chicago, Illinois, United States. Its main campus is in the Hyde Park, Chicago, Hyde Park neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, Chic ...
from 1963 to 1967, where she was a member of the Committee on Social Thought;
Yale University Yale University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701, Yale is the List of Colonial Colleges, third-oldest institution of higher education in the United Stat ...
, where she was a
fellow A fellow is a title and form of address for distinguished, learned, or skilled individuals in academia, medicine, research, and industry. The exact meaning of the term differs in each field. In learned society, learned or professional society, p ...
; and the Center for Advanced Studies at
Wesleyan University Wesleyan University ( ) is a Private university, private liberal arts college, liberal arts university in Middletown, Connecticut, United States. It was founded in 1831 as a Men's colleges in the United States, men's college under the Methodi ...
(1961–62, 1962–63). From 1967 she was a professor at
The New School for Social Research The New School for Social Research (NSSR), previously known as The University in Exile and The New School University, is a graduate-level educational division of The New School in New York City, United States. NSSR enrolls more than 1,000 stud ...
in
Manhattan Manhattan ( ) is the most densely populated and geographically smallest of the Boroughs of New York City, five boroughs of New York City. Coextensive with New York County, Manhattan is the County statistics of the United States#Smallest, larg ...
, New York City. She was elected a fellow of the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (The Academy) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, and other ...
in 1962 and a member of the
American Academy of Arts and Letters The American Academy of Arts and Letters is a 300-member honor society whose goal is to "foster, assist, and sustain excellence" in American literature, Music of the United States, music, and Visual art of the United States, art. Its fixed number ...
in 1964. In 1974, Arendt was instrumental in the creation of Structured Liberal Education (SLE) at
Stanford University Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California, United States. It was founded in 1885 by railroad magnate Leland Stanford (the eighth ...
. She wrote a letter to the president of Stanford to persuade the university to enact Stanford history professor Mark Mancall's vision of a residentially-based humanities program. At the time of her death, she was University Professor of
Political Philosophy Political philosophy studies the theoretical and conceptual foundations of politics. It examines the nature, scope, and Political legitimacy, legitimacy of political institutions, such as State (polity), states. This field investigates different ...
at The New School.


Relationships

In addition to her affair with Heidegger, and her two marriages, Arendt had close friendships. Since her death, her correspondence with many of them has been published, revealing much information about her thinking. To her friends she was both loyal and generous, dedicating several of her works to them. (friendship) she described as being one of "" (the active modes of being alive), and, to her, friendship was central both to her life and to the concept of politics. Hans Jonas described her as having a "genius for friendship", and, in her own words, "" (love of friendship). Her philosophy-based friendships were male and European, while her later American friendships were more diverse, literary, and political. Although she became an American citizen in 1950, her cultural roots remained European, and her language remained her German "" (mother tongue). She surrounded herself with German-speaking ''émigrés'', sometimes referred to as "The Tribe". To her, (real people) were "pariahs", not in the sense of outcasts, but in the sense of outsiders, unassimilated, with the virtue of "social nonconformism ... the ''sine qua non'' of intellectual achievement", a sentiment she shared with Jaspers. Arendt always had a (best friend emale. In her teens she had formed a lifelong relationship with her , Anne Mendelssohn Weil ("Ännchen"). After she emigrated to America, Hilde Fränkel, Paul Tillich's secretary and mistress, filled that role until the latter died in 1950. After the war, Arendt was able to return to Germany and renew her relationship with Weil, who made several visits to New York, especially after Blücher's death in 1970. Their last meeting was in Tegna, Switzerland in 1975, shortly before Arendt's death. With Fränkel's death, Mary McCarthy became Arendt's closest friend and confidante.


Final illness and death

Heinrich Blücher had survived a
cerebral aneurysm An intracranial aneurysm, also known as a cerebral aneurysm, is a Cerebrovascular disease, cerebrovascular disorder characterized by a localized dilation or ballooning of a blood vessel in the brain due to a weakness in the vessel wall. These a ...
in 1961 and remained unwell after 1963. On 31 October 1970, he died of a heart attack. A devastated Arendt had previously told Mary McCarthy, "Life without him would be unthinkable". Arendt was also a heavy smoker and was frequently depicted with a cigarette in her hand. She sustained a near-fatal heart attack while lecturing in Scotland in May 1974, and although she recovered, she remained in poor health and continued to smoke. On the evening of 4 December 1975, shortly after her 69th birthday, she had a heart attack in her apartment while entertaining friends, and was pronounced dead at the scene. Her ashes were buried alongside those of Blücher at Bard College, in
Annandale-on-Hudson, New York Annandale-on-Hudson is a Hamlet (New York), hamlet in Dutchess County, New York, United States, located in the Hudson Valley town of Red Hook, New York, Red Hook, across the Hudson River from Kingston, New York, Kingston. The hamlet consists main ...
, in May 1976. After Arendt's death the title page of the final part of ''The Life of the Mind'' ("Judging") was found in her typewriter, which she had just started, consisting of the title and two epigraphs. This has subsequently been reproduced in the edited version of her ''Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy''.(''see
image An image or picture is a visual representation. An image can be Two-dimensional space, two-dimensional, such as a drawing, painting, or photograph, or Three-dimensional space, three-dimensional, such as a carving or sculpture. Images may be di ...
'').


Work

Arendt wrote works on
intellectual history Intellectual history (also the history of ideas) is the study of the history of human thought and of intellectuals, people who conceptualization, conceptualize, discuss, write about, and concern themselves with ideas. The investigative premise of ...
as a political theorist, using events and actions to develop insights into contemporary
totalitarian Totalitarianism is a political system and a form of government that prohibits opposition from political parties, disregards and outlaws the political claims of individual and group opposition to the state, and completely controls the public sph ...
movements and the threat to human freedom presented by scientific abstraction and bourgeois morality. Intellectually, she was an independent thinker, a loner, not a "joiner", separating herself from schools of thought or ideology. In addition to her major texts she published anthologies, including '' Between Past and Future'' (1961), ''Men in Dark Times'' (1968), and ''Crises of the Republic'' (1972). She also contributed to many publications, including ''
The New York Review of Books ''The New York Review of Books'' (or ''NYREV'' or ''NYRB'') is a semi-monthly magazine with articles on literature, culture, economics, science and current affairs. Published in New York City, it is inspired by the idea that the discussion of ...
'', '' Commonweal'', ''
Dissent Dissent is an opinion, philosophy or sentiment of non-agreement or opposition to a prevailing idea or policy enforced under the authority of a government, political party or other entity or individual. A dissenting person may be referred to as ...
'' and ''
The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...
''. She is perhaps best known for her accounts of
Adolf Eichmann Otto Adolf Eichmann ( ;"Eichmann"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''. ; 19 March 1906 â€“ 1 Ju ...
and his trial, because of the intense controversy that it generated.


Political theory and philosophical system

While Arendt never developed a systematic political theory and her writing does not easily lend itself to categorization, the tradition of thought most closely identified with Arendt is that of
civic republicanism Classical republicanism, also known as civic republicanism or civic humanism, is a form of republicanism developed in the Renaissance inspired by the governmental forms and writings of classical antiquity, especially such classical writers as Ar ...
, from Aristotle to Tocqueville. Her political concept is centered around
active citizenship Active citizenship involves citizens having control over their daily lives as users of public services, allowing them to influence decisions, voice concerns, and engage with service provision. This includes both choice and voice, enabling citize ...
that emphasizes
civic engagement Civic engagement or civic participation is any individual or group activity addressing issues of public concern. Civic engagement includes communities working together or individuals working alone in both political and non-political actions to ...
and collective deliberation. She believed that no matter how bad, government could never succeed in extinguishing human freedom, despite holding that modern societies frequently retreat from democratic freedom with its inherent disorder for the relative comfort of administrative bureaucracy. Some have claimed her political legacy is her strong defence of freedom in the face of an increasingly less than free world. She does not adhere to a single systematic philosophy, but rather spans a range of subjects covering totalitarianism, revolution, the nature of freedom, and the faculties of thought and judgment. While she is best known for her work on "dark times", the nature of totalitarianism and evil, she imbued this with a spark of hope and confidence in the nature of Mankind:
That even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination might well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given to them. ''Men in Dark Times'' (1968)


''Love and Saint Augustine'' (1929)

Arendt's doctoral thesis, ('' Love and Saint Augustine. Towards a philosophical interpretation''), was published in 1929 and attracted critical interest, although an English translation did not appear until 1996. In this work she combined approaches of both Heidegger and Jaspers. Arendt's interpretation of love in the work of Augustine deals with three concepts, love as craving or desire (''Amor qua appetitus''), love in the relationship between man (''creatura'') and creator (''Creator – Creatura''), and neighborly love (''Dilectio proximi''). Love as craving anticipates the future, while love for the Creator deals with the remembered past. Of the three, ''dilectio proximi'' or '' caritas'' is perceived as the most fundamental, to which the first two are oriented, which she treats as ''vita socialis'' (social life) – the second of the
Great Commandments The Great Commandment (or Greatest Commandment) is a name used in the New Testament to describe the first of two commandments cited by Jesus in Matthew 22 (), Mark 12 (), and in answer to him in Luke 10 (), According to Jesus of Nazareth, the ...
(or
Golden Rule The Golden Rule is the principle of treating others as one would want to be treated by them. It is sometimes called an ethics of reciprocity, meaning that one should reciprocate to others how one would like them to treat the person (not neces ...
) "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" uniting and transcending the former. Augustine's influence (and Jaspers' views on his work) persisted in Arendt's writings for the rest of her life. Some of the '' leitmotifs'' of her canon were apparent, introducing the concept of (Natality) as a key condition of human existence and its role in the development of the individual, developing this further in ''The Human Condition'' (1958). She explained that the construct of natality was implied in her discussion of new beginnings and Man's elation to the Creator as ''nova creatura''. The centrality of the theme of birth and renewal is apparent in the constant reference to Augustinian thought, and specifically the innovative nature of birth, from this, her first work, to her last, ''The Life of the Mind''. Love is another connecting theme. In addition to the Augustinian loves expostulated in her dissertation, the phrase ''amor mundi'' (love of the world) is one often associated with Arendt and both permeates her work and was an absorbing passion throughout her work. She took the phrase from Augustine's homily on the first epistle of St John, "If love of the world dwell in us". ''Amor mundi'' was her original title for ''The Human Condition'' (1958), the subtitle of Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography (1982), the title of a collection of writing on faith in her work and is the newsletter of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.


''The Origins of Totalitarianism'' (1951)

Arendt's first major book, ''The Origins of Totalitarianism'' (1951), examined the roots of
Stalinism Stalinism (, ) is the Totalitarianism, totalitarian means of governing and Marxism–Leninism, Marxist–Leninist policies implemented in the Soviet Union (USSR) from History of the Soviet Union (1927–1953), 1927 to 1953 by dictator Jose ...
and
Nazism Nazism (), formally named National Socialism (NS; , ), is the far-right totalitarian socio-political ideology and practices associated with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party (NSDAP) in Germany. During Hitler's rise to power, it was fre ...
, structured as three essays, "Antisemitism", "Imperialism", and "Totalitarianism". Arendt argues that totalitarianism was a "novel form of government," that "differs essentially from other forms of political oppression known to us such as despotism, tyranny and dictatorship" in that it applied terror to subjugate mass populations rather than just political adversaries. Arendt also maintained that Jewry was not the operative factor in the Holocaust, but merely a convenient proxy because Nazism was about terror and consistency, not merely eradicating Jews. Arendt explained the tyranny using Kant's phrase "'' radical evil''", by which their victims became "superfluous people". In later editions she enlarged the text to include her work on "Ideology and Terror: A novel form of government" and the Hungarian Revolution, but then published the latter separately. Criticism of ''Origins'' has often focused on its portrayal of the two movements, Hitlerism and Stalinism, as equally tyrannical.


''Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess'' (1957)

Arendt's on Rahel Varnhagen was completed while she was living in exile in Paris in 1938, but not published till 1957, in the United Kingdom by East and West Library, part of the
Leo Baeck Institute The Leo Baeck Institute, established in 1955, is an international research institute with centres in New York City, London, Jerusalem and Berlin, that are devoted to the study of the history and culture of German-speaking Jewry. The institute was ...
. This biography of a nineteenth-century Jewish socialite formed an important step in her analysis of Jewish history and the subjects of assimilation and
emancipation Emancipation generally means to free a person from a previous restraint or legal disability. More broadly, it is also used for efforts to procure Economic, social and cultural rights, economic and social rights, civil and political rights, po ...
, and introduced her treatment of the
Jewish diaspora The Jewish diaspora ( ), alternatively the dispersion ( ) or the exile ( ; ), consists of Jews who reside outside of the Land of Israel. Historically, it refers to the expansive scattering of the Israelites out of their homeland in the Southe ...
as either ''pariah'' or ''parvenu''. In addition it represents an early version of her concept of history. The book is dedicated to Anne Mendelssohn, who first drew her attention to Varnhagen. Arendt's relation to Varnhagen permeates her subsequent work. Her account of Varnhagen's life was perceived during a time of the destruction of German-Jewish culture. It partially reflects Arendt's own view of herself as a German-Jewish woman driven out of her own culture into a stateless existence, leading to the description "biography as autobiography".


''The Human Condition'' (1958)

In what is arguably her most influential work, '' The Human Condition'' (1958), Arendt differentiates political and social concepts, labor and work, and various forms of actions; she then explores the implications of those distinctions. Her theory of political action, corresponding to the existence of a public realm, is extensively developed in this work. Arendt argues that, while human life always evolves within societies, the social part of human nature, political life, has been intentionally realized in only a few societies as a space for individuals to achieve freedom. Conceptual categories, which attempt to bridge the gap between
ontological Ontology is the philosophical study of being. It is traditionally understood as the subdiscipline of metaphysics focused on the most general features of reality. As one of the most fundamental concepts, being encompasses all of reality and every ...
and sociological structures, are sharply delineated. While Arendt relegates labor and work to the realm of the social, she favors the human condition of action as that which is both existential and aesthetic. Of human actions, Arendt identifies two that she considers essential. These are forgiving past wrong (or unfixing the fixed past) and promising future benefit (or fixing the unfixed future). Arendt had first introduced the concept of "natality" in her ''Love and Saint Augustine'' (1929) and in ''The Human Condition'' starts to develop this further. In this, she departs from Heidegger's emphasis on mortality. Arendt's positive message is one of the "miracle of beginning", the continual arrival of the new to create action, that is to alter the state of affairs brought about by previous actions. "Men", she wrote "though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin". She defined her use of "natality" as:
The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its normal, "natural" ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue of being born.
Natality would go on to become a central concept of her political theory, and also what Karin Fry considers its most optimistic one.


''Between Past and Future'' (1954...1968)

''Between Past and Future'' is an anthology of eight essays written between 1954 and 1968, dealing with a variety of different but connected philosophical subjects. These essays share the central idea that humans live between the past and the uncertain future. Man must permanently think to exist, but must learn thinking. Humans have resorted to tradition, but are abandoning respect for this tradition and culture. Arendt tries to find solutions to help humans think again, since modern philosophy has not succeeded in helping humans to live correctly.


''On Revolution'' (1963)

Arendt's book ''On Revolution'' presents a comparison of two of the main revolutions of the 18th century, the American and French Revolutions. She goes against a common impression of both Marxist and
leftist Left-wing politics describes the range of political ideologies that support and seek to achieve social equality and egalitarianism, often in opposition to social hierarchy either as a whole or of certain social hierarchies. Left-wing politi ...
views when she argues that France, while well-studied and often emulated, was a disaster and that the largely ignored American Revolution was a success. The turning point in the French Revolution occurred when the leaders rejected their goals of freedom to focus on compassion for the masses. In the United States, the founders never betray the goal of '. Arendt believes the revolutionary spirit of those men had been lost, however, and advocates a "council system" as an appropriate institution to regain that spirit.


''Men in Dark Times'' (1968)

The anthology of essays ''Men in Dark Times'' presents intellectual biographies of some creative and moral figures of the 20th century, such as
Walter Benjamin Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin ( ; ; 15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940) was a German-Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Jewish mysticism, Western M ...
,
Karl Jaspers Karl Theodor Jaspers (; ; 23 February 1883 – 26 February 1969) was a German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry, and philosophy. His 1913 work ''General Psychopathology'' influenced many ...
,
Rosa Luxemburg Rosa Luxemburg ( ; ; ; born Rozalia Luksenburg; 5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Polish and naturalised-German revolutionary and Marxist theorist. She was a key figure of the socialist movements in Poland and Germany in the early 20t ...
,
Hermann Broch Hermann Broch (; 1 November 1886 – 30 May 1951) was an Austrian writer, best known for two major works of modernist fiction: '' The Sleepwalkers'' (''Die Schlafwandler,'' 1930–32) and '' The Death of Virgil'' (''Der Tod des Vergil,'' 1945). ...
,
Pope John XXIII Pope John XXIII (born Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli; 25 November 18813 June 1963) was head of the Catholic Church and sovereign of the Vatican City State from 28 October 1958 until his death on 3 June 1963. He is the most recent pope to take ...
, and
Isak Dinesen Baroness Karen Christentze von Blixen-Finecke (born Dinesen; 17 April 1885 â€“ 7 September 1962) was a Danish author who wrote in Danish and English. She is also known under her pen names Isak Dinesen, used in English-speaking countries; Ta ...
.


''Crises of the Republic'' (1972)

''Crises of the Republic'' was the third of Arendt's anthologies, consisting of four essays. These related essays deal with contemporary American politics and the crises it faced in the 1960s and 1970s. "Lying in Politics" looks for an explanation behind the administration's deception regarding the
Vietnam War The Vietnam War (1 November 1955 – 30 April 1975) was an armed conflict in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia fought between North Vietnam (Democratic Republic of Vietnam) and South Vietnam (Republic of Vietnam) and their allies. North Vietnam w ...
, as revealed in the ''
Pentagon Papers The ''Pentagon Papers'', officially titled ''Report of the Office of the Secretary of Defense Vietnam Task Force'', is a United States Department of Defense history of the United States in the Vietnam War, United States' political and militar ...
''. "Civil Disobedience" examines the opposition movements, while the final "Thoughts on Politics and Revolution" is a commentary, in the form of an interview on the third essay, "On Violence". In "On Violence" Arendt substantiates that violence presupposes power which she understands as a property of groups. Thus, she breaks with the predominant conception of power as derived from violence.


''The Life of the Mind'' (1978)

Arendt's last major work, ''The Life of the Mind'' remained incomplete at the time of her death in 1975, but marked a return to moral philosophy. The outline of the book was based on her graduate level political philosophy class, ''Philosophy of the Mind'', and her
Gifford Lectures The Gifford Lectures () are an annual series of lectures which were established in 1887 by the will of Adam Gifford, Lord Gifford at the four ancient universities of Scotland: St Andrews, Glasgow, Aberdeen and Edinburgh. Their purpose is to "pro ...
in Scotland. She conceived of the work as a trilogy based on the mental activities of thinking, willing, and judging. Her most recent work had focused on the first two, but went beyond this in terms of '. Her discussion of thinking was based on
Socrates Socrates (; ; – 399 BC) was a Ancient Greek philosophy, Greek philosopher from Classical Athens, Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and as among the first moral philosophers of the Ethics, ethical tradition ...
and his notion of thinking as a solitary dialogue between oneself, leading her to novel concepts of conscience. Arendt died suddenly five days after completing the second part, with the first page of Judging still in her typewriter, and McCarthy then edited the first two parts and provided some indication of the direction of the third. Arendt's exact intentions for the third part are unknown but she left several manuscripts (such as ''Thinking and Moral Considerations'', ''Some Questions on Moral Philosophy'' and ''Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy'') relating to her thoughts on the mental faculty of Judging. These have since been published separately.


Collected works

After Arendt died in 1975, her essays and notes have continued to be collected, edited and published posthumously by friends and colleagues, mainly under the editorship of Jerome Kohn, including those that give some insight into the unfinished third part of ''
The Life of the Mind ''The Life of the Mind'' was the final work of Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), and was unfinished at the time of her death. Designed to be in three parts, only the first two had been completed and the first page of the third part was in her typewrit ...
''. Some dealt with her Jewish identity. ''The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age'' (1978), is a collection of 15 essays and letters from the period 1943–1966 on the situation of Jews in modern times, to try and throw some light on her views on the Jewish world, following the backlash to ''Eichmann'', but proved to be equally polarizing. A further collection of her writings on being Jewish was published as ''The Jewish Writings'' (2007). Her work on moral philosophy appeared as ''Lectures on Kant's Political Philosophy'' (1982) and ''Responsibility and Judgment'' (2003), and her literary works as ''Reflections on Literature and Culture'' (2007). Other work includes the collection of forty, largely fugitive, essays, addresses, and reviews covering the period 1930–1954, entitled ''Essays in Understanding 1930–1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism'' (1994). These presaged her monumental ''The Origins of Totalitarianism'', in particular ''On the Nature of Totalitarianism'' (1953) and ''The Concern with Politics in Contemporary European Philosophical Thought'' (1954). However these attracted little attention. However after a new version of ''Origins of Totalitarianism'' appeared in 2004 followed by ''The Promise of Politics'' in 2005 there appeared a new interest in Arendtiana. This led to a second series of her remaining essays, ''Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding, 1953–1975'', published in 2018. Her notebooks which form a series of memoirs, were published as in 2002.


Poetry

Arendt began writing poetry in her adolescence, but it was intensly personal and few knew of the existence of her poems until her archives at the
Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...
were made accessible by McCarthy in 1988. She began collecting them in 1923 and they were one of the few things she took with her on her flight from Berlin and escape to the United States. They remained unpublished in her lifetime, although she had typed, edited and bound them after she arrived in New York and they were rediscovered at the library by Samantha Rose Hill in 2011. The early poems that she brought with her were deposited with her papers in the library. Other later poems were found in notebooks in the German Literature Archive, Marbach, Germany, where she had placed them just before her death in 1975. Some further poems were found in her correspondence with Heidegger, Blücher and Broch. It was not until 2025 that her seventy-one collected poems were first published in a bilingual German-English edition.


Correspondence

Some further insight into her thinking is provided in the continuing posthumous publication of her correspondence with many of the important figures in her life, including Karl Jaspers (1992), Mary McCarthy (1995), Heinrich Blücher (1996), Martin Heidegger (2004),
Alfred Kazin Alfred Kazin (June 5, 1915 – June 5, 1998) was an American writer and literary critic. His literary reviews appeared in ''The New York Times'', the '' New York Herald-Tribune'', ''The New Republic'' and ''The New Yorker''. He wrote often a ...
(2005), Walter Benjamin (2006),
Gershom Scholem Gershom Scholem (; 5 December 1897 – 21 February 1982) was an Israeli philosopher and historian. Widely regarded as the founder of modern academic study of the Kabbalah, Scholem was appointed the first professor of Jewish mysticism at Hebrew Un ...
(2011) and Günther Stern (2016). Other correspondences that have been published include those with women friends such as Hilde Fränkel and Anne Mendelssohnn Weil (''see'' Relationships).


Arendt and the Eichmann trial (1961–1963)

In 1960, on hearing of Adolf Eichmann's capture and plans for his trial, Hannah Arendt contacted ''The New Yorker'' and offered to travel to Israel to cover it when it opened on 11 April 1961. Arendt was anxious to test her theories, developed in ''The Origins of Totalitarianism'', and see how justice would be administered to the sort of man she had written about. Also she had witnessed "little of the Nazi regime directly" and this was an opportunity to witness an agent of totalitarianism first hand. The offer was accepted and she attended six weeks of the five-month trial with her young Israeli cousin, . On arrival she was treated as a celebrity, meeting with the trial chief judge, Moshe Landau, and the foreign minister,
Golda Meir Golda Meir (; 3 May 1898 – 8 December 1978) was the prime minister of Israel, serving from 1969 to 1974. She was Israel's first and only female head of government. Born into a Jewish family in Kyiv, Kiev, Russian Empire (present-day Ukraine) ...
. In her subsequent 1963 report, based on her observations and transcripts, and which evolved into the book '' Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil'', Arendt coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe the Eichmann phenomenon. She, like others, was struck by his very ordinariness and the demeanor he exhibited of a small, slightly balding, bland bureaucrat, in contrast to the horrific crimes he stood accused of. He was, she wrote, "terribly and terrifyingly normal." She examined the question of whether
evil Evil, as a concept, is usually defined as profoundly immoral behavior, and it is related to acts that cause unnecessary pain and suffering to others. Evil is commonly seen as the opposite, or sometimes absence, of good. It can be an extreme ...
is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness, a tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions. Arendt's argument was that Eichmann was not a monster, contrasting the immensity of his actions with the very ordinariness of the man himself. Eichmann, she stated, not only called himself a Zionist, having initially opposed the Jewish persecution, but also expected his captors to understand him. She pointed out that his actions were not driven by malice, but rather blind dedication to the regime and his need to belong, to be a "joiner." On this, Arendt would later state "Going along with the rest and wanting to say 'we' were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible". What Arendt observed during the trial was a bourgeois sales clerk who found a meaningful role for himself and a sense of importance in the Nazi movement. She noted that his addiction to clichés and use of bureaucratic morality clouded his ability to question his actions, "to think". This led her to set out her most debated dictum: "the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil." By stating that Eichmann did not think, she did not imply lack of conscious awareness of his actions, but by "thinking" she implied reflective rationality, that was lacking. Arendt was critical of the way the trial was conducted by the Israelis as a "show trial" with ulterior motives other than simply trying evidence and administering justice. Arendt was also critical of the way Israel depicted Eichmann's crimes as crimes against a nation-state, rather than against humanity itself. She objected to the idea that a strong Israel was necessary to protect world Jewry being again placed where "they'll let themselves be slaughtered like sheep," recalling the biblical phrase. She portrayed the prosecutor,
Attorney General In most common law jurisdictions, the attorney general (: attorneys general) or attorney-general (AG or Atty.-Gen) is the main legal advisor to the government. In some jurisdictions, attorneys general also have executive responsibility for law enf ...
Gideon Hausner, as employing hyperbolic rhetoric in the pursuit of Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's political agenda. Arendt, who believed she could maintain her focus on moral principles in the face of outrage, became increasingly frustrated with Hausner, describing his parade of survivors as having "no apparent bearing on the case". She was particularly concerned that Hausner repeatedly asked "why did you not rebel?" rather than question the role of the Jewish leaders. On this point, Arendt argued that during
the Holocaust The Holocaust (), known in Hebrew language, Hebrew as the (), was the genocide of History of the Jews in Europe, European Jews during World War II. From 1941 to 1945, Nazi Germany and Collaboration with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy ...
some of them cooperated with Eichmann "almost without exception" in the destruction of their own people. These leaders, notably M. C. Rumkowski, constituted the Jewish Councils ( Judenräte). She had expressed concerns on this point prior to the trial. She described this as a moral catastrophe. While her argument was not to allocate blame, rather she mourned what she considered a moral failure of compromising the imperative that it is better to suffer wrong than to do wrong. She describes the cooperation of the Jewish leaders in terms of a disintegration of Jewish morality: "This role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter in the whole dark story". Widely misunderstood, this caused an even greater controversy and particularly animosity toward her in the Jewish community and in Israel. For Arendt, the Eichmann trial marked a turning point in her thinking in the final decade of her life, becoming increasingly preoccupied with
moral philosophy Ethics is the philosophical study of moral phenomena. Also called moral philosophy, it investigates normative questions about what people ought to do or which behavior is morally right. Its main branches include normative ethics, applied et ...
.


Reception

Arendt's five-part series "Eichmann in Jerusalem" appeared in ''The New Yorker'' in February 1963 some nine months after Eichmann was hanged on 31 May 1962. By this time his trial was largely forgotten in the popular mind, superseded by intervening world events. However, no other account of either Eichmann or National Socialism has aroused so much controversy. Before its publication, Arendt was considered a brilliant humanistic original political thinker. Her mentor, Karl Jaspers, however, had warned her about a possible adverse outcome, "The Eichmann trial will be no pleasure for you. I'm afraid it cannot go well". On publication, three controversies immediately occupied public attention: the concept of Eichmann as banal, her criticism of the role of Israel and her description of the role played by the Jewish people themselves. Arendt was profoundly shocked by the response, writing to Karl Jaspers "People are resorting to any means to destroy my reputation ... They have spent weeks trying to find something in my past that they can hang on me". Now she was being called arrogant, heartless and ill-informed. She was accused of being duped by Eichmann, of being a "self-hating Jewess", and even an enemy of Israel. Her critics included the Anti-Defamation League and many other Jewish groups, editors of publications she was a contributor to, faculty at the universities she taught at, and friends from all parts of her life. Her friend Gershom Scholem, a major scholar of
Jewish mysticism Academic study of Jewish mysticism, especially since Gershom Scholem's ''Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism'' (1941), draws distinctions between different forms of mysticism which were practiced in different eras of Jewish history. Of these, Kabbal ...
, broke off relations with her, publishing their correspondence without her permission. Arendt was criticized by many Jewish public figures, who charged her with coldness and lack of sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust. Because of this lingering criticism, neither this book nor any of her other works were translated into Hebrew until 1999. Arendt responded to the controversies in the book's postscript. Although Arendt complained that she was being criticized for telling the truth – "what a risky business to tell the truth on a factual level without theoretical and scholarly embroidery" – the criticism was largely directed to her theorizing on the nature of mankind and evil and that ordinary people were driven to commit the inexplicable not so much by hatred and ideology as ambition, and inability to empathize. Equally problematic was the suggestion that the victims deceived themselves and complied in their own destruction. Prior to Arendt's depiction of Eichmann, his popular image had been, as ''
The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'' put it "the most evil monster of humanity" and as a representative of "an atrocious crime, unparalleled in history", "the extermination of European Jews". As it turned out Arendt and others were correct in pointing out that Eichmann's characterization by the prosecution as the architect and chief technician of the Holocaust was not entirely credible. While much has been made of Arendt's treatment of Eichmann, Ada Ushpiz, in her 2015 documentary ''Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt'', placed it in a much broader context of the use of rationality to explain seemingly irrational historical events.


''Kein Mensch hat das Recht zu gehorchen''

In an interview with
Joachim Fest Joachim Clemens Fest (8 December 1926 – 11 September 2006) was a German historian, journalist, critic and editor who was best known for his writings and public commentary on Nazi Germany, including a biography of Adolf Hitler and books about A ...
in 1964, Arendt was asked about Eichmann's defense that he had made Kant's principle of the duty of obedience his guiding principle all his life. Arendt replied that that was outrageous and that Eichmann was misusing Kant, by not considering the element of judgement required in assessing one's own actions – "" (No man has, according to Kant, the right to obey), she stated, paraphrasing Kant. The reference was to Kant's (Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason 1793) in which he states:
(The saying, "''We must hearken to God, rather than to man''," signifies no more than this, viz. that should any earthly legislation enjoin something immediately contradictory of the moral law, obedience is not to be rendered)
Kant clearly defines a higher moral duty than rendering merely unto Caesar. Arendt herself had written in her book "This was outrageous, on the face of it, and also incomprehensible, since Kant's moral philosophy is so closely bound up with man's faculty of judgment, which rules out blind obedience." Arendt's reply to Fest has since been widely quoted as (No one has the right to obey), changing (No person) to the more generic (No one) and omitting the attribution (according to Kant), although it does encapsulate an aspect of her moral philosophy. The phrase has become one of her iconic images, appearing on the wall of the house in which she was born (''see'' Commemorations), among other places. A
fascist Fascism ( ) is a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology and movement. It is characterized by a dictatorial leader, centralized autocracy, militarism, forcible suppression of opposition, belief in a natural soci ...
bas-relief Relief is a sculptural method in which the sculpted pieces remain attached to a solid background of the same material. The term ''relief'' is from the Latin verb , to raise (). To create a sculpture in relief is to give the impression that th ...
on the Palazzo degli Uffici Finanziari (1942), in the Piazza del Tribunale,
Bolzano Bolzano ( ; ; or ) is the capital city of South Tyrol (officially the province of Bolzano), Northern Italy. With a population of 108,245, Bolzano is also by far the largest city in South Tyrol and the third largest in historical Tyrol. The ...
, Italy celebrating
Mussolini Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (29 July 188328 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who, upon assuming office as Prime Minister, became the dictator of Fascist Italy from the March on Rome in 1922 until his overthrow in 194 ...
, reads ''Credere, Obbedire, Combattere'' (Believe, Obey, Combat). In 2017, its 'Obey' meaning was altered using Arendt's original phrasing, less the attribution, projected upon it in the three official languages of the region. The phrase has been appearing in other artistic work featuring political messages, such as the 2015 installation by Wilfried Gerstel, which has evoked the concept of resistance to dictatorship.


List of selected publications


Bibliographies

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Books

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Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
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Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
* 400 pages. (''see''
Rahel Varnhagen Rahel Antonie Friederike Varnhagen () (née Levin, later Robert; 19 May 1771 – 7 March 1833) was a German writer who hosted one of the most prominent salons in Europe during the late-18th and early-19th centuries. She is the subject of a celebr ...
) ** *** ** * , (see also
The Origins of Totalitarianism ''The Origins of Totalitarianism'', published in 1951, was Hannah Arendt's first major work, where she describes and analyzes Nazism and Stalinism as the major totalitarian political movements of the first half of the 20th century. History '' ...
and
Comparison of Nazism and Stalinism Various historians and other authors have carried out a comparison of Nazism and Stalinism, with particular consideration to the similarities and differences between the two ideologies and political systems, the relationship between the two re ...

Full text (1979 edition)
on
Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
** ** * (see also The Human Condition) * * (see also Between Past and Future) * (see also On Revolution
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Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
*
Full text: 1964 edition
(see also
Eichmann in Jerusalem ''Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil'' is a 1963 book by the philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of ...
) * * ** *


Articles and essays

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Correspondence

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excerpts
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Posthumous

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Online text at ''Pensar el Espacio Público''
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Online text

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Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
* * *
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on
Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
* ** *** (original German transcription) ** * ** ** * ** *
at ''Pensar el Espacio Público''
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Collections

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Miscellaneous

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(Original video)
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Views

In 1961, while covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Arendt wrote a letter to
Karl Jaspers Karl Theodor Jaspers (; ; 23 February 1883 – 26 February 1969) was a German-Swiss psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry, and philosophy. His 1913 work ''General Psychopathology'' influenced many ...
that Adam Kirsch described as reflecting "pure racism" toward
Sephardic Jews Sephardic Jews, also known as Sephardi Jews or Sephardim, and rarely as Iberian Peninsular Jews, are a Jewish diaspora population associated with the historic Jewish communities of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal) and their descendant ...
from the Middle East and
Ashkenazi Jews Ashkenazi Jews ( ; also known as Ashkenazic Jews or Ashkenazim) form a distinct subgroup of the Jewish diaspora, that emerged in the Holy Roman Empire around the end of the first millennium CE. They traditionally speak Yiddish, a language ...
from Eastern Europe. She wrote:
Fortunately, Eichmann's three judges were of German origin, indeed the best of German Jewry. ttorney General GideonHausner is a typical Galician Jew, still European, very unsympathetic... boring... constantly making mistakes. Probably one of those people who don't know any language. Everything is organized by a police force which gives me the creeps, speaks only Hebrew, and looks Arabic. Some downright brutal types among them. They would obey any order. And outside the doors, the oriental mob, as if one were in Istanbul or some other half-Asiatic country.
Although Arendt remained a Zionist both during and after World War II, she made it clear that she favored the creation of a Jewish-Arab federated state in British Mandate of Palestine (now Israel and the
Palestinian territories The occupied Palestinian territories, also referred to as the Palestinian territories, consist of the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip—two regions of the former Mandate for Palestine, British Mandate for Palestine ...
), rather than a purely Jewish state. She believed that this was a way to address Jewish statelessness and to avoid the pitfalls of nationalism. However, Hannah Arendt distanced herself from official Zionism in her article 'Der Zionismus aus heutiger Sicht' (Zionism reconsidered) where she criticized the drift of the Zionist movement after their Atlantic City Conference in November 1944, asserting that this was the triumph of the sectarian ideology of the most extreme Zionists.


Racism

It was not just Arendt's analysis of the Eichmann trial that drew accusations of racism. In her 1958 essay entitled ''Reflections on Little Rock'' she expressed opposition to
desegregation Racial integration, or simply integration, includes desegregation (the process of ending systematic racial segregation), leveling barriers to association, creating equal opportunity regardless of race, and the development of a culture that draws ...
following the 1957 Little Rock Integration Crisis in Arkansas. As she explains in the preface, for a long time the magazine was reluctant to print her contribution, so far did it appear to differ from the publication's liberal values. Eventually it was printed alongside critical responses. Later ''
The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...
'' would express similar hesitancy over the Eichmann papers. So vehement was the response that Arendt felt obliged to defend herself in a sequel. The debate over this essay has continued since. William Simmons devotes a whole section of his 2011 text on human rights (''Human Rights Law and the Marginalized Other'') to a critique of Arendt's position and in particular on Little Rock. While many critics feel she was fundamentally racist, many of those who have defended Arendt's position have pointed out that her concerns were for the welfare of the children, a position she maintained throughout her life. She felt that white children were being thrown into a racially disharmonious "jungle" to serve a broader political strategy of forcible integration. While over time Arendt conceded some ground to her critics, namely that she argued as an outsider, she remained committed to her central critique that children should not be thrust into the front-lines of geopolitical conflict. In ''Reflections on Little Rock'', she wrote:
To force parents to send their children to an integrated school against their will means to deprive them of rights which clearly belong to them in all free societies-the private right over their children and the social right to free association. As for the children, forced integration means a very serious conflict between home and school, between their private and their social life, and while such conflicts are common in adult life, children cannot be expected to handle them and therefore should not be exposed to them.
She also believed desegregation was an overreach of government authority, stating "The conflict between a segregated home and a desegregated school, between family prejudice and school demands, abolishes at one stroke both the teachers' and the parents' authority, replacing it with the rule of public opinion among children who have neither the ability nor the right to establish a public opinion of their own."


Feminism

Embraced by
feminists Feminism is a range of socio-political movements and ideology, ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social gender equality, equality of the sexes. Feminism holds the position that modern soci ...
as a pioneer in a world dominated by men, Arendt did not consider herself a feminist, remaining opposed to the social dimensions of
Women's Liberation The women's liberation movement (WLM) was a political alignment of women and feminism, feminist intellectualism. It emerged in the late 1960s and continued till the 1980s, primarily in the industrialized nations of the Western world, which resu ...
, urging independence, but always keeping in mind ''Vive la petite différence!'' On becoming the first woman to be appointed a professor at Princeton in 1953, the media were much engaged in this exceptional achievement, but she never wanted to be seen as an exception, either as a woman (an "exception woman") or a Jew, stating emphatically "I am not disturbed at all about being a woman professor, because I am quite used to being a woman". In 1972, discussing women's liberation, she observed "the real question to ask is, what will we lose if we win?". She rather enjoyed what she saw as the privileges of being feminine as opposed to feminist, "intensely feminine and therefore no feminist", stated Hans Jonas. Arendt considered some professions and positions unsuitable for women, particularly those involving leadership, telling
Günter Gaus Günter Gaus (23 November 1929 – 14 May 2004) was a prominent German journalist-commentator who became a diplomat and (very briefly) a regional politician in Berlin. Once he had moved on – as he probably assumed, permanently – from the wor ...
"It just doesn't look good when a woman gives orders". Despite these views, and having been labelled "anti-feminist", much space has been devoted to examining Arendt's place in relation to feminism. In the last years of her life,
Virginia Held Virginia Potter Held (born October 28, 1929) is an American moral, social/political and feminist philosopher whose work on the ethics of care sparked significant research into the ethical dimensions of providing care for others and critiques o ...
noted that Arendt's views evolved with the emergence of a new feminism in America in the 1970s to recognize the importance of the women's movement.


Critique of human rights

In ''The Origins of Totalitarianism'', Hannah Arendt devotes a lengthy chapter (''The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man'') to a critical analysis of human rights, in what has been described as "the most widely read essay on refugees ever published". Arendt is not skeptical of the notion of political rights in general, but instead defends a national or civil conception of rights. Human rights, or the Rights of Man as they were commonly called, are universal, inalienable, and possessed simply by virtue of being human. In contrast, civil rights are possessed by virtue of belonging to a political community, most commonly by being a citizen. Arendt's primary criticism of human rights is that they are ineffectual and illusory because their enforcement is in tension with national sovereignty. She argued that since there is no political authority above that of sovereign nations, state governments have little incentive to respect human rights when such policies conflict with national interests. This can be seen most clearly by examining the treatment of refugees and other stateless people. Since the refugee has no state to secure their civil rights, the only rights they have to fall back on are human rights. In this way Arendt uses the refugee as a test case for examining human rights in isolation from civil rights. Arendt's analysis draws on the refugee upheavals in the first half of the 20th century along with her own experience as a refugee fleeing Nazi Germany. She argued that as state governments began to emphasize national identity as a prerequisite for full legal status, the number of minority resident aliens increased along with the number of stateless persons whom no state was willing to recognize legally. The two potential solutions to the refugee problem, repatriation and naturalization, both proved incapable of solving the crisis. Arendt argued that repatriation failed to solve the refugee crisis because no government was willing to take them in and claim them as their own. When refugees were forcibly deported to neighboring countries, such immigration was deemed illegal by the receiving country, and so failed to change the fundamental status of the migrants as stateless. Attempts at naturalizing and assimilating refugees also had little success. This failure was primarily the result of resistance from both state governments and the majority of citizens, since both tended to see the refugees as undesirables who threatened their national identity. Resistance to naturalization also came from the refugees themselves who resisted assimilation and attempted to maintain their own ethnic and national identities. Arendt contends that neither naturalization nor the tradition of asylum was capable of handling the sheer number of refugees. Instead of accepting some refugees with legal status, the state often responded by denaturalizing minorities who shared national or ethnic ties with stateless refugees. Arendt argues that the consistent mistreatment of refugees, most of whom were placed in internment camps, is evidence against the existence of human rights. If the notion of human rights as universal and inalienable is to be taken seriously, the rights must be realizable given the features of the modern liberal state. She concluded "The Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable–even in countries whose constitutions were based upon them–whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state". Arendt contends that they are not realizable because they are in tension with at least one feature of the liberal state—national sovereignty. One of the primary ways in which a nation exercises sovereignty is through control over national borders. State governments consistently grant their citizens free movement to traverse national borders. In contrast, the movement of refugees is often restricted in the name of national interests. This restriction presents a dilemma for liberalism because liberal theorists typically are committed to both human rights and the existence of sovereign nations. In one of her most quoted passages, she puts forward the concept that human rights are little more than an abstraction:
The conception of human rights based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such broke down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.


Lying in politics

Arendt explored the effects of systemic lying on society. In her 1972 essay "Lying in Politics...", she discussed how organized falsehood can lead to a situation where the distinction between truth and falsehood blurs, resulting in a populace that becomes skeptical of everything. Systemic lying is not aimed at making people believe a lie so much as making it hard to believe anything. People who can no longer distinguish between truth and lies on their own, cannot distinguish between right and wrong on their own. "The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world... is being destroyed." Also in ''The Origins of Totalitarianism'', Arendt wrote about lying in politics, "The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that (if found to be lies, many) would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."


In popular culture

Several authors have written biographies that focus on the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. In 1999, the French feminist philosopher Catherine Clément wrote a novel, ''Martin and Hannah'', speculating on the triangular relationship between Heidegger and the two women in his life, Arendt and Heidegger's wife Elfriede Petri. In addition to the relationships, the novel is a serious exploration of philosophical ideas, that centers on Arendt's last meeting with Heidegger in Freiburg in 1975. The scene is based on Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's description in ''Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World'' (1982), but reaches back to their childhoods, and Heidegger's role in encouraging the relationship between the two women. The novel explores Heidegger's embrace of Nazism as a proxy for that of Germany and, as in Arendt's treatment of Eichmann, the difficult relationship between collective guilt and personal responsibility. In 2012 the German film, ''
Hannah Arendt Hannah Arendt (born Johanna Arendt; 14 October 1906 â€“ 4 December 1975) was a German and American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theory, political theorists of the twentieth century. Her work ...
'', directed by
Margarethe von Trotta Margarethe von Trotta (; born 21 February 1942)Hans Helmut Prinzler, ''Chronik des deutschen Films, 1895–1994'' (Stuttgart and Weimar: Verlag J. B. Metzler, 1995), p. 149. is a German film director, screenwriter, and actress. She has been ref ...
was released. The film, with Barbara Sukowa in the title role, depicted the controversy over Arendt's coverage of the Eichmann trial in ''
The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. It was founded on February 21, 1925, by Harold Ross and his wife Jane Grant, a reporter for ''The New York T ...
'' and her subsequent book, ''
Eichmann in Jerusalem ''Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil'' is a 1963 book by the philosopher and political thinker Hannah Arendt. Arendt, a Jew who fled Germany during Adolf Hitler's rise to power, reported on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, one of ...
: A Report on the Banality of Evil'', in which she was widely misunderstood as defending Eichmann and blaming Jewish leaders for the Holocaust. In 2015, the filmmaker Ada Ushpiz produced a documentary on Hannah Arendt, ''Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt''. In the 2023 TV series ''Transatlantic'', Arendt is portrayed by Alexa Karolinski.


Legacy

Hannah Arendt is considered one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century. In 1998 Walter Laqueur stated "No twentieth-century philosopher and political thinker has at the present time as wide an echo", as philosopher, historian, sociologist and also journalist. Arendt's legacy has been described as a cult. In a 2016 review of a documentary about Arendt, the journalist A. O. Scott describes Hannah Arendt as "of unmatched range and rigor" as a thinker, although she is primarily known for the series of articles known as ''Eichmann in Jerusalem'' that she wrote for ''The New Yorker'', and in particular for the one phrase "the banality of evil". She shunned publicity, never expecting, as she explained to Karl Jaspers in 1951, to see herself as a "cover girl" on the newsstands. In Germany, there are tours available of sites associated with her life. The study of the life and work of Arendt, and of her political and philosophical theory is described as Arendtian. In her will she established the Hannah Arendt Bluecher Literary Trust as the custodian of her writings and photographs. Her personal library was deposited at Bard College at the Stevenson Library in 1976, and includes approximately 4,000 books,
ephemera Ephemera are items which were not originally designed to be retained or preserved, but have been collected or retained. The word is etymologically derived from the Greek ephēmeros 'lasting only a day'. The word is both plural and singular. On ...
, and pamphlets from Arendt's last apartment as well as her desk (in McCarthy House). Most of her papers were deposited at the
Library of Congress The Library of Congress (LOC) is a research library in Washington, D.C., serving as the library and research service for the United States Congress and the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It also administers Copyright law o ...
and her correspondence with her German friends and mentors, such as Heidegger, Blumenfeld and Jaspers, at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach. The Library of Congress listed more than 50 books written about her in 1998, and that number has continued to grow, as have the number of scholarly articles, estimated as 1000 at that time. Her life and work is recognized by the institutions most closely associated with her teaching, by the creation of Hannah Arendt Centers at both Bard (Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities) and The New School, both in New York State. In Germany, her contributions to understanding authoritarianism is recognised by the Hannah-Arendt-Institut für Totalitarismusforschung ( Hannah Arendt Institute for the Research on Totalitarianism) in
Dresden Dresden (; ; Upper Saxon German, Upper Saxon: ''Dräsdn''; , ) is the capital city of the States of Germany, German state of Saxony and its second most populous city after Leipzig. It is the List of cities in Germany by population, 12th most p ...
. There are Hannah Arendt Associations (Hannah Arendt Verein) such as the Hannah Arendt Verein für politisches Denken in
Bremen Bremen (Low German also: ''Breem'' or ''Bräm''), officially the City Municipality of Bremen (, ), is the capital of the States of Germany, German state of the Bremen (state), Free Hanseatic City of Bremen (), a two-city-state consisting of the c ...
that awards the annual Hannah-Arendt-Preis für politisches Denken ( Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thinking) established in 1995. In Oldenburg, the Hannah Arendt Center at Carl von Ossietzky University was established in 1999, and holds a large collection of her work (Hannah Arendt Archiv), and administers the
internet portal A web portal is a specially designed website that brings information from diverse sources, like emails, online forums and search engines, together in a uniform way. Usually, each information source gets its dedicated area on the page for displayin ...
''HannahArendt.net'' (A Journal for Political Thinking) as well as a monograph series, the ''Hannah Arendt-Studien''. In Italy, the Hannah Arendt Center for Political Studies is situated at the University of Verona. In 2017 a journal, ''Arendt Studies'', was launched to publish articles related to the study of her life, work, and legacy. Many places associated with her, have memorabilia of her on display, such as her student card at the University of Heidelberg. 2006, the centennial of her birth, saw commemorations of her work in conferences and celebrations around the world. There is also a Hannah Arendt Day (Hannah Arendt Tag) in her birthplace. Of the many photographic portraits of Arendt, that taken in 1944 by Fred Stein (''see
image An image or picture is a visual representation. An image can be Two-dimensional space, two-dimensional, such as a drawing, painting, or photograph, or Three-dimensional space, three-dimensional, such as a carving or sculpture. Images may be di ...
''), whose work she greatly admired, has become iconic, and has been described as better known than the photographer himself, having appeared on a German postage stamp. Among organizations that have recognized Arendt's contributions to civilization and human rights, is the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR).


Continuing interest

The rise of nativism, such as the election of
Donald Trump Donald John Trump (born June 14, 1946) is an American politician, media personality, and businessman who is the 47th president of the United States. A member of the Republican Party (United States), Republican Party, he served as the 45 ...
in the United States, and concerns regarding an increasingly authoritarian style of governance has led to a surge of interest in Arendt and her writings, including radio broadcasts and writers, including Jeremy Adelman and Zoe Williams, to revisit Arendt's ideas to seek the extent to which they inform our understanding of such movements, which are being described as "Dark Times". At the same time
Amazon Amazon most often refers to: * Amazon River, in South America * Amazon rainforest, a rainforest covering most of the Amazon basin * Amazon (company), an American multinational technology company * Amazons, a tribe of female warriors in Greek myth ...
reported that it had sold out of copies of ''The Origins of Totalitarianism'' (1951).
Michiko Kakutani is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for ''The New York Times'' from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998. Early life and family Kakutani, a Japanese Americ ...
, in her 2018 book ''The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump'', argues that the rise of totalitarianism has been founded on the violation of truth. She begins her book with an extensive quote from ''The Origins of Totalitarianism'':
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.
Kakutani and others believed that Arendt's words speak not just events of a previous century but apply equally to the contemporary cultural landscape populated with
fake news Fake news or information disorder is false or misleading information (misinformation, disinformation, propaganda, and hoaxes) claiming the aesthetics and legitimacy of news. Fake news often has the aim of damaging the reputation of a person ...
and lies. She also draws on Arendt's essay "Lying in Politics" from ''Crises in the Republic'' pointing to the lines:
The historian knows how vulnerable is the whole texture of facts in which we spend our daily life; it is always in danger of being perforated by single lies or torn to shreds by the organized lying of groups, nations, or classes, or denied and distorted, often carefully covered up by reams of falsehoods or simply allowed to fall into oblivion. Facts need testimony to be remembered and trustworthy witnesses to be established in order to find a secure dwelling place in the domain of human affairs
Arendt drew attention to the critical role that propaganda plays in
gaslighting Gaslighting is the manipulation of someone into questioning their perception of reality. The term derives from the 1944 film ''Gaslight (1944 film), Gaslight'' and became popular in the mid-2010s. Some mental health experts have expressed c ...
populations, Kakutani observes, citing the passage:
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true . ... The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness
Arendt took a broader perspective on history than merely totalitarianism in the early 20th century, stating "the deliberate falsehood and the outright lie have been used as legitimate means to achieve political ends since the beginning of recorded history." Contemporary relevance is also reflected in the increasing use of the phrase, attributed to her, " No one has the right to obey" to reflect that actions result from choices, and hence judgement, and that we cannot disclaim responsibility for that which we have the power to act upon. In addition those centers established to promote Arendtian studies continue to seek solutions to a wide range of contemporary issues in her writing. Arendt's teachings on obedience have also been linked to the controversial psychology experiments by
Stanley Milgram Stanley Milgram (August 15, 1933 – December 20, 1984) was an American social psychologist known for his controversial Milgram experiment, experiments on obedience conducted in the 1960s during his professorship at Yale University, Yale.Blass, T ...
, that implied that ordinary people can easily be induced to commit atrocities. Milgram himself drew attention to this in 1974, stating that he was testing the theory that Eichmann like others would merely follow orders, but unlike Milgram she argued that actions involve responsibility. Arendt's theories on the political consequences of how nations deal with refugees have remained relevant and compelling. Arendt had observed first hand the displacement of large stateless and rightsless populations, treated not so much as people in need than as problems to solve, and in many cases, resist. She wrote about this in her 1943 essay "We refugees". Another Arendtian theme that finds an echo in contemporary society is her observation, inspired by Rilke, of the despair of not being heard, the futility of tragedy that finds no listener that can bring comfort, assurance and intervention – an example being gun violence in America and the resulting political inaction. ''In Search of the Last Agora'', an illustrated documentary film by Lebanese director Rayyan Dabbous about Arendt's 1958 work ''The Human Condition'', was released in 2018 to mark the book's 50th anniversary. The experimental film is described as finding "new meaning in the political theorist's conceptions of politics, technology and society in the 1950s".


See also

*
American philosophy American philosophy is the activity, corpus, and tradition of philosophers affiliated with the United States. The ''Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' notes that while it lacks a "core of defining features, American Philosophy can neverthe ...
*
German philosophy German philosophy, meaning philosophy in the German language or philosophy by German people, in its diversity, is fundamental for both the analytic and continental traditions. It covers figures such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Immanuel Kant, ...
* Hannah Arendt Award * List of refugees * List of women philosophers *
Post-truth Post-truth is a term that refers to the widespread documentation of, and concern about, disputes over public truth claims in the 21st century. The term's academic development refers to the theories and research that seek to explain the specific cau ...
* Women in philosophy


Notes


References


Sources


Articles (journals and proceedings)

* * * * * * * * , reprinted in * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


Rahel Varnhagen

* * *


Special issues and proceedings

* * *


Audiovisual

* * ** (see also
Hannah Arendt Hannah Arendt (born Johanna Arendt; 14 October 1906 â€“ 4 December 1975) was a German and American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theory, political theorists of the twentieth century. Her work ...
) ** * * **


Books and monographs

* * ** "Ethics in many different voices" pp. 247–268, see also revised versions as and * * ** * * * * ** * * * * (see also Obedience to Authority) * * * * * ** * *


Autobiography and biography

* * ** * ** * * *
excerpt
'' * * * * * * * * *
full text
) *


Critical works

* ** * * ** * * * * * * * * *
excerpt
, see also * * * * * * * *
text at ''Pensar el Espacio Público''


Historical

* * , available in Latin as * * * *
facsimile text
at Gallica, and reproduced on
Wikisource Wikisource is an online wiki-based digital library of free-content source text, textual sources operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Wikisource is the name of the project as a whole; it is also the name for each instance of that project, one f ...
* *
full text available on
Internet Archive The Internet Archive is an American 501(c)(3) organization, non-profit organization founded in 1996 by Brewster Kahle that runs a digital library website, archive.org. It provides free access to collections of digitized media including web ...
*


Chapters and contributions

* * , in * , in * , in * , in * , in * , in * , in * , in * Guilherme, Alexandre and Morgan, W. John, 'Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)-dialogue as a public space'. Chapter 4 in ''Philosophy, Dialogue, and Education: Nine modern European philosophers'', Routledge, London and New York, pp. 55–71, . * , in * , in * , in * , in * , in * , in


Dictionaries and encyclopedias

* * *
Version: January 2019
) * ** , in * * * * *


Magazines

* * * , reprinted in * * * , reprinted from * , reprinted in * * * * *


Newspapers

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


Theses

*


Websites

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * – includes Brecht reading
english
) * * * * *
English translation by A. S. Kline 2004
*


Biography and timelines

* * * *


Institutions, locations and organizations

* * * * * * * * * * ** * * *


= Hannah Arendt Center (Bard)

= * ** ** *** ** ** **


Maps

*


External images

* * * * *


Further reading


External links

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