Hannah Arendt

Hannah (civil name: Johanna) Arendt was born on October 14, 1906, the only child of Paul Arendt and Martha, née Cohn in Linden, Lindener Marktplatz 2, near Hanover. Her father worked as an engineer for an electricity company in Hanover. Due to a serious illness, he had to quit his job and the family moved back to Königsberg, East Prussia, which was the hometown of her parents, in 1909. Hannah Arendt's mother had studied French and music in Paris for three years and attached great importance to her daughter's musical and linguistic education. Paul Arendt owned a library of Greek and Latin American classics, which Hannah later read.

The Arendts were Jewish, but not religious. Still, they sent Hannah to synagogue with her grandparents. She spent a lot of time with her paternal grandfather, especially from the time her father fell ill. Her grandfather impressed her with his special ability to tell stories. In March 1913 her grandfather died and in October her father. In the same year she was enrolled in school and additionally received religious instruction from Rabbi Vogelstein twice a week. She read very much. After the outbreak of World War I, Hannah and her mother left the city to join Martha's sister in Berlin, but returned to Königsberg after ten weeks. A few years later she was accepted into the Grumacher Kreis founded by the student Ernst Grumach, in which the students of the higher classes talked about literature and philosophy and read Greek texts. Through Grumach, Arendt met her longtime friend Anne Mendelsohn. Hannah Arendt had to leave school shortly before graduating from high school because of differences with a teacher and then studied at the University of Berlin for a few semesters. After returning to Königsberg, she took the Abitur as an external student in 1924.

With the help of her uncle Ernst Aron, Hannah Arendt was able to begin studying at the University of Marburg in 1924. There she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger and Nicolai Hartmann, among others, and minored in Protestant theology. Heidegger and Arendt fell in love with each other and entered into a love affair. Hannah Arendt lived in Marburg because of this relationship and rather withdrew to keep it a secret. She maintained contacts with her fellow student Hans Jonas and with her Königsberg friends. The relationship between Heidegger and Arendt remained secret until the great Arendt biography by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl was published in the UK and the US in 1982. In early 1926, Arendt decided to change her place of study and went to Freiburg for one semester. She then studied philosophy in Heidelberg. There Arendt met many new people such as Karl Jaspers, with whom she kept a friendly relationship throughout her life, and her later (first) husband Günther Stern, who studied together with her. Hannah Arendt finished her studies in 1929 with her dissertation "Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin." In it, she examined the Christian philosopher and church scholar Augustine of Hippo's (354-430) understanding of love. In doing so, she examined the tense relationship of the individual to the world. The work was graded 1-2 by Karl Jaspers.

Hannah Arendt lived in Potsdam until she renewed her acquaintance with Günther Stern (later Günther Anders). They married in Nowawes (Babelsberg) in 1929 then moved to Berlin. Arendt realized as early as 1931 that the National Socialists would come to power and was already thinking of emigrating to France in 1932. However, she decided to stay and became politically active.

After Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor in 1933 Arendt called for and supported active resistance to the Nazis and joined the Zionist Association for Germany to document the persecution of Jews. Her apartment served as a stopover for refugees and persecuted persons. Among other things, this brought her to the attention of the Gestapo (the secret police of the Nazi regime). While doing research for the Jewish Resistance in preparation for the World Zionist Congress, she was arrested on her way to the Staatsbibliothek Unter den Linden and interrogated by the Gestapo for eight days. Through fortunate circumstances, she was released. Hannah then decided to flee Germany. She traveled via Karlsbad, which had been a health resort since the 19th century. Many Germans had settled there for a long time and the city had an important support network for persecuted people. From there she traveled on to Geneva via Prague. She stayed in Switzerland for several months as she found work and accommodation with the help of friends. Because of her family connection, but also to support Zionist associations, Hannah Arendt was drawn to Paris. When she arrived in France, she had no papers to identify herself.

After her escape, Hannah Arendt reached Paris in 1933. In Paris, she met other German exiles such as Walter Benjamin as well as her future husband, Heinrich Blücher. During her time in Paris, Hannah resumed work with the World Zionist Organization. Furthermore, she lectured on anti-Semitism to various associations such as the Free German College of Paris. During the seven years she spent in Paris, she also worked at the Aliyah organization. This organization helped Jewish youth escape to Palestine. For this reason, in 1935 Arendt accompanied a group of young people to Palestine, where she stayed for three months and expanded her historical knowledge of the region. As part of her studies, she visited, among other places, the rock city of Petra. A year after her return to Paris, Arendt met Heinrich Blücher, whom she married in 1940, after divorcing her previous husband Günther Stern in 1937. The year 1937 was also marked by the loss of her German citizenship.

The wave of emigration from Germany, as well as the political developments of the 1930s, led to increasing anti-Semitism, which also became more widespread in France and was closely and critically observed by Hannah Arendt. From Christmas 1938, she lived together with Heinrich Blücher in an apartment in the Rue de la Convention. In addition, after the events in the German Reich - the November pogrom on the night of 09 to 10 November 1938 - Arendt's mother Martha was waiting for them in Paris. After the declaration of war by France against Germany, on September 3, 1939, male German citizens with suspicious political past were arrested in France. Heinrich Blücher was interned in camp Villemalard, where he remained for almost two months and with the help of a friend Lotte Klenbort obtained his release. Heinrich then returned to Paris together with Hannah Arendt, where they were married on January 16, 1940. The marriage later enabled them to obtain an emergency United States visa, which was granted only to single or married couples.

As the war progressed, France decided on May 5, 1940, to place all German men and single or childless women between the ages of 17 and 55 in camps on a centered basis as "enemy aliens." Hannah Arendt had to go to the Parisian assembly point, the Vélodrome d'Hiver, on May 15 and was transferred from there to the Gurs camp by bus on May 23, along with 2,364 other women.

The Gurs camp was located in southwestern France, near the French-Spanish border, and had previously served as a camp for refugees from the Spanish Civil War and as a collection point for members of the International Brigades. At the end of May, about 2,500 people were interned, and on the day of the armistice, June 22, 1940, there were 9,771. Most of them were women, but there were also children. Conditions on the ground were poor, as the detainees had no employment, hygienic conditions deteriorated rapidly, and supplies for the inmates were inadequate. In addition, the inmates remained in the dark about their situation as well as the events of the war, which fueled fears and despair. Hannah Arendt was not unaffected by this. However, she managed to take advantage of the chaos of the days following the defeat of France and obtain release papers. Together with about 200 other women, she was thus able to leave the camp. She headed a little further north, to Montauban, where she could expect friends and help. The small town in the south of France near Toulouse was a focal point for migrants and refugees because of its liberal political leadership.

Heinrich Blücher was housed at Camp Vernet. After the capture of Paris by German troops, this was evacuated. When, during a march south, the prisoners were fired upon by German soldiers, the French guards released them to flee to unoccupied areas of France. Thus Blücher and Arendt were able to meet again in Montauban, where they lived until October 1940.

At this point, the registration of Jew*s began in the local prefectures. This encouraged Hannah Arendt and her husband to intensify their efforts to leave the country. To this end, they went to Marseille several times to obtain emergency visas for the United States. They succeeded in obtaining both a visa for the USA and an exit and transit visa for Spain. In January 1941, the Vichy regime briefly relaxed its refugee policy, which Hannah Arendt and her husband took advantage of to travel by train to Lisbon. They remained there for another three months before immigrating to New York.

After the successful escape from the Gurs reception camp, Arendt emigrated with her husband and mother to New York in the USA in 1941 without a citizenship. The family was initially able to survive on a small stipend from the Zionist Refugee Organization, allowing them to focus on English language acquisition. She learned the language, among other things, during a stay with an American family. That same year, Hannah Arendt was able to write political columns for the German-Jewish weekly magazine Aufbau titled "This means You," thus making herself financially self-sufficient. As ambitious as Hannah Arendt had always been, she had a wide variety of projects and jobs in the years that followed. Thus she was research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations, chief editor at the Salman Schocken Publishing House and also director of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Organization for the rescue of Jewish cultural property.

Ten years after arriving in New York (1951), Hannah Arendt was finally granted American citizenship and was no longer stateless. She also moved on professionally. After several guest lectures at elite universities such as Princeton and Harvard, she received a professorship at Brooklyn College in New York. These opportunities certainly came about due to the success of various publications, such as her major work "Origins of Totalitarianism" (in German: "Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft").

One of the things Arendt is probably still best known for today is her coverage of the so-called Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for the magazine New Yorker. Her articles continue to be discussed for their criticism of the behavior of the Judenräte as well as their portrayal of Adolf Eichmann himself and his motives. These articles were also ultimately bundled together in book form under the title "Eichmann in Jerusalem. An Account of the Banality of Evil." Arendt's career continued to soar. A professorship at the University of Chicago, an appointment at the New School for Social Research in New York, and election as vice president of the Institute for Arts and Letters are only snippets of her further career stages. Until her death, she wanted to remain as efficient as possible and thus did not let a heart attack slow her down. After a short break, she continued to teach and write. On December 4, 1975, however, she died of another heart attack. Her ashes were buried next to those of her husband, Heinrich Blücher, in the Bard College cemetery.