Hannah Arendt: Biography Of This German Thinker, Escape From Nazism
Arendt is a key figure for philosophy at a time when the entire world was in turmoil due to World War II.
We will review the life of this author, also reviewing the historical context in which most of the milestones in her biography occurred.We will understand the importance of this thinker’s work through this biography of Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt was born in the city of Hannover, then part of the German Empire, in 1906. Her family was of Jewish origin, a fact that would have special significance for the events that would devastate Europe a few decades later. When Hannah was very young, the family moved to Königsberg, in Prussia, where she would grow up.
The father died in 1913, when Hannah Arendt was only 7 years old. Therefore, It was his mother who took care of giving him an education, with liberal and social democratic overtones The family’s position allowed him to interact with intellectuals in the city. He soon developed an attraction to philosophy, and by the age of 14 he had already read the work of Kant and Jaspers.
She was expelled from school due to disciplinary conflicts and trained on her own in Berlin to be able to access university, as she would do in 1924, at the University of Marburg, in Hesse. She was a student of such important personalities as Rudolf Bultmann, Nicolai Hartmann and, above all, Martin Heidegger with whom she also had a secret romance, since he was a married man and also much older than her.
The situation forced Hannah Arendt to move to other universities, such as Albert Ludwig’s in Freiburg, where she had the opportunity to learn from Edmund Husserl, and then to Heidelberg, in Baden-Württemberg, where she earned her doctorate. Her thesis director was Karl Jaspers, another important author who would also maintain a great friendship with her throughout her life. Her thesis dealt with the concept of love in Saint Augustine of Hippo.
His relationship with different intellectuals from universities allowed him to contact Kurt Blumenfeld, promoter of the Zionist movement in Germany into which Hannah Arendt entered, beginning her activism in favor of the Jews.
Hannah Arendt met her future husband, Günther Stern, in Marburg, who later changed his surname to be Gunther Anders. He was also a philosopher, of Polish origin. They moved in together before the wedding, which was a scandal for a society with deep-rooted traditions. It was the year 1930. They moved to Berlin, where Arendt progressively became closer to political movements.
He read the works of Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. He began to be interested in the reasons that led society to marginalize Jews. Likewise, writes feminist articles in which she points out the differences that are imposed in the life of a woman compared to that of a man
Her friend Jaspers insisted to Hannah Arendt that she should publicly affirm that she was German, but she refused and always used her Jewish identity. The year was 1932, just before Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany. Hannah considered leaving the country, sensing the persecution to which she would be exposed because of her race. Her husband went into exile to France, but she initially remained in her native country.
He joined Zionist organizations and this earned him arrest by the Nazi regime’s secret police, the Gestapo She was one of the first intellectuals who defended the active fight against National Socialism. In fact, she harshly criticized the rest for not joining this movement and simply trying to coexist with the regime. The issue was so hard that it led him to end some of her friendships.
Finally she found no alternative but exile and managed to reach Paris in 1933, where she was reunited with her husband. However, their interests were already very different and in 1937 they divorced. In that same year, Germany withdrew her nationality, making Hannah Arendt stateless.
A few years later, in 1940, she would marry again, this time with Heinrich Blücher. That year, France called for all German immigrants to be deported. Hannah was transferred to an internment camp in Gurs, where she spent five weeks before managing to escape They moved first to Montauban and then to Lisbon, the Portuguese capital, with the help of Varian Fry, an American journalist. He would eventually emigrate to the United States of America.
Hannah Arendt arrived with her husband and mother in New York City in 1941 as refugees He quickly learned the language, which helped him work as a columnist for the magazine Aufbau. He took advantage of this speaker to try to promote Jewish identity and try to create a Jewish army worldwide, but this claim never prospered.
During the years to come it continued, with increasing intensity, publishing articles to raise awareness of the situation of Jews in the world He also talked about the situation of stateless people, like her.
Once the Second World War ended, Hannah Arendt embarked on a series of trips to Germany to see firsthand what the consequences had been for the Jewish people after the Holocaust. The first of these trips took place in 1949, and it allowed him to meet again with Martin Heidegger and Karl Jasper.
He wrote an essay in which he captured the destruction of the moral fabric that Nazi Germany had carried out during those years, perpetrating crimes that were beyond even the imagination. What impacted her most was the attitude of the German people themselves, who according to her walked between indifference and silence in the face of these atrocities.
After this difficult period, Hannah Arendt He began to produce works on existential philosophy, studying Albert Camus deeply He raised the possibility of a European Federation, in which nationalist conflicts would end. He also published another important work in which he dealt with the regimes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. They are the three volumes, Antisemitism, Imperialism and Totalitarianism.
US Citizenship and Continued Career
In 1951, Hannah Arendt would finally regain her citizenship after a long period without belonging to any country. In this case it was her US that provided her with a new passport. She thus put an end to an injustice that had plagued her for a long time. Shortly after, In ’53, he began to work teaching classes at Brooklyn College, since his works on totalitarianism had made him very popular
Arendt sued the German government, seeking a claim for damages caused by having to go into exile and give up her career, but it would take decades to prosper, as it was granted in 1972. She continued her activism against all types of discrimination, such as that was exercised on former communists and black people. Likewise, he opposed the Vietnam War.
In 1961 she moved to Jerusalem, as a reporter for The New Yorker, to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, which would be the origin of several of her works, including Eichmann in Jerusalem, a report on the banality of evil, one of the more important. In said volume deals with several controversial points, among them the responsibility of the Jewish councils of Germany, which in some way facilitated the work of the Nazis
Teaching at the university and recent years
In 1959, Hannah Arendt began working at different universities, first at Princeton, one of the most prestigious in America, then at Chicago and finally at the New School for Social Research in New York, an entity where she would work until the end of his days. She received various awards from American and German institutions, including honorary doctorates.
One of the questions about ethics that he dealt with in his works is the nature of good and evil in human beings. Hannah Arendt argued that man is neither good nor bad by nature, and that the responsibility for each act of evil lies solely with the person who carried it out. She also states that The morality of a society should not fall on the concept of moral conscience, as there is a risk that it will be manipulated and ultimately totalitarianism is achieved.
Hannah Arendt died in 1975, of a heart attack, in her own office at the university and in the presence of her classmates. It is said that she always maintained that she wanted to end her days working, so in that sense her wish was fulfilled.
