Hannah Arendt

• 1. Introduction

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  Hannah Arendt's name is printed on journals, schools, scholarly prizes, humanitarian prizes, think-tanks and street signs. It also appears on stamps and monuments. She was born Johanna Arendt, and she grew into one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century. Yet the same name is tied to an argument that some critics called an apologia. Arendt tried to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, and not every reader forgave her for asking. This documentary follows her from a bookish childhood to a courtroom where she watched one such actor stand trial. Along the way it asks what exile cost her, and which friends and ideas she carried across a continent and an ocean. It also asks why a thinker who refused to join any school of thought is still claimed by so many.

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• 2. A Königsberg Girlhood

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  Max Arendt, her paternal grandfather, was a prominent businessman, a local politician and a leader of the Jewish community in Königsberg. He saw himself first as a German and disapproved of Zionists. Even so, the Zionist Kurt Blumenfeld was a frequent visitor to the family and later became one of Hannah's mentors. She was named after her paternal grandmother and was the only child of Paul and Martha Arendt, who married on the 11th of April 1902. Martha's family, the Cohns, had come to Königsberg from Lithuania in 1852 as refugees from antisemitism. They made their living importing tea, and J. N. Cohn and Company became the largest business in the city.

  Paul Arendt was an engineer who prided himself on his love of the Classics, and Hannah immersed herself in his large library. His health failed, and the family moved back to Königsberg in 1909. He was institutionalized in 1911 and died on the 30th of October 1913, when Hannah was seven. In 1920 her mother married Martin Beerwald, an ironmonger and a widower. Hannah, then 14, gained two older stepsisters named Clara and Eva, along with a more secure home.

  Martha Arendt considered herself progressive, yet she raised her daughter on strict Goethean lines, which meant reading his complete works. She recorded Hannah's progress in a book she titled Unser Kind, measuring it against what was then called normal development. Hannah attended kindergarten from 1910, and her teachers were impressed by her precocity. She learned ancient Greek as a child and wrote poetry as a teenager. At school she founded both a reading group for classical literature and a philosophy club. By the age of 14 she had read Kierkegaard, Jaspers and Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.

  Kant's own hometown was Königsberg. He had written that such a town is "the right place for gaining knowledge concerning men and the world even without travelling." Arendt's family gave her a different lesson about the world around her. In her recollection, nobody in her circle paid much attention to moral questions, because moral conduct was assumed to be a matter of course. Her Jewish family was thoroughly assimilated, yet Jews still lacked full citizenship rights, and antisemitism was quieter than overt but never absent. During the last two years of the First World War, her mother organized Social Democratic discussion groups and followed Rosa Luxemburg, whose writings later shaped Hannah's political thinking.

  In 1922, at the age of 15, Arendt was expelled from the Luise-Schule for leading a boycott of a teacher who had insulted her. Her mother sent her to Berlin, where she lived in a student residence and audited university courses, including classics and Christian theology with Romano Guardini. She then passed the Abitur for the University of Marburg. That was where her friend Ernst Grumach had studied with a newly appointed professor named Martin Heidegger.

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• 3. Heidegger and Jaspers

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  In the autumn of 1924, Arendt arrived at Marburg and found it in the middle of an intellectual revolution. She described Heidegger as "the hidden king" of the realm of thinking. Guardini had introduced her to Kierkegaard, and she had resolved to make theology her major field. At Marburg she studied classical languages, German literature, Protestant theology with Rudolf Bultmann, and philosophy with Nicolai Hartmann and Heidegger. Heidegger taught that thinking is an activity, which she later called passionate thinking.

  Arendt's 1923 poem Trost, or Consolation, shows how restless she was before she met him. It ends by saying that one achievement remains, merely existing. At 18 she began a long romantic relationship with the 35-year-old Heidegger, who was married with two young sons. The two agreed to keep it secret while preserving their letters. The world did not learn of it until Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography appeared in 1982, when Heidegger's wife Elfride was still alive.

  In 1995 Elzbieta Ettinger gained access to the sealed correspondence and published a controversial account. Arendt's detractors used it to cast doubt on her integrity, and the account was later refuted. Arendt also faced criticism because Heidegger later supported the Nazi Party after his election as rector at Freiburg University in 1933. Even so, he remained one of the deepest influences on her thinking. He later said she had inspired his work on passionate thinking.

  In the summer of 1925, home in Königsberg, Arendt wrote Die Schatten, or The Shadows, addressed to Heidegger. It is her only autobiographical piece, written abstractly in the third person. She describes alienation and a strangeness that finds the remarkable inside the banal. She also describes her love for him as an unbending devotion to a unique man.

  After a semester at Freiburg attending the lectures of Edmund Husserl, Arendt moved to the University of Heidelberg. There she completed her doctorate under Karl Jaspers and earned her degree summa cum laude. Jaspers was the other leading figure of the new existence philosophy, and he and his wife Gertrud Mayer became her lifelong friends. Her friend Hans Jonas followed her from Marburg to Heidelberg. Jaspers also sent her to lectures by Friedrich Gundolf, which kindled her interest in German Romanticism. At a lecture she met Kurt Blumenfeld again, and he introduced her to Jewish politics.

  At Heidelberg she lived near the castle at Schlossberg 16, where a single surviving wall now bears a plaque. A Japanese student there, Kitayama Junyu, translated her into Japanese in 1930. The year 1929 brought the Depression and the end of the golden years of the Weimar Republic. As a Jew, she had little chance of an academic appointment in Germany. Her path back to Berlin led through a man she had barely noticed at Marburg, the philosopher Günther Stern.

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• 4. The Conscious Pariah

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  At a masked ball on New Year's Eve in Berlin, Arendt met Günther Stern again and began a relationship with him. Within a month she had moved into his one-room studio, which was shared with a dancing school in Halensee. They married in Potsdam on the 26th of September 1929, with the blessing of both sets of parents. For two years they wandered between Heidelberg and Frankfurt, hoping in vain that Stern would win an academic post. During that time they wrote an essay together on Rilke's Duino Elegies. It describes the situation behind the poems as marked by the absence of an echo and the knowledge of futility. In 1931 the couple returned to Berlin, where Stern wrote for a newspaper under the pen name Günther Anders, helped by Bertolt Brecht.

  Anne Mendelssohn had come across the correspondence of Rahel Varnhagen and gave her collection to Arendt. Varnhagen was a Prussian socialite who wanted to assimilate into German culture and was rejected because she was born Jewish. Arendt abandoned her study of Romanticism for a book about Varnhagen. She felt the same sensibility and vulnerability in Rahel that she saw in herself. She later called Varnhagen "my very closest woman friend, unfortunately dead a hundred years now." From Max Weber she borrowed the idea of a pariah people, and from Bernard Lazare the term conscious pariah.

  By 1932 Arendt was reading Marx and Trotsky and building contacts at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik. She never regarded herself as a political leftist, and she justified her activism through her Jewishness. That year she published her first article on Judaism, on the Enlightenment and the Jewish question. She also reviewed a book on women's issues sympathetically but doubted that the women's movement could achieve political change.

  Heidegger's behavior in 1932 troubled her deeply. She wrote to him after hearing reports that he was speaking at National Socialist meetings, and she asked him to deny that he was drawn to the movement. He replied that he would not deny the rumors, which were true. Jaspers urged her to think of herself as a German first. She answered that for her, Germany meant the mother tongue, philosophy and poetry, and not her identity.

  Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933, and the Reichstag was burned the following month. Stern, who had communist associations, fled to Paris, but Arendt stayed on. She turned her apartment on Opitzstraße in Berlin-Steglitz into a way-station for fugitives, and a plaque there now recognizes the rescue work. Her motto became: "If one is attacked as a Jew one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man."

  On the 7th of March 1933, the Kölnische Zeitung published part of her Varnhagen manuscript as an epilogue. It opened by declaring that Jewish assimilation in Germany must now declare its bankruptcy. The Zionist Federation of Germany then asked her to use her access to the Prussian State Library to gather evidence of antisemitism for a planned speech at the Zionist Congress in Prague. A librarian denounced her for anti-state propaganda. The Gestapo arrested both Arendt and her mother, and they spent eight days in prison. Her notebooks were written in code and could not be deciphered, so a young, sympathetic officer released her to await trial. A 2019 play by Jenny Lyn Bader, Mrs. Stern Wanders the Prussian State Library, dramatizes the episode.

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• 5. Exile and Escape

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  After their release, Arendt and her mother crossed the Ore Mountains by night into Czechoslovakia. They traveled on to Prague, and then by train to Geneva. There Arendt decided to commit herself to the Jewish cause. A friend of her mother's found her work at the Jewish Agency for Palestine at the League of Nations, where she distributed visas and wrote speeches. In the autumn she reached Paris and was reunited with Stern. Her mother had travel documents, so she went back to Königsberg and her husband.

  In Paris Arendt befriended Walter Benjamin and the French philosopher Raymond Aron. She was stateless, without papers, and learning a foreign language, and it wore on her mentally and physically. In 1934 she began working for Agriculture et Artisanat, which prepared Jewish youth to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. She studied French, Hebrew and Yiddish along the way. In 1935 she became assistant to the philanthropist Baroness Germaine de Rothschild. Later that year she joined Youth Aliyah, where she served as Secretary-General from 1935 to 1939. She made her first trip to the British Mandate of Palestine in 1935, accompanying a group of young emigrants. After the annexation of Austria and the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, she became the organization's special agent for rescuing children from those countries.

  Heinrich Blücher, whom she met in Paris in 1936, was a self-educated Berlin poet and Marxist philosopher. He had been a Spartacist and a founding member of the German Communist Party, from which he was later expelled. Her marriage to Stern had already ended in all but name, and Stern left for America in 1936. In 1937 she lost her German citizenship, and she and Stern divorced. Blücher's long record of political activism pushed her thinking toward political action. They married on the 16th of January 1940. In April 1939, after the Kristallnacht pogrom, her mother left her husband Martin Beerwald and joined her daughter in Paris.

  On the 5th of May 1940, the military governor of Paris ordered "enemy aliens" from Germany, aged 17 to 55, to report for internment. Women were gathered at the Vélodrome d'Hiver on the 15th of May, and Arendt's mother, being over 55, was allowed to stay. Arendt described refugees as a new kind of human being, "put into concentration camps by their foes and into internment camps by their friends." The men, including Blücher, were sent to Camp Vernet, and the women to Camp Gurs.

  France capitulated on the 22nd of June, and Gurs fell in the Vichy zone. About four weeks later, in the chaos, Arendt obtained liberation papers and left with about 200 of the 7,000 women held there. She walked and hitchhiked north to Montauban, where Blücher, who had escaped from a forced march, joined her. Anne Mendelssohn and Arendt's mother soon followed. Walter Benjamin had taken his own life, fearing capture while trying to reach Spain.

  The American journalist Varian Fry and the American vice-consul Hiram Bingham, working in Marseille, raised funds, forged papers and bribed officials. Between them they secured exit papers and American visas for thousands of people. With help from Günther Stern, Arendt, her husband and her mother obtained the permits they needed. In January 1941 they traveled by train through Spain to Lisbon, and in May they sailed for New York on the Guiné II. They arrived on the 22nd of May 1941 with very little. A few months later Fry's operations were shut down and the borders were sealed.

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• 6. Natality and Totalitarianism

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  The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, was Arendt's first major book. It examines the roots of Stalinism and Nazism in three essays titled Antisemitism, Imperialism and Totalitarianism. She argued that totalitarianism was a novel form of government, different from despotism, tyranny and dictatorship. It used terror to subjugate whole populations rather than only political adversaries. She also held that concentration camps were essential to it, and that victims became "superfluous people." The book appeared before Reitlinger's Final Solution and a full decade before Hilberg's Destruction of the European Jews. Critics have often objected to its portrayal of Hitlerism and Stalinism as equally tyrannical.

  Her doctoral thesis on Saint Augustine, finally translated into English in 1996, had already planted the idea that shaped her later work. It distinguishes love as craving, love between creature and Creator, and neighborly love, which she treated as the most fundamental. Here she first introduced natality, the idea that birth is the basic condition of human existence. Another Augustinian phrase, amor mundi, or love of the world, was the original title of The Human Condition. It is also the subtitle of Young-Bruehl's biography and the name of the newsletter of the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College.

  The Human Condition, published in 1958, separates labor, work and action. Of all actions, she singled out two as essential, forgiving past wrongs and promising future benefits. Here she broke from Heidegger's emphasis on mortality. She wrote that men "though they must die, are not born in order to die but in order to begin." Karin Fry considers natality the most optimistic concept in her political theory.

  On Revolution, published in 1963, compares the American and French revolutions and defies a common leftist view. Arendt argued that France, though well studied and often imitated, was a disaster. In her telling, its leaders abandoned freedom as their goal and turned to compassion for the masses. The largely ignored American Revolution, she said, stayed true to the goal of freedom. She thought that revolutionary spirit had since been lost and recommended a council system to recover it.

  Crises of the Republic, published in 1972, turns to American politics in the 1960s and 1970s. One essay, Lying in Politics, probes the deception about the Vietnam War revealed by the Pentagon Papers. Another, On Violence, breaks with the idea that power comes from violence. She treated power as a property of groups. In a talk in New York she put it plainly: "Violence can destroy power, but it can never replace it."

  Men in Dark Times, published in 1968, collects portraits of figures such as Walter Benjamin, Karl Jaspers, Rosa Luxemburg and Pope John XXIII. Its preface holds the hope that sustained her darkest subjects. She wrote that even in dark times we may expect some illumination. It would come less from theories and concepts than from the "uncertain, flickering, and often weak light" that some men and women kindle in their lives and works.

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• 7. Eichmann in Jerusalem

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  In 1960, on hearing that Adolf Eichmann had been captured, Arendt contacted The New Yorker and offered to cover his trial in Israel. The trial opened on the 11th of April 1961. She wanted to test the theories of The Origins of Totalitarianism against the kind of man she had written about. She also knew that she had seen little of the Nazi regime directly, and here was a chance to watch one of its agents at close range.

  The magazine accepted her offer. Arendt attended six weeks of the five-month trial, accompanied by her young Israeli cousin Edna Brocke. She arrived to something close to celebrity treatment, meeting the trial's chief judge, Moshe Landau, and the foreign minister, Golda Meir.

  Her report appeared in 1963 and grew into the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In it she coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe what she had seen. Like others in the courtroom, she was struck by how ordinary Eichmann seemed. The report did more than any earlier book to make her widely known, and it stirred intense controversy.

  The backlash did not fade quickly. In 1978 a collection called The Jew as Pariah gathered 15 essays and letters written between 1943 and 1966. It was meant to shed light on her views of the Jewish world after the reaction to Eichmann, and it proved equally polarizing. A new edition of Origins appeared in 2004, followed by The Promise of Politics in 2005, and readers returned to her with fresh interest.

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• 8. Friends and Final Pages

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  Arendt's first impression of America, formed during two difficult summer months with a family in Winchester, Massachusetts, was a sharp one. She wrote that the fundamental contradiction of the country was "political freedom coupled with social slavery." Back in New York in 1941, she took a job at the German-language Jewish newspaper Aufbau, where she wrote a political column until 1945. Her first full-time salaried job came in 1944, as research director of the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. There she compiled lists of Jewish cultural assets in Germany and occupied Europe, to help recover them after the war. In 1946 she became an editor at Schocken Books.

  Arendt taught at many American universities from 1951 onward, but she consistently refused tenure-track positions to protect her independence. In 1959 she became the first woman appointed a full professor at Princeton. She taught at the University of Chicago from 1963 to 1967 and joined The New School for Social Research in 1967. In 1974 she wrote to the president of Stanford to support a residential humanities program, which became Structured Liberal Education.

  Hans Jonas said she had a "genius for friendship," and she called friendship one of the active modes of being alive. She always had a female best friend, first Anne Mendelssohn Weil, then Hilde Fränkel, and finally Mary McCarthy. She kept German as her mother tongue and surrounded herself with German-speaking émigrés she called The Tribe. After the war she briefly renewed her relationship with Heidegger, a quasi-romance lasting two years, and defended him against critics of his Nazi membership.

  Heinrich Blücher died of a heart attack on the 31st of October 1970. Arendt had told McCarthy before that, "Life without him would be unthinkable." A heavy smoker, she suffered a near-fatal heart attack while lecturing in Scotland in May 1974. On the evening of the 4th of December 1975, she had another while entertaining friends in her apartment, and she was pronounced dead at the scene. Her ashes were buried beside Blücher's at Bard College in May 1976.

  After her death, friends found a page in her typewriter holding only the title Judging and two epigraphs. It was meant to begin the third part of The Life of the Mind, and McCarthy edited the first two parts. Arendt's poems had mostly stayed private, and some were found in her archives at the Library of Congress and in the German Literature Archive in Marbach. It was not until 2025 that seventy-one of them were published together in a bilingual German-English edition.

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