Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt (/ˈɛərənt, ˈɑːr-/,[9][10] US also /əˈrɛnt/,[11] German: [ˌhana ˈaːʁənt] ⓘ;[12] born Johanna Arendt; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German-American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century.[5][13][14]
"Arendt" redirects here. For other people with the surname, see Arendt (surname). For the film, see Hannah Arendt (film).
Hannah Arendt
4 December 1975
Hannah Arendt Bluecher
- German (1906–1937)
- Stateless (1937–1950)
- United States (from 1950)
- The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951)
- The Human Condition (1958)
- On Revolution (1963)
- "The Life of the Mind" (1977)
- Max Arendt (grandfather)
- Henriette Arendt (aunt)
- Continental philosophy
- Existential phenomenology[1]
- Philosophy of life[2][3]
- Classical republicanism[4]
- Action theory (posthumous attribution)[5]
Political theory, theory of totalitarianism, philosophy of history, theory of modernity
- Humanity as Homo faber
- Humanity as animal laborans[7]
- The labor–work distinction
- The banality of evil
- Distinction between vita activa and vita contemplativa (praxis as the highest level of the vita activa)[8]
- Auctoritas
- Natality[5]
Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of power and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. She is also remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, which was considered by some an apologia, and for the phrase "the banality of evil." She is commemorated by institutions and journals devoted to her thinking, the Hannah Arendt Prize for political thinking, and on stamps, street names, and schools, amongst other things.
Hannah Arendt was born to a Jewish family in Linden (now a district of Hanover, Germany) in 1906. When she was three, her family moved to the East Prussian capital of Königsberg for her father's health care. Paul Arendt had contracted syphilis in his youth, but was thought to be in remission when Arendt was born. He died when she was seven. Arendt was raised in a politically progressive, secular family, her mother being an ardent Social Democrat. After completing secondary education in Berlin, Arendt studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a four-year affair.[15] She obtained her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg in 1929. Her dissertation was entitled Love and Saint Augustine and her supervisor was the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers.
Hannah Arendt married Günther Stern in 1929, but soon began to encounter increasing antisemitism in 1930s Nazi Germany. In 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, Arendt was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism. On release, she fled Germany, living in Czechoslovakia and Switzerland before settling in Paris. There she worked for Youth Aliyah, assisting young Jews to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. She was stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. Divorcing Stern that year, she then married Heinrich Blücher in 1940. When Germany invaded France that year she was detained by the French as an alien. She escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941 via Portugal. She settled in New York, which remained her principal residence for the rest of her life. She became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming an American citizen in 1950. With the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, her reputation as a thinker and writer was established and a series of works followed. These included the books The Human Condition in 1958, as well as Eichmann in Jerusalem and On Revolution in 1963. She taught at many American universities, while declining tenure-track appointments. She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, at the age of 69, leaving her last work, The Life of the Mind, unfinished.
In popular culture[edit]
Several authors have written biographies that focus on the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger.[60][61][359] In 1999, the French feminist philosopher Catherine Clément wrote a novel, Martin and Hannah,[360] 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),[67] but reaches back to their childhoods, and Heidegger's role in encouraging the relationship between the two women.[361] 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. Clément also brings Hannah's other mentor and confidante, Karl Jaspers, into the matrix of relationships.[362]
In 2012 the German film, Hannah Arendt, directed by Margarethe von Trotta was released. The film, with Barbara Sukowa in the title role, depicted the controversy over Arendt's coverage of the Eichmann trial and subsequent book,[218] in which she was widely misunderstood as defending Eichmann and blaming Jewish leaders for the Holocaust.[363][364] In 2015, the filmmaker Ada Ushpiz produced a documentary on Hannah Arendt, Vita Activa: The Spirit of Hannah Arendt.[319] In the 2023 TV series Transatlantic, Arendt is portrayed by Alexa Karolinski.[365][366]