145 Facts About Hannah Arendt

1.

Hannah Arendt was a German-born American historian and political philosopher.

2.

Hannah Arendt was one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century.

3.

Paul Hannah Arendt had contracted syphilis in his youth, but was thought to be in remission when Hannah Arendt was born.

4.

Hannah Arendt was raised in a politically progressive, secular family, her mother being an ardent Social Democrat.

5.

Hannah Arendt obtained her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg in 1929.

6.

Hannah Arendt married Gunther Stern in 1929, but soon began to encounter increasing antisemitism in 1930s Nazi Germany.

7.

In 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, Hannah Arendt was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism.

8.

Hannah Arendt was stripped of her German citizenship in 1937.

9.

Hannah Arendt escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941 via Portugal.

10.

Hannah Arendt settled in New York, which remained her principal residence for the rest of her life.

11.

Hannah Arendt became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming an American citizen in 1950.

12.

Hannah Arendt taught at many American universities, while declining tenure-track appointments.

13.

Hannah Arendt died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, at the age of 69, leaving her last work, The Life of the Mind, unfinished.

14.

Hannah Arendt's works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of power and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism.

15.

Hannah Arendt 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.

16.

Hannah Arendt was born as Johanna Arendt in 1906, in the Wilhelmine period.

17.

Hannah Arendt's grandparents were members of the Reform Jewish community.

18.

Hannah Arendt's paternal grandfather, Max Arendt, was a prominent businessman, local politician, a leader of the Konigsberg Jewish community and a member of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsburger judischen Glaubens.

19.

Hannah Arendt's extended family contained many more women, who shared the loss of husbands and children.

20.

Hannah Arendt's parents were more educated and politically more to the left than her grandparents.

21.

Paul Hannah Arendt was educated at the Albertina.

22.

At the time of Hannah's birth, Paul Arendt was employed by an electrical engineering firm in Linden, and they lived in a frame house on the market square.

23.

Hannah Arendt suffered from chronic syphilis and was institutionalized in the Konigsberg psychiatric hospital in 1911.

24.

For years afterward, Hannah Arendt had to have annual WR tests for congenital syphilis.

25.

Hannah Arendt died on 30 October 1913, when Hannah was seven, leaving her mother to raise her.

26.

Hannah Arendt received religious instruction from the rabbi, Hermann Vogelstein, who would come to her school for that purpose.

27.

Hannah Arendt's family moved in circles that included many intellectuals and professionals.

28.

Hannah Arendt came to define her Jewish identity negatively after encountering overt antisemitism as an adult.

29.

Hannah Arendt came to greatly identify with Rahel Varnhagen, the Prussian socialite who desperately wanted to assimilate into German culture, only to be rejected because she was born Jewish.

30.

In 1920, Martha Cohn married Martin Beerwald, an ironmonger and widower of four years, and they moved to his home, two blocks away, at Busoldstrasse 6, providing Hannah Arendt with improved social and financial security.

31.

Hannah Arendt was 14 at the time and acquired two older stepsisters, Clara and Eva.

32.

Hannah Arendt's precocity continued, learning ancient Greek as a child, writing poetry in her teenage years, and starting both a Graecae and philosophy club at her school.

33.

Hannah Arendt was fiercely independent in her schooling and a voracious reader, absorbing French and German literature and poetry and philosophy.

34.

Hannah Arendt's was expelled from the Luise-Schule in 1922, at the age of 15, for leading a boycott of a teacher who insulted her.

35.

Hannah Arendt's mother sent her to Berlin to Social Democrat family friends.

36.

Hannah Arendt lived in a student residence and audited courses at the University of Berlin, including classics and Christian theology under Romano Guardini.

37.

Hannah Arendt successfully sat the entrance examination for the University of Marburg, where Ernst Grumach had studied under Martin Heidegger.

38.

Hannah Arendt's mother had engaged a private tutor, and her aunt Frieda Arendt, a teacher, helped, while Frieda's husband Ernst Aron provided financial tuition assistance.

39.

Hannah Arendt arrived in the fall in the middle of an intellectual revolution led by the young Heidegger, of whom she was in awe, describing him as "the hidden king [who] reigned in the realm of thinking".

40.

Many years later Hannah Arendt would describe these classes, how people came to Marburg to hear him, and how, above all he imparted the idea of as activity, which she qualified as "passionate thinking".

41.

Hannah Arendt was restless, finding her studies neither emotionally or intellectually satisfying.

42.

Hannah Arendt was ready for passion, finishing her poem with the lines:.

43.

Hannah Arendt was handsome, a genius, romantic, and taught that thinking and "aliveness" were but one.

44.

The 17-year-old Hannah Arendt then began a long romantic relationship with the 35-year-old Heidegger, who was married with two young sons.

45.

Hannah Arendt later faced criticism for this because of Heidegger's support for the Nazi Party after his election as rector at Freiburg University in 1933.

46.

The relationship was unknown until Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography of Hannah Arendt appeared in 1982.

47.

Stern had completed his doctoral dissertation with Edmund Husserl at Freiburg, and was now working on his Habilitation thesis with Heidegger, but Hannah Arendt, involved with Heidegger, took little notice of him at the time.

48.

Hannah Arendt describes a state of "", on the one hand an abrupt loss of youth and innocence, on the other an "", the finding of the remarkable in the banal.

49.

Hannah Arendt refers to her relationship with Heidegger as "".

50.

Hannah Arendt became reacquainted, at a lecture, with Kurt Blumenfeld, who introduced her to Jewish politics.

51.

On completing her dissertation, Hannah Arendt turned to her, initially on German Romanticism, and thereafter an academic teaching career.

52.

In 1929, Hannah Arendt met Gunther Stern again, this time in Berlin at a New Year's masked ball, and began a relationship with him.

53.

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

54.

Hannah Arendt assisted Gunther with his work, but the shadow of Heidegger hung over their relationship.

55.

Anne Mendelssohn had accidentally acquired a copy of Varnhagen's correspondence and excitedly introduced her to Hannah Arendt, donating her collection to her.

56.

Hannah Arendt would come to call Rahel Varnhagen's discovery of living with her destiny as being a "conscious pariah".

57.

Back in Berlin, Hannah Arendt found herself becoming more involved in politics and started studying political theory, and reading Marx and Trotsky, while developing contacts at the Deutsche Hochschule fur Politik.

58.

Hannah Arendt's increasing interest in Jewish politics and her examination of assimilation in her study of Varnhagen led her to publish her first article on Judaism,.

59.

Hannah Arendt wrote a review of Hans Weil's, which dealt with the emergence of in the time of Rahel Varnhagen.

60.

Hannah Arendt was critical of the movement, because it was a women's movement, rather than contributing with men to a political movement, and abstract rather than striving for concrete goals.

61.

Hannah Arendt wrote, asking him to deny that he was attracted to National Socialism.

62.

Stern, who had communist associations, fled to Paris, but Hannah Arendt stayed on to become an activist.

63.

Hannah Arendt took a public position by publishing part of her largely completed biography of Rahel Varnhagen as "" in the on 7 March 1933 and a little later in.

64.

Hannah Arendt surrounded herself with Zionist activists, including Kurt Blumenfeld, Martin Buber and Salman Schocken, and started to research antisemitism.

65.

Hannah Arendt had access to the Prussian State Library for her work on Varnhagen.

66.

Hannah Arendt's 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.

67.

Hannah Arendt obtained work with a friend of her mother's at the League of Nations' Jewish Agency for Palestine, distributing visas and writing speeches.

68.

Hannah Arendt was now an emigree, an exile, stateless, without papers, and had turned her back on the Germany and Germans of the.

69.

Later in 1935, Hannah Arendt joined Youth Aliyah, an organization similar to Agriculture et Artisanat that was founded in Berlin on the day Hitler seized power.

70.

Hannah Arendt made her first visit to British Mandate of Palestine in 1935, accompanying one of these groups and meeting with her cousin Ernst Furst there.

71.

In 1938, Hannah Arendt completed her biography of Rahel Varnhagen, although this was not published until 1957.

72.

In 1936, Hannah Arendt met the self-educated Berlin poet and Marxist philosopher Heinrich Blucher in Paris.

73.

Hannah Arendt fulfilled her social obligations and used the name Hannah Stern, but the relationship effectively ended when Stern, perhaps recognizing the danger better than she, emigrated to America with his parents in 1936.

74.

In 1937, Hannah Arendt was stripped of her German citizenship and she and Stern divorced.

75.

Hannah Arendt had begun seeing more of Blucher, and eventually they began living together.

76.

Hannah Arendt describes how, "in the resulting chaos we succeeded in getting hold of liberation papers with which we were able to leave the camp", which she did with about 200 of the 7,000 women held there, about four weeks later.

77.

Hannah Arendt found the experience difficult but formulated her early appraisal of American life,.

78.

On returning to New York, Hannah Arendt was anxious to resume writing and became active in the German-Jewish community, publishing her first article, "From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today" in July 1942.

79.

Hannah Arendt contributed to the Menorah Journal, a Jewish-American magazine, and other German emigre publications.

80.

Hannah Arendt was recruited "because of her great interest in the Commission's activities, her previous experience as an administrator, and her connections with Germany".

81.

In July 1946, Hannah Arendt left her position at the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction to become an editor at Schocken Books, which later published some of her works.

82.

Hannah Arendt famously opposed the establishment of a Jewish nation state in Palestine and initially opposed the establishment of a binational Arab-Jewish state.

83.

Hannah Arendt began corresponding with the American author Mary McCarthy, six years her junior, in 1950 and they soon became lifelong friends.

84.

In 1950, Hannah Arendt became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

85.

Hannah Arendt portrayed Heidegger as a naive man swept up by forces beyond his control, and pointed out that Heidegger's philosophy had nothing to do with National Socialism.

86.

Hannah Arendt's work was recognized by many awards, including the Danish Sonning Prize in 1975 for Contributions to European Civilization.

87.

Hannah Arendt taught at many institutions of higher learning from 1951 onwards, but, preserving her independence, consistently refused tenure-track positions.

88.

Hannah Arendt was a visiting scholar at the University of Notre Dame, University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University and Northwestern University.

89.

Hannah Arendt taught at the University of Chicago from 1963 to 1967, where she was a member of the Committee on Social Thought, Yale University, where she was a fellow and the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University.

90.

Hannah Arendt was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1962 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1964.

91.

In 1974, Hannah Arendt was instrumental in the creation of Structured Liberal Education at Stanford University.

92.

Hannah Arendt wrote a letter to the president of Stanford to persuade the university to enact Stanford history professor Mark Mancall's vision of a residentially-based humanities program.

93.

Hannah Arendt surrounded herself with German-speaking emigres, sometimes referred to as "The Tribe".

94.

Hannah Arendt was a heavy smoker and was frequently depicted with a cigarette in her hand.

95.

Hannah Arendt sustained a near fatal heart attack while lecturing in Scotland in May 1974, and although she recovered, she remained in poor health afterwards, and continued to smoke.

96.

Hannah Arendt's ashes were buried alongside those of Blucher at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York in May 1976.

97.

Hannah Arendt wrote works on intellectual history as a political theorist, using events and actions to develop insights into contemporary totalitarian movements and the threat to human freedom presented by scientific abstraction and bourgeois morality.

98.

Hannah Arendt contributed to many publications, including The New York Review of Books, Commonweal, Dissent and The New Yorker.

99.

Hannah Arendt is perhaps best known for her accounts of Adolf Eichmann and his trial, because of the intense controversy that it generated.

100.

Hannah Arendt believed that no matter how bad, government could never succeed in extinguishing human freedom, despite holding that modern societies frequently retreat from democratic freedom with its inherent disorder for the relative comfort of administrative bureaucracy.

101.

Hannah Arendt explained that the construct of natality was implied in her discussion of new beginnings and man's elation to the Creator as nova creatura.

102.

Hannah Arendt maintained that Jewry was not the operative factor in the Holocaust, but merely a convenient proxy because Nazism was about terror and consistency, not merely eradicating Jews.

103.

Hannah Arendt explained the tyranny using Kant's phrase "radical evil", by which their victims became "superfluous people".

104.

Hannah Arendt argues that, while human life always evolves within societies, the social part of human nature, political life, has been intentionally realized in only a few societies as a space for individuals to achieve freedom.

105.

Hannah Arendt tries to find solutions to help humans think again, since modern philosophy has not succeeded in helping humans to live correctly.

106.

Hannah Arendt goes against a common impression of both Marxist and leftist views when she argues that France, while well-studied and often emulated, was a disaster and that the largely ignored American Revolution was a success.

107.

Hannah Arendt believes the revolutionary spirit of those men had been lost and advocates a "council system" as an appropriate institution to regain that spirit.

108.

Crises of the Republic was the third of Hannah Arendt's anthologies, consisting of four essays.

109.

Hannah Arendt conceived of the work as a trilogy based on the mental activities of thinking, willing, and judging.

110.

Hannah Arendt died suddenly five days after completing the second part, with the first page of Judging still in her typewriter, and McCarthy then edited the first two parts and provided some indication of the direction of the third.

111.

In 1960, on hearing of Adolf Eichmann's capture and plans for his trial, Hannah Arendt contacted The New Yorker and offered to travel to Israel to cover it when it opened on 11 April 1961.

112.

Hannah Arendt was anxious to test her theories, developed in The Origins of Totalitarianism, and see how justice would be administered to the sort of man she had written about.

113.

Hannah Arendt's argument was that Eichmann was not a monster, contrasting the immensity of his actions with the very ordinariness of the man himself.

114.

Hannah Arendt noted that his addiction to cliches and use of bureaucratic morality clouded his ability to question his actions, "to think".

115.

Hannah Arendt was critical of the way the trial was conducted by the Israelis as a "show trial" with ulterior motives other than simply trying evidence and administering justice.

116.

Hannah Arendt was critical of the way Israel depicted Eichmann's crimes as crimes against a nation state, rather than against humanity itself.

117.

Hannah Arendt objected to the idea that a strong Israel was necessary to protect world Jewry being again placed where "they'll let themselves be slaughtered like sheep," recalling the biblical phrase.

118.

Hannah Arendt portrayed the prosecutor, Attorney General Gideon Hausner, as employing hyperbolic rhetoric in the pursuit of Prime Minister Ben-Gurion's political agenda.

119.

Hannah Arendt, who believed she could maintain her focus on moral principles in the face of outrage, became increasingly frustrated with Hausner, describing his parade of survivors as having "no apparent bearing on the case".

120.

On this point, Hannah Arendt argued that during the Holocaust some of them cooperated with Eichmann "almost without exception" in the destruction of their own people.

121.

Hannah Arendt had expressed concerns on this point prior to the trial.

122.

Hannah Arendt describes the cooperation of the Jewish leaders in terms of a disintegration of Jewish morality: "This role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter in the whole dark story".

123.

Hannah Arendt was accused of being duped by Eichmann, of being a "self-hating Jewess", and even an enemy of Israel.

124.

Hannah Arendt's critics included The Anti-Defamation League and many other Jewish groups, editors of publications she was a contributor to, faculty at the universities she taught at and friends from all parts of her life.

125.

Hannah Arendt was criticized by many Jewish public figures, who charged her with coldness and lack of sympathy for the victims of the Holocaust.

126.

In 1961, while covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt wrote a letter to Karl Jaspers that Adam Kirsch described as reflecting "pure racism" toward Sephardic Jews from the Middle East and Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe.

127.

Hannah Arendt believed that this was a way to address Jewish statelessness and to avoid the pitfalls of nationalism.

128.

Hannah Arendt felt that white children were being thrown into a racially disharmonious "jungle" to serve a broader political strategy of forcible integration.

129.

Hannah Arendt rather enjoyed what she saw as the privileges of being feminine as opposed to feminist, "Intensely feminine and therefore no feminist", stated Hans Jonas.

130.

Hannah Arendt considered some professions and positions unsuitable for women, particularly those involving leadership, telling Gunter Gaus "It just doesn't look good when a woman gives orders".

131.

Hannah Arendt is not skeptical of the notion of political rights in general, but instead defends a national or civil conception of rights.

132.

Hannah Arendt argued that since there is no political authority above that of sovereign nations, state governments have little incentive to respect human rights when such policies conflict with national interests.

133.

Hannah Arendt argued that as state governments began to emphasize national identity as a prerequisite for full legal status, the number of minority resident aliens increased along with the number of stateless persons whom no state was willing to recognize legally.

134.

Hannah Arendt argued that repatriation failed to solve the refugee crisis because no government was willing to take them in and claim them as their own.

135.

Hannah Arendt contends that neither naturalization nor the tradition of asylum was capable of handling the sheer number of refugees.

136.

Hannah Arendt argues that the consistent mistreatment of refugees, most of whom were placed in internment camps, is evidence against the existence of human rights.

137.

Hannah Arendt is portrayed in the 2023 TV series Transatlantic.

138.

In 2012 the German film, Hannah Arendt, directed by Margarethe von Trotta was released.

139.

Hannah Arendt is considered one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century.

140.

Hannah Arendt shunned publicity, never expecting, as she explained to Karl Jaspers in 1951, to see herself as a "cover girl" on the newsstands.

141.

Hannah Arendt begins her book with an extensive quote from The Origins of Totalitarianism:.

142.

Kakutani and others believed that Hannah Arendt's words speak not just events of a previous century but apply equally to the contemporary cultural landscape populated with fake news and lies.

143.

Hannah Arendt drew attention to the critical role that propaganda plays in gaslighting populations, Kakutani observes, citing the passage:.

144.

Hannah Arendt had observed first hand the displacement of large stateless and rightsless populations, treated not so much as people in need than as problems to solve, and in many cases, resist.

145.

Hannah Arendt wrote about this in her 1943 essay "We refugees".