Johanna Arendt, better known as Hannah Arendt (1906 – 1975), is a political theorist who has worked extensively on totalitarianism. She is particularly known for her reflection on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Eichmann in Jerusalem, the banality of evil .
Heidegger
Daughter of Martha Cohn and Paul Arendt, Johanna was born on October 14, 1906 in Hanover, Germany, into a Jewish family . She grew up in Kœnigsberg, the future German Kaliningrad, and in Berlin. His father died of syphilis in 1913.
In 1924, she began to study philosophy, theology and philology at the universities of Marburg, Freiburg im Breisgau and Heidelberg and very quickly revealed her great intelligence and her non-conformism. In 1925, she met Heidegger, her teacher 17 years her senior, to whom she immediately had great admiration. They begin an affair, which Hannah will interrupt by leaving to continue her studies in Fribourg. There, she became a pupil of Husserl then of Karl Jaspers who directed her thesis on the Concept of love in Augustine .
Work on totalitarianism
In 1929, Hannah Arendt married Günther Stern, a young German philosopher she met during her studies; they divorced in 1937. As a Jew, she could not teach in German universities and her research on anti-Semitism and its propaganda led her to be interrogated by the Gestapo. In 1933, Hannah moved to France where she worked to welcome refugees fleeing Nazism and helped young Jews to emigrate to Palestine. In 1940, she married Heinrich Blücher, German philosopher and refugee. The same year, faced with the advance of Hitler's armies, she fled to Portugal before being able to embark for America in 1941.
When Hannah arrives in New York, she finds herself completely destitute and finds a job as a housekeeper. She also works for several newspapers. At the end of the war, she returned to Germany and worked there for an association helping Jewish survivors. In 1951, she became a naturalized American citizen and became a lecturer in political philosophy at several universities including Columbia, Princeton and Berkeley, while publishing her work in parallel. Working on political thought, she notably explores the concepts of revolution, totalitarianism, culture, modernity, tradition and freedom. In 1951, she published The Origins of Totalitarianism , Condition of modern man in 1958, The Crisis of Culture in 1961 then Essay on the revolution in 1963.
Eichmann in Jerusalem, the banality of evil
In 1960, Hannah Arendt followed for ten months the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a senior Third Reich official and member of the Nazi Party, responsible for the logistics of the "Final Solution". She wrote long articles for The New Yorker newspaper and published, following the trial, Eichmann in Jerusalem, the Banality of Evil . She describes Eichmann there as a normal man, not particularly anti-Semitic, obeying orders, and analyzes the mechanisms of evil. She also denounces the attitude of Jewish councils who collaborated with Nazism during the war. At the time, her positions, misunderstood, sparked a huge controversy and Hannah suffered from misunderstanding, especially from her family. The film Hannah Arendt, by Margarethe Von Trotta, retraces this period.
In 1963, Hannah Arendt became chair of political science at the University of Chicago, then she was appointed professor at the New School for Social Research in New York in 1967. She died in New York on December 4, 1975.