Hannah Arendt: biography of this German thinker, escapee from Nazism.

A summary of the life of Hannah Arendt, influential thinker and social critic.

Arendt is a key figure for philosophy at a time when the whole world was in turmoil due to the Second World War.

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

Brief biography of Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was born in the city of Hannover, then belonging to the German Empire, in 1906. Her family was of Jewish origin, a fact that would have a special transcendence for the events that would devastate Europe some decades later. When Hannah was very young, the family moved to Königsberg, Prussia, where she grew up.

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

She was expelled from school due to disciplinary conflicts, and she studied on her own in Berlin in order to be able to enter university, as she did 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 romance.with whom she also had a secret affair, as he was a married man and much older than she was.

The situation forced Hannah Arendt to move to other universities, such as that of Albert Ludwig in Freiburg, where she had the opportunity to learn from Edmund Husserl, and later to Heidelberg, in Baden-Württemberg, where she received her doctorate. 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 St. Augustine of Hippo.

Her relationship with different intellectuals of the universities allowed her to get in touch with Kurt Blumenfeld, promoter of the Zionist movement in Germany, in which she got in touch with Kurt Blumenfeld, promoter of the Zionist movement in Germany.Hannah Arendt joined this movement and began her activism on behalf of the Jews.

Marriage and politics

Hannah Arendt met in Marburg the man who would be her husband, Günther Stern, who later changed his surname to Gunther Anders. He was also a philosopher, of Polish origin. They moved in together prior to the wedding, which was a scandal for a society of deeply rooted traditions. The year was 1930. They moved to Berlin, where Arendt became progressively closer to political movements.

She read the works of Karl Marx and Leon Trotsky. She became interested in the reasons that led society to marginalize Jews. At the same time, she wrote feminist articles in which she pointed out the differences imposed on the life of a woman with respect 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. Hannah considered leaving the country, sensing the persecution to which she would be exposed because of her race. Her husband went into exile in France, but she initially remained in her native country.

He joined Zionist organizations and this led to his arrest by the Nazi regime's secret police, the Gestapo.. She was one of the first intellectuals to advocate the active struggle 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 harsh that it led her 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 the same year, Germany withdrew her nationality, so Hannah Arendt became stateless.

A few years later, in 1940, she married again, this time to Heinrich Blücher. That year, France summoned all German immigrants for deportation. Hannah 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 finally emigrate to the United States of America.

Exile in the USA and trips to Germany

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

In the years to come, he continued, with increasing intensity, to publish articles to raise awareness of Jewish identity, publishing articles to raise awareness of the situation of Jews in the world.. She also spoke about the situation of stateless people like herself.

After the end of World War II, Hannah Arendt embarked on a series of trips to Germany to see for herself what the consequences of the Holocaust had been for the Jewish people. The first of these trips took place in 1949, and allowed her to meet Martin Heidegger and Karl Jasper.

He wrote an essay in which he described the destruction of the moral fabric that Nazi Germany had carried out during those years, committing crimes beyond imagination. What struck 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 hard stage, Hannah Arendt began to work on existential philosophy, studying Albert Camus in depth.. She raised the possibility of a European Federation, in which nationalist conflicts would end. He also published another important work dealing with the regimes of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. These are the three volumes, Anti-Semitism, Imperialism and Totalitarianism.

U.S. citizenship and continuation of her career

In 1951, Hannah Arendt finally regained her citizenship after a long period without belonging to any country. In this case it was the USA who provided her with a new passport. This put an end to a long-standing injustice. Shortly thereafter, in 1953, he began to work as a lecturer at Brooklyn College, as his works on totalitarianism had made him very popular..

Arendt sued the German government, seeking a claim for damages for having had to go into exile and give up her career, but it would take decades to succeed, as it was granted in 1972. He continued his activism against all types of discrimination, such as that against former communists and black people. She also opposed the Vietnam War.

In 1961 she went 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 this volume deals with several controversial points, among them the responsibility of the Jewish councils in Germany, which in a certain way facilitated the work of the Nazis..

University teaching and later years

In 1959, Hannah Arendt began to work 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, where she would work until the end of her days. He received various awards from American and German institutions, including honorary doctorates.

One of the ethical questions she dealt with in her works is the nature of good and evil in human beings. Hannah Arendt argued that man is by nature neither good nor evil, and that the responsibility for every act of evil lies solely with the person who has done it. She also asserts that the morality of a society should not rest on the concept of moral conscience, for there is a risk that this may be manipulated and ultimately totalitarianism is achieved.

Hannah Arendt died in 1975 of a Heart attack in her own office at the university in the presence of her colleagues. It is said that she always maintained that she wanted to end her days working, so in that sense her wish was fulfilled.

Bibliographical 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: una vida del siglo XX. Bogotá: Panamericana.