2004-2005 Season: Hannah and Martin

Who Was Hannah Arendt?

“There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous. To think and to be fully alive are the same.” – Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany in 1906—the only child of secular Jewish parents. While Arendt remained close to her mother throughout her life, her father passed away when she was only seven years of age. She entered Marburg University in 1924, where she studied philosophy with burgeoning philosopher, Martin Heidegger. Her romantic relationship with Heidegger begin in 1925 during which time he was creating his greatest work, Being and Time. The relationship between Heidegger and Arendt ended the following year, and Arendt moved to Heidelberg to study with Karl Jaspers, the existentialist philosopher and friend of Heidegger. Under Jasper’s guidance, she wrote her dissertations on the concept of love in St. Augustine’s thought. Throughout the years, Arendt remained close to Jaspers, although the influence of Heidegger’s phenomenology was to prove the greater in its lasting influence upon her work.

In 1929, Arendt met Gunther Stern, a young Jewish philosopher, with whom she became romantically involved, and subsequently married. After her dissertation was published, she became increasingly involved with Jewish and Zionist politics. In 1933, as Hitler was appointed Chancellor, she escaped to Paris fearing Nazi persecution. In 1936, she met Heinrich Blücher, a German political refugee; she divorced an already estranged Stern in 1939, and married Blücher in 1940.

After the outbreak of war, and following arrest and detention in a camp as an “enemy alien,” Arendt and Blücher fled to the USA in 1941. In 1944, she began work on what would become her first major political book, The Origin of Totalitarianism. After The Origin of Totalitarianism was published in 1951, she began the first in a sequence of visiting fellowships and professional positions at American universities and she attained American citizenship.

To continue her exploration of totalitarianism, Arendt turned her attention to the composition of humanity, publishing The Human Condition in 1958. Also in 1958, Arendt published Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, which was the philosophical biography of a Jewish merchant-turned salon hostess of the late 1700s. In 1959, she published Reflections on Little Rock, her controversial consideration of the emergent Black civil rights movement, stating and later refuting that the destruction of segregations should not begin with children. In 1961, she published Between Past and Future, and traveled to Jerusalem to cover the trail of Nazi Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker.

In 1963 she published her polemical reflections on the Eichmann trial, first in The New Yorker and then in book form as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In 1967, having held teaching positions at Berkeley and Chicago, she took up a position at the New School for Social Research in New York.

Following Blücher’s death in 1970, she worked on her projected three-volume work, The Life of the Mind. Volumes 1 and 2, on Thinking and Willing, were published posthumously. Arendt died on December 4, 1975, having only just started work on the third and final volume, Judging.

Today, Arendt remains one of the most original, challenging and influential political thinkers of the 20 th century, and her work will no doubt continue to provide inspiration for political philosophy in the centuries to come.

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