Hannah Arendt’s multifaceted personality is fascinating. Born in Germany in 1906, From 1924, she studied philosophy, theology and classical philology in 3 different german universities. Under Karl Jaspers’ supervision, she published her thesis about Love and Saint Augustine in 1929. She also had an affair with Heidegger, before the philosopher started to support the Nazi party. When learning rumours about Heidegger’s sympathy with National Socialism, she wrote him a letter. In Heidegger's answer, “nowhere in the letter is there any denial of Nazi sympathies” while he assured her of his feelings…
In 1933, while collecting information about Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda in order to denounce it, Arendt was arrested by the Gestapo and put to jail for eight days. Since her notebooks were written in codes (and thus could not be decoded), she was happily released by a “young and sympathetic arresting officer” (Unfortunately, no further details are available on this life event …)
She emigrated to Paris, and coped with the precarious situation of being a migrant for eight years, stateless and without papers, in a different language and culture. During that time, she collected valuable information about French anti-Semitism and the Dreyfus Affair. On May 5, 1940, she was arrested and sent to Camp Gurs, an internment and prisoner of war camp holding 7000 detained women in south-west of France next to Pau. She escaped with 200 women, and walked 221 km until Montauban where she found help to escape to Portugal then emigrate to the US.
She later defined herself as a “Woman, Jewish but not German”, and as a political theorist rather than as a philosopher. With her experience, persecuted in Germany for being Jewish and living as an migrant then arrested in France, she published her first major book The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 asking “What happened? Why did this happen? And how could this happen?”. At a time where many could not face the unbearable details of the Final Solution, she analyses The Three Pillars of Hell (Anti-Semitism—Imperialism—Racism) to uncover the essence of the system that produced it : Totalitarianism is based on Terror, and builds upon a crisis of values in order to produce a new kind of anonymous and exchangeable human beings. She later published On Revolution in 1963, where she compared the American Revolution to the French one.
To end on a more personal note, Arendt was a joyful character, stating that “One must think with the body and the soul or not think at all” and her call for living in the richness of the present shall be reminded by us all :)
As a final word from The Origins of Totalitarianism:
“Antisemitism (not merely the hatred of Jews), imperialism (not merely conquest), totalitarianism (not merely dictatorship)- one after the other, one more brutally than the other, have demonstrated that human dignity needs a new guarantee which can be found only in a new political principle, in a new law on earth, whose validity this time must comprehend the whole of humanity.”
I thought it was worth remembering all of this today and tomorrow.
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