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Photograph of Hannah Arendt in 1933 –

Top 10 Sensational Facts about Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was a German political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century. Arendt was raised in a politically progressive, secular family. Her mother was an ardent supporter of the Social Democrats. After completing her secondary education in Berlin, she studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a four-year affair. She obtained her doctorate in philosophy writing on Love and Saint Augustine at the University of Heidelberg in 1929 under the direction of the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers.

Hannah Arendt married Günther Stern in 1929 but soon began to encounter increasing anti-Jewish discrimination in 1930s Nazi Germany. In 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, Arendt was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism in Nazi Germany. On release, she fled Germany, living in Czechoslovakia and Switzerland before settling in Â鶹APP. There she worked for Youth Aliyah, assisting young Jews to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. Divorcing Stern in 1937, she married Heinrich Blücher in 1940, but when Germany invaded France in 1940 she was detained by the French as an alien, despite having been stripped of her German citizenship in 1937.

Here are the top 10 sensational facts about Hannah Arendt.

1. Hannah’s works deals with the nature of power and evil, as well as politics

In the popular mind, she is best remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, which was considered by some an apologia, and for the phrase “the banality of evil”. 

She is commemorated by institutions and journals devoted to her thinking, the Hannah Arendt Prize for political thinking, and on stamps, street names, and schools, amongst other things.

2. Arendt attended the Königin-Luise-Schule for her secondary education, a girls’ Gymnasium on Landhofmeisterstraße

Hannah Arendt Student Card at Heidelberg University by Albert Labrède –

Gymnasium in the German education system is the most advanced and highest of the three types of German secondary schools. Gymnasium strongly emphasizes academic learning, comparable to the British sixth form system or with prep schools in the United States. 

Most of her friends, while at school, were gifted children of Jewish professional families, generally older than she and went on to university education. Among them was Ernst Grumach , who introduced her to his girlfriend, Anne Mendelssohn, who would become a lifelong friend. 

3. Arendt’s education at the Luise-Schule ended after leading a boycott of a teacher

Arendt’s education at the Luise-Schule ended in 1922 when she was expelled at the age of 15 for leading a boycott of a teacher who insulted her. Instead, her mother arranged for her to go to Berlin to be with Social Democrat family friends.

In Berlin, she lived in a student residence and audited courses of her choosing at the University of Berlin, including classics and Christian theology under Romano Guardini. This enabled her to successfully sit the entrance examination for the University of Marburg, where Ernst Grumach had studied under Martin Heidegger, who had been appointed a professor there in 1922. 

For the examination, her mother engaged a private tutor, while her aunt Frieda Arendt, a teacher, also helped her, and Frieda’s husband Ernst Aron provided financial assistance for her to attend university.

4. Hannah Arendt composed her sole autobiographical piece, Die Schatten in 1925

Hannah Arendt lecturing in Germany, 1955 –

In the summer of 1925, while home at Königsberg, Arendt composed her sole autobiographical piece, Die Schatten (The Shadows), a description of herself addressed to Heidegger. In this essay, full of anguish and Heideggerian language, she reveals her insecurities relating to her femininity and Jewishness, writing abstractly in the third person.

She describes a state of “Fremdheit” (alienation), on the one hand, an abrupt loss of youth and innocence, on the other an “Absonderlichkeit” (strangeness), the finding of the remarkable in the banal. In her detailing of the pain of her childhood and longing for protection, she shows her vulnerabilities and how her love for Heidegger had released her and once again filled her world with color and mystery.

5.  Arendt’s sole contribution to sociology was she found love to be a transcendent principle

In both her treatment of Mannheim and Rilke, Arendt found love to be a transcendent principle “Because there is no true transcendence in this ordered world, one also cannot exceed the world, but only succeed to higher ranks.

In Rilke she saw a latter-day secular Augustine, describing the Elegies as the letzten literarischen Form religiösen Dokumentes (the ultimate form of religious document). Later, she would discover the limitations of transcendent love in explaining the historical events that pushed her into political action. Another theme from Rilke that she would develop was the despair of not being heard. Reflecting on Rilke’s opening lines, which she placed as an epigram at the beginning of their essay.

6.  Hannah Arendt positioned herself as a critic of the Nazi Party in 1932 

Portrait of Hannah Arendt in 1924 –

Hannah published ´¡»å²¹³¾-²Ñü±ô±ô±ð°ù-¸é±ð²Ô²¹¾±²õ²õ²¹²Ô³¦±ð a critique of the appropriation of the life of Adam Müller to support right wing ideology. The beginnings of anti-Jewish laws and boycott came in the spring of 1933. Confronted with systemic antisemitism.

Arendt adopted the motiv “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.This was Arendt’s introduction of the concept of Jew as Pariah that would occupy her for the rest of her life in her Jewish writings.

7. Hannah’s actions in researching antisemitism led to her and her mother’s arrest

As a Jew, Arendt was anxious to inform the world of what was happening to her people in 1930–1933. She surrounded herself with Zionist activists, including Kurt Blumenfeld, Martin Buber and Salman Schocken, and started to research antisemitism. 

Arendt had access to the Prussian State Library for her work on Varnhagen. Blumenfeld’s Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland persuaded her to use this access to obtain evidence of the extent of antisemitism, for a planned speech to the Zionist Congress in Prague. 

This research was illegal at the time. Her actions led to her being denounced by a librarian for anti-state propaganda, resulting in the arrest of both Arendt and her mother by the Gestapo. They served eight days in prison but her notebooks were in code and could not be deciphered, and she was released by a young, sympathetic arresting officer to await trial.

8.  Arendt and her mother fled Germany for Geneva

Hannah Arendt with her mother at the age of 8 –

On release, realizing the danger she was now in, Arendt and her mother fled Germany following the established escape route over the Erzgebirge Mountains by night into Czechoslovakia and on to Prague, and then by train to Geneva.

In Geneva, she made a conscious decision to commit herself to “the Jewish cause”. She obtained work with a friend of her mother’s at the League of Nations’ Jewish Agency for Palestine, distributing visas and writing speeches.

9. Hannah Arendt was an é³¾¾±²µ°ùé±ð

An émigré is a person who has emigrated, often with a connotation of political or social self-exile. The word is the past participle of the French émigrer, “to emigrate”. 

Hannah was an exile, stateless, without papers, and had turned her back on the Germany and Germans of the Nazizeit. Her legal status was precarious and she was coping with a foreign language and culture, all of which took their toll on her mentally and physically.

10.  Arendt began corresponding with the American author Mary McCarthy, in 1950 

In the 1950s Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and On Revolution (1963). Arendt began corresponding with the American author Mary McCarthy, six years her junior, in 1950 and they soon became lifelong friends. In 1950, Arendt also became a naturalized citizen of the United States.