Hannah Arendt: biography of this German thinker, fleeing Nazism

Arendt is a key figure for philosophy at a time when the entire world was in upheaval due to World War II.

We will review the life of this author, also reviewing the historical context in which most of the milestones of her biography occurred.We will understand the importance of her work of this thinker through this biography of Hannah Arendt.

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Brief 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. Hannah being very young, the family moved to Königsberg, in Prussia, where she would grow up.

Her father died in 1913, when Hannah Arendt was only 7 years old. Therefore, it was her mother who took care of giving her an education, with liberal and social democratic overtones. The position of her family allowed her to interact with intellectuals in the city. She soon developed an attraction to philosophy, and by the age of 14 she had already read the works of Kant and Jaspers.

She was expelled from school due to disciplinary conflicts and studied at her expense in Berlin to be able to access the 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 transfer to other universities, such as Albert Ludwig in Freiburg, where she had the opportunity to learn from Edmund Husserl and later in Heidelberg, in Baden-Wurttemberg, where she she doctored. Her thesis director was Karl Jaspers, another important author who would also maintain a great friendship with her throughout her life. The thesis dealt with the concept of love in San Agustín de Hipona.

Her relationship with different intellectuals from the universities allowed her to get in touch with Kurt Blumenfeld, promoter of the Zionist movement in Germany., in which Hannah Arendt entered, beginning her activism in favor of the Jews.

marriage and politics

Hannah Arendt met her future husband, Günther Stern, in Marburg, who later changed her last name to Gunther Anders. He was also a philosopher, of Polish origin. They had moved in together before the wedding, which was a scandal for a society with deep traditions. It was the year 1930. They moved to Berlin, where Arendt became progressively closer to political movements.

She read the works of Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. She began to be interested in the reasons that led society to marginalize Jews. Likewise, she 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 state 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. Ella Hannah Ella considered leaving the country, sensing the persecution to which she was going to be exposed because of her race. Her husband went into exile in France, but she initially remained in her native country.

She joined Zionist organizations and this earned her arrest by the secret police of the Nazi regime, 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 live with the regime. The issue was so hard that it led him to end some of his friendships.

She finally found no other alternative than exile and she managed to reach Paris, in 1933, where she reunited with her husband. However, the interests of both 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 summoned all German immigrants to be deported. Ella Hannah Ella was transferred to an internment camp in Gurs, where she spent five weeks before she managed 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.

Exile in the US and trips to Germany

Hannah Arendt arrived with her husband and her mother in New York City in 1941 as refugees.. She quickly learned the language, which helped her to work as a columnist for the magazine Aufbau. She took advantage of said loudspeaker to try to promote Jewish identity and try to create a worldwide Jewish army, but that claim never came to fruition.

Over the next few years she continued, with increasing intensity, she publishing articles to raise awareness of the situation of Jews in the world. She also talked about the situation of stateless people, like her.

After World War II ended, Hannah Arendt embarked on a series of trips to Germany to verify in situ what had been the consequences for the Jewish people after the Holocaust. The first of these trips took place in 1949, and she allowed him to meet Martin Heidegger and Karl Jasper again.

She wrote an essay in which she captured the destruction of the moral fabric that Nazi Germany had carried out during those years, perpetrating crimes that were beyond even imagination. What struck her the 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 hard stage, Hannah Arendt she began to carry out works on existential philosophy, deeply studying Albert Camus. He raised the possibility of a European Federation, in which nationalist conflicts would end. She also published another important work in which she dealt with the regimes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. They are the three volumes, Anti-Semitism, Imperialism and Totalitarianism.

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US citizenship and continuation of his career

In the year 1951, Hannah Arendt would finally recover her citizenship after a long season without belonging to any country. In this case it was the US that provided him with a new passport. She thus put an end to an injustice that had haunted her for a long time. Shortly after, In 53, she began to work teaching classes at Brooklyn College, since her works on totalitarianism had made her very popular..

Arendt sued the German government, seeking a claim for damages caused by having she had to go into exile and give up her career, but it would take decades for her to prosper, since she was granted in 1972. She continued her activism against all kinds of discrimination, such as that practiced against former communists and black people. Similarly, she was opposed to 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 most important. In said volume she deals with several controversial points, including the responsibility of the Jewish councils in Germany, which in a certain way facilitated the work of the Nazis.

University teaching and final years

In 1959, Hannah Arendt began working at different universities, first at Princeton, one of the most prestigious in America, then in Chicago and finally at the New School for Social Research in New York, an entity where she would work until the end of her days. She received different awards from American and German institutions, including honorary doctorates.

One of the questions about ethics that she dealt with in her works is the nature of good and evil in the human being. 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 has committed it. She also claims that the morality of a society should not fall on the concept of moral conscience, since there is a risk that it will be manipulated and she ultimately manages to establish totalitarianism.

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.

Bibliographic references:

• Arendt, H., Kroh, J. (1964). Eichmann in Jerusalem. Penguin Classics.
• Benhabib, S. (1995). The pariah and her shadow: Hannah Arendt's biography of Rahel Varnhagen. Harvard University.
• Owens, P. (2005). Hannah Arendt: A biographical and political introduction. Springer.
• Villa, H.V. (2004). Hannah Arendt: A Twentieth-Century Life. Bogota: Pan American.