Hannah Arendt

233 Pages·2021·9.498 MB·English

by  Samantha Rose Hill

Hannah Arendt
Titles in the series Critical Lives present the work of leading cultural figures of the modern period. Each book
explores the life of the artist, writer, philosopher or architect in question and relates it to their major works.
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Hannah Arendt
Samantha Rose Hill
reaktion books
For my father, Paul, who understands new beginnings.
Published by
reaktion books ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
44–48 Wharf Road
London n1 7ux, uk
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2021
Copyright © Samantha Rose Hill 2021
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system
or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the
publishers.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ Books Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
isbn 978 1 78914 379 9
Contents
Introduction: Understanding 7
1 Inner Awakening 16
2 Shadows 33
3 Love and Saint Augustine 43
4 Life of a Jewess 50
5 Turn Towards Politics 64
6 ‘We Refugees’ 70
7 Internment 82
8 State of Emergency 91
9 Transition 97
10 Friendship 106
11 Reconciliation 118
12 The Origins of Totalitarianism 126
13 Amor Mundi 137
14 Between Past and Future 146
15 Eichmann in Jerusalem 153
16 On Revolution 167
17 Men in Dark Times 176
18 Crises of the Republic 184
19 The Life of the Mind 192
20 Storytelling 207
References 211
Select Bibliography 226
Acknowledgements 230
Photo Acknowledgements 232
Hannah Arendt, 1940s, photographed by Fred Stein.
Introduction: Understanding
We play at paste,
Till qualified for pearl,
Then drop the paste,
And deem ourself a fool.
The shapes, though, were similar,
And our new hands
Learned gem-tactics,
Practicing sands.
Emily Dickinson1

‘What is the subject of our thought? Experience! Nothing else!’
Hannah Arendt exclaimed in 1972 at a conference on ‘The Work
of Hannah Arendt’, which had been organized by the Toronto
Society for the Study of Social and Political Thought. Arendt was
invited to attend the conference as a guest of honour and insisted on
participating instead.
In many ways Hannah Arendt’s work is about thinking. In her
Denktagebuch (thinking journals) she asks: ‘Gibt es ein Denken
das nicht Tyrannisches ist?’ (Is there a way of thinking that is not
tyrannical?) At the beginning of The Human Condition she posits:
‘What I propose, therefore, is very simple: it is nothing more than
to think what we are doing.’2 When she covered the trial of Adolf
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Eichmann in Jerusalem for the New Yorker, she found Eichmann
lacked the capacity to engage in self-reflective thinking, to imagine
the world from the perspective of another. Arendt’s final work, The
Life of the Mind, begins with a treatise on ‘Thinking’.
But thinking and experience go hand-in-hand for Hannah
Arendt, and there is little question that the social and political
conditions of the twentieth century shaped her life and work. Born
in Germany in 1906 to a well-established secular Jewish family,
Arendt sensed from an early age that she was different, an outsider,
a rebel or, as she would later come to say, a pariah and an outlaw.
The facts of her life do not dispute this claim. Arendt was expelled
from her gymnasium at fourteen for leading a protest against
a teacher who offended her. When her first husband, Günther
Anders, left Berlin in 1933, she stayed behind and turned their
apartment into an underground stop to help communists fleeing
the country. The same year, she was arrested by the Gestapo for
collecting examples of anti-Semitic propaganda in the Prussian
State Library. She fled to Paris where she learned French and
studied Hebrew while working with Youth Aliyah to help Jewish
youth emigrate to Palestine. At the age of 33 she was interned in
Gurs in the south of France for five weeks before taking part in a
mass escape. She emigrated to the United States in the summer of
1941, and went to work as a housekeeper to learn English before
beginning to write for a number of Jewish journals. She took a job
with the Conference on Jewish Relations to help Jewish families and
organizations reclaim their stolen property and taught courses on
European history all while writing her first major work, The Origins
of Totalitarianism.
Her good friend the American author Mary McCarthy described
her as ‘a magnificent stage diva’.3 German philosopher Hans
Jonas said she had ‘an intensity, an inner direction, an instinct for
quality, a groping for essence, a probing for depth, which cast a
magic about her’.4 Julia Kristeva, a Bulgarian-French philosopher,
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wrote ‘Many of Arendt’s contemporaries spoke to her womanly
seductiveness; those from the New York salons mused about
the “Weimar flapper”.’5 The playwright Lionel Abel called her
‘Hannah Arrogant’.6 The fbi described her as ‘a small, rotund,
stoop shouldered woman with a crew-like haircut, masculine
voice, and marvelous mind.’7 Perhaps what is most difficult
to understand about Hannah Arendt is that she was, by all
accounts, sui generis. Absolutely incomparable.
In Hannah Arendt’s youthful self-portrait Die Schatten (The
Shadows), she describes her hunger for experience in the world as
being ‘trapped in a craving’. What drove her to her work from an
early age was an insatiable desire to experience and understand life.8
As she would later come to argue, the work of understanding, unlike
the urge to know, requires an endless commitment to the activity of
thinking; it requires one to always be ready to begin again.
In many respects Arendt became a writer by accident. She
said she wrote to remember what she thought, to record what
was worth remembering, and that writing was an integral part
of the process of understanding. This is evidenced throughout
her journals and published work, where she engaged in what
she called ‘thinking exercises’. In her preface to Between Past and
Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought, she wrote that ‘thought
itself arises out of incidents of living experience and must remain
bound to them as the only guidepost by which to take its bearings.’
For Arendt, thinking exercises were a way to engage in the work
of understanding, and they were a way to break free from her
education in the tradition of German philosophy.
After the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, Arendt left the world
of academic philosophy to do the work of political thinking. She
was appalled by how the ‘professional thinkers’ had been blind to
the rise of National Socialism in Germany and had contributed
to the Nazification of cultural and political institutions. Instead
of protesting the emergence of Hitler’s regime, they were carried
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