Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt did not know she was precocious growing up. “I thought everyone was like me,” she says. She was born near Hanover, in 1906, but her parents shortly moved to Konigsberg to live with her grandparents. Her father died when she was seven. In school, in Konigsberg, she learned what it meant to be Jewish in Germany.

At first she went to the university at Marburg, and became involved with her professor, the charismatic and eloquent Heidegger.  “Being is hazardous,” said Heidegger. “The ground is trembling, but this lack of meaning is what makes life so vital and real.” She moved on to the University of Heidelberg, where she completed a dissertation on St. Augustine, under Karl Jaspers in 1929. Both of these teachers led Arendt to what she called “passionate thinking.” 

In 1929 she married Gunther Stern, like her headed toward an academic career. But by this time, it was almost impossible for them to find work. As more repression began, things became very difficult for Jews in Germany. Stern moved to Paris in 1931, but Arendt used their apartment in Berlin as a way-station for people trying to leave. She was arrested in 1933 for work documenting anti-Jewish propaganda. When she was freed after eight days, she walked out of Germany and into exile in Czechoslovakia.

Arendt looked for practical work in Paris. She had watched her university friends accommodate themselves to Hitler and she vowed not to get further involved with academia. She decided that if she was attacked as a Jew, she must fight as a Jew. She worked with Jewish organizations, including Youth Aliyah, doing fund-raising and helping young people move to Palestine. Arendt was stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. Her mother had joined her in Paris, but her marriage was only a formality. She and Stern divorced.

Arendt met Heinrich Blucher, a working-class, self-taught philosopher, poet and activist, in Paris, “a political street fighter.” She found she could keep faith both with herself and with him. They married in 1940. “Where you are, there is my home,” she wrote to him.

Hannah was made to report for internment as France capitulated to Germany. She was sent to a camp in Gurs, in southern France with about 7,000 other women. The chaos was so great, however, that she managed to escape to Montauban, where she met her husband, and also her mother. With help from the American Varian Fry, they were able to get papers to get to Lisbon and then a ship to New York in 1941.

In New York, Arendt and Blucher participated in the vibrant life around them, gathering a tribe of fellow refugees and making many friends. Arendt excelled at loyalty, friendship and honesty. She said later that she wasn’t surprised by the persecution of Jews, but when they learned about Auschwitz in 1943, “that was the real shock. We could not believe it.”

Though she worked for Jewish organizations, Arendt was never a Zionist. She thought the creation of a state for Jews only would make hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees. She had accepted being a “pariah” and found there was a certain warmth among her fellow Jews. But when the Israeli state was created, the warmth disappeared.

Arendt saw herself as a political theorist, not a philosopher. She began work on The Origins of Totalitarianism, her first major book, published in 1951. In it she says that the true existential crisis at the root of totalitarianism is loneliness. Loneliness had become the everyday experience of the masses, crushing them. In the modern world, labor and consumption alone throw us back on ourselves and make us lonely. Consumption takes the place of all truly relating activities.

Arendt was also teaching at many institutions, though she would not accept tenure-track positions, preferring to be independent. In her classes she said, “I don’t want you to empathize. I want you to understand.” We can’t change human suffering, but we can make it articulate. The table we sit around, she told her seminars, is the world. She was trying to remake the common world. She was not interested in people’s existential relationship to themselves as much as to each other. This was the true experience of freedom and true politics.

When Adolf Eichmann was brought to trial in Jerusalem, Arndt offered to cover the trial for The New Yorker. Reading his many pages of defense, Arendt laughed aloud. She thought he was a clown. Her ironic treatment of the trial was misunderstood by many and Arendt got a lot of backlash. The trial was a public event which brought the Holocaust to world-wide notice, and made Arendt well-known.

Traveling back to Germany to help reclaim treasures stolen by the Nazis, Arendt re-connected with Heidegger. She did not wish to return to Germany, but she did enjoy speaking German, and hearing it on the street. In 1950 she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. She continued to write and teach. Her husband Blucher died in 1970, and her own ill-health began in 1974. She died the following year, of a heart attack.

Lyndsey Stonebridge presents much of Arendt’s thought, as embodied in her life in We Are Free to Change the World [published 2024]. She points out Arendt’s stubborn insistence on reality, her fearlessness. The life of the mind doesn’t harden as it matures, but is responsive, always ready to look again. 

There are many biographies of Hannah Arendt, and I especially enjoyed an interview she gave in 1964, which you can watch here. Her thought seems to me to be particularly relevant today because of her insistence that we live in the world with others. She felt that violence is always a failure of politics. Freedom cannot be forced. It can only be experienced in the world and alongside others.