A life in exile: Hannah Arendt and her escape from evil
Hannah Arendt was one of the most influential political theorists. Her works reveal how important it is to stand up for democracy and human rights.
In 1961, the journalist Hannah Arendt travelled from New York to Jerusalem to report on the trial of the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann. In Beit Ha’am, a theatre that had been converted into a courtroom with a stage and seating for spectators, she observed how this slim man wearing glasses and a suit stepped silently into the glass defendant’s box. Eichmann, formerly an Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) in the SS, was one of the key figures in the Holocaust and among those responsible for the murder of six million people in Europe. His trial made headlines around the world. In a letter to Karl Jaspers, her former teacher and doctoral supervisor, she wrote: “I would never have forgiven myself if I hadn’t gone there.”
A childhood overshadowed by loss
Hannah Arendt, born to secular Jewish parents in Hanover on 14 October 1906, grew up in a family of intellectuals. Her father, an engineer and amateur scholar, had a library full of classical works of Greek and Latin literature, while her mother had studied French and music in Paris. When her father became seriously ill, the family moved back to Königsberg, her parents’ home city in what was then East Prussia. Her father died in 1916. In her autobiographical work, Hannah Arendt recalls how she often felt abandoned during this time - including by her mother, who in her grief would undertake long journeys and leave Hannah with her grandparents. At the same time, her mother taught Hannah to stand up for herself: if anti-Semitic remarks were made in the classroom, Hannah was to get up, leave the room and tell her mother all about it at home. In 1924, Hannah Arendt began studying philosophy. “I had always wanted to study philosophy, ever since I was 14,” she explained in a television interview in the mid-1960s. “It was a question of having to understand,” a way of “thinking without a banister,” as she called it. She first studied under Martin Heidegger in Marburg and then under Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg.
The shock of 1933 and the path into exile
On the evening of 27 February 1933, one month before Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of the Reich, the Reichstag building in Berlin went up in flames - an arson attack that played into the hands of the Nazi party . Issuing the “Reichstag Fire Decree”, it nullified basic rights and paved the way for a dictatorship. “What then happened was monstrous. This was an immediate shock for me, and from that moment on I felt responsible,” recalls Hannah Arendt.
One could probably say that a person’s living humanity declines to the extent to which he renounces thinking.
She herself was arrested by the Gestapo in Berlin in the summer of 1933 for her efforts to help the politically persecuted. However, she managed to avoid prison because she made friends with an SS officer during her interrogations. She then fled with her mother across the green border to Czechoslovakia and then on to Paris.
A life in exile and the fight against totalitarianism
While exiled in Paris, Arendt gave lectures on anti-Semitism and worked for an organisation that helped Jewish youngsters flee to Palestine. When the Second World War began, however, France was no longer safe either. Arendt fled again in 1941 - this time to the USA. “Saved”, she telegraphed to her former husband Günther Anders, who was already living in New York. Together with her second husband Heinrich Blücher and her mother, Hannah Arendt settled in a small apartment in Manhattan and began a career as commentator and editor. “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, a work she published in 1951 that drew parallels between National Socialism and Stalinism, made her famous worldwide.
The trial of Eichmann and the banality of evil
When Hannah Arendt arrived in Jerusalem for “The New Yorker” magazine in 1961, she expected to encounter a monster in the courtroom. Yet the main organiser of the Holocaust didn’t look anything like she had expected: “The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal,” she wrote. This analysis of the “banality of evil”, which she published as a book in 1964, made her the target of criticism, with some people accusing her of playing down the Holocaust. Yet what Arendt wanted to show was that evil is in many cases not the result of extreme wickedness but stems from an inability to think independently.
What was terrifying was his sheer normality.
Hannah Arendt died in New York on 4 December 1975. Her message remains timeless: Everyone is called upon to question laws and stand up for human dignity and democracy. Today, the Hannah Arendt Initiative named after her supports at-risk journalists around the world in their important work. This network of civil society organisations is funded by Germany’s Federal Foreign Office.
