Arendt, Hannah, 1906-1975

Variant names
Dates:
Birth 1906-10-14
Death 1975-12-04
Active 1941
Active 1994
Birth 1906
Gender:
Female
Americans
French, English, German, German, French, English,

Biographical notes:

Hannah Arendt was born in Linden in 1906. At the age of three her family moved to Königsberg. Arendt was raised in a politically progressive, secular family. She studied at the University of Marburg and obtained her doctorate in philosophy writing on Love and Saint Augustine at the University of Heidelberg in 1929.

Hannah Arendt encountered increasing anti-Jewish discrimination in 1930s Nazi Germany. In 1933 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 Paris. 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. She escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941. She taught at many American universities, while declining tenure-track appointments. She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, at the age of 69.

Her 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. 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.

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Permalink:
http://n2t.net/ark:/99166/w69h6dkn
SNAC ID:

Subjects:

  • Education, Higher
  • Austrian literature
  • Authors, Austrian
  • Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945)
  • Jews
  • National socialism
  • Philosophy
  • Political science
  • Political scientists
  • Totalitarianism
  • War crime trials
  • War crime trials
  • Zionism
  • War crime trials

Occupations:

  • College teachers
  • Authors
  • Educators
  • Philosophers

Places:

  • 01, DE
  • 01, DE
  • 16, DE
  • 05, DE
  • IL, US
  • 06, DE
  • NY, US
  • 23, RU
  • Palestine (as recorded)
  • Germany (as recorded)
  • Palestine (as recorded)
  • Germany (as recorded)
  • Jerusalem (as recorded)
  • Germany (as recorded)

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