HANNAH ARENDT: HER LIFE
The political philosopher, Hannah Arendt,
was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906, the only child of
secular Jewish parents. During childhood, Arendt moved first to
Königsberg (East Prussia) and later to Berlin. In 1922-23,
Arendt began her studies (in classics and Christian theology)
at the University of Berlin, and in 1924 entered Marburg
University, where she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger.
She moved to Heidelberg to study with the existentialist
philosopher Karl Jaspers. Under Jasper’s supervision, she
wrote her dissertation on the concept of love in St.
Augustine’s thought. She remained close to Jaspers
throughout her life, although the influence of
Heidegger’s phenomenology was to prove the greater in its
lasting influence upon Arendt’s work.
In 1929, her dissertation (Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin) was published and she met Gunther Stern, a young
Jewish philosopher, whom she married in 1930. In 1933, with
National Socialism on the rise, Arendt increased her political
activity. In association with the German Zionist Organization
lead by Kurt Blimenfeld, she assisted the publication of
information regarding victims of Nazism. She was arrested by
the Gestapo for conducting research on anti-Semitic propaganda,
but managed to escape her prison sentence and fled to Paris.
There she became friend with both Walter Benjamin and Raymond
Aron. In 1936 she met Heinrich Blücher, a German political
refugee, who will become her second husband in 1940.
Blücher, a political refugee from Germany, was a
communist, and had been a member of the Spartacus League run by
Rosa Luxemburg.
After the outbreak of war, and following
detention in a camp as an ‘enemy alien’, Arendt and
Blücher fled to the USA in 1941.
In New York Arendt worked in two main
intellectual circles. Her writing appeared early on in the
journal Jewish Social Studies, and she became friends with the
editor and his wife, Salo and Jeannette Baron. She wrote
arguments for a Jewish army in other magazines like Jewish
Frontier and Aufbau. She worked as an editor at Schocken Books, a
German Jewish publishing firm that had been reestablished in
New York and Palestine. Baron charged Arendt with the task of
redistributing Judaic artifacts and salvaged treasures for the
Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. Her other intellectual circle
of activity included Dwight Macdonald and Mary McCarthy, and
was associated with the Partisan Review. In this circle she met
the critic Alfred Kazin who aided her with her writing of The Origins of Totalitarianism, which was published in 1951.
Following the extraordinary resonance of
the book, Arendt received her first visiting fellowships and
professorial positions at American universities. She was
appointed visiting scholar at the University of California at
Berkeley, Princeton University, Columbia University, and
Northwestern University, and served as a professor on The
Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago, as
well as at The New School in New York City.
She was awarded a fellowship at Yale
University and in 1959 became the first woman
to receive a full professorship at
Princeton. Arendt was instrumental in the creation of
Structured Liberal Education (SLE) at Stanford University. She
wrote a letter to the then president of Stanford University to
convince the university to enact Mark Mancall’s vision of
a residentially-based humanities program.
In 1952 Arendt received a Guggenheim
Foundation Grant for the study of Marxism and totalitarianism.
Her next three books came from this work: The Human Condition (1958);
Between Past and Future (1961); and On
Revolution (1968). In these texts
we can read her desire to reconstruct political philosophy in
phenomenological terms. The controversial text Reflections on Little Rock (1959) studied the emerging Black civil rights
movement. She wrote articles for the New York Review of Books
in the 1960s and early 1970s criticizing the abuse of executive
power and what she calls the “imperial presidency”
associated with military intervention in Vietnam.
In 1955 Arendt was, with Martin Buber and
Gershom Scholem, one of the advisors on the funding board of
the Leo Baeck Institute in New York. In 1958, she published The Human Condition
and - under the imprint of the Leo Baeck Institute - Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess.
Arendt published the most controversial
work of her career in 1963: Eichmann
in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil,
written as correspondent for The New Yorker in 1960-61, when
Isreali security forces captured Adolf Eichman, the S.S.
lieutenant colonel responsible for masterminding the death
camps, and put him to trial.
In her reporting of the Eichmann trial she
raised the question whether evil is radical or simply a
function of banality—the tendency of ordinary people to
obey orders and conform to mass opinion without critically
thinking about the results of their action or inaction. The
book sparkled an ignited controversy after which she was
ostracized in the large majority of Jewish intellectual
circles.
Arendt’s writing on the Eichmann
trials lead to a series of lectures on judgement, the
neo-Kantian meditation which were part of the work for The Life of the Mind (1978).
While in Aberdeen, Scotland, delivering these Gifford Lectures,
she survived a heart attack. The second and fatal attack
occurred while entertaining the Barons in her New York
apartment on December 4, 1975. The first two volumes of The Life of the Mind
were published posthumously, Volume 1 Thinking and Volume 2 Willing, as her death
cut short her work on the third volume, Judging.
On her death at age 69 in 1975, Arendt was
buried at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where
her husband taught for many years.
For further reading on Hannah
Arendt’s life see:
Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (1982), Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Yale University Press, 1983
