Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt, born Johanna Arendt on October 14, 1906, and died December 4, 1975, was a German-American historian and philosopher. She ranks among the most significant political thinkers of the 1900s. Her writing spans many subjects, but she is most famous for exploring wealth, power, fame, evil, politics, direct democracy, authority, tradition, and totalitarianism. She is also known for the uproar over the Adolf Eichmann trial, where she tried to explain how ordinary people become agents in totalitarian systems—an effort some saw as an apology—and for coining the phrase "the banality of evil." Her name appears on journals, schools, academic prizes, humanitarian awards, think tanks, streets, stamps, monuments, and other cultural markers that honor her ideas. Arendt was born to a Jewish family in Linden. Her father died when she was seven. Raised in a politically progressive, secular home, her mother was a committed Social Democrat. After finishing secondary school in Berlin, she studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger, beginning a romantic affair with him while she was his student. She earned her philosophy doctorate at the University of Heidelberg in 1929, with a dissertation titled *Love and Saint Augustine*, supervised by existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers. In 1933, the Gestapo briefly imprisoned Arendt for conducting illegal research on antisemitism. After her release, she fled Germany and settled in Paris. There, she worked for Youth Aliyah, helping young Jews emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. When Germany invaded France, the French government detained her as an alien. She escaped and reached the United States in 1941. She worked as a writer and editor, and for Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1950. Her reputation as a thinker was cemented with *The Origins of Totalitarianism* in 1951, followed by *The Human Condition* (1958), *Eichmann in Jerusalem* (1963), and *On Revolution* (1963). She taught at many American universities but declined tenure-track positions. She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, leaving her final work, *The Life of the Mind*, unfinished. Arendt was born in the Wilhelmine period into a secular, educated, well-off Jewish family in Linden, Prussia. Her ancestors were merchants from Königsberg. Her grandparents belonged to the Reform Jewish community. Her paternal grandfather, Max Arendt, was a prominent businessman, local politician, and leader of the Königsberg Jewish community, part of the Central Organization for German Citizens of Jewish Faith. Like others in that group, he saw himself primarily as German and disapproved of Zionists and Zionist activities, including those of Kurt Blumenfeld, a frequent visitor and later one of Hannah’s mentors. Her lifelong best friend, Anne Mendelssohn, came from a dynasty of philosophers and musicians. Of Max Arendt’s children, Paul Arendt was an engineer and Henriette Arendt a policewoman and social worker. Hannah was the only child of Paul and Martha Arendt (née Cohn), married on April 11, 1902. She was named after her paternal grandmother. The Cohns had come to Königsberg from nearby Russian Lithuania in 1852 as refugees from antisemitism, working as tea importers; J. N. Cohn & Company was the city’s largest business. The Arendts had reached Germany from Russia a century earlier. Her extended family included many women who had lost husbands and children. Her parents were more educated and politically left than her grandparents, both being Social Democrats rather than the German Democrats most contemporaries supported. Paul Arendt studied at the University of Königsberg and worked as an engineer, but he loved Classics and kept a large library that Hannah immersed herself in. Martha Cohn, a musician, had studied in Paris for three years. In their first four years of marriage, the Arendts lived in Berlin and supported the socialist journal *Socialist Monthly Bulletins*. When Hannah was born, Paul worked for 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 declining health. He had chronic syphilis and was institutionalized in the Königsberg psychiatric hospital in 1911. For years afterward, Hannah had to undergo annual WR tests for congenital syphilis. Paul died on October 30, 1913, when Hannah was seven, leaving her mother to raise her. They lived on Tiergartenstraße 51, a leafy street near the Königsberg Tiergarten, in the mostly Jewish Hufen neighborhood. Though her parents were non-religious, they allowed Max Arendt to take Hannah to the Reform synagogue. She also received religious instruction from Rabbi Hermann Vogelstein, who came to her school for that purpose. Her family moved in circles of intellectuals and professionals, a social world of high standards and ideals.