Hannah Arendt

Why this Chapter exists

The vocabulary we still use.

Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was a German Jewish political thinker who fled the Nazis and became an American citizen. Several of her terms, among them “totalitarianism” as she defined it and “the banality of evil,” entered academic fields and public debate after the Second World War. Her Eichmann book, her relationship with the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and her changing relationship with Zionism are still argued over.

A child of German Jewish life

A child of German Jewish life.

Johanna “Hannah” Arendt was born on October 14, 1906, in Linden, a district of Hannover, Germany, to Paul and Martha Cohn Arendt. The family belonged to the educated German Jewish middle class of the late imperial period. Paul was an engineer at an electrical firm, and Martha came from a Königsberg merchant family with strong cultural interests. They kept a Jewish identity without religious orthodoxy: well integrated into German culture, and openly Jewish at the same time.

The family moved to Königsberg, Martha’s home city, in 1909 as Paul’s illness worsened. He died there in 1913, when Hannah was about seven, and she grew up in the city. Königsberg in those years was a center of German cultural and academic life, the home of the philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose work would deeply shape Arendt’s own, and home to a sizable Jewish community.

Arendt’s schooling there, at the girls’ secondary school, came with early, serious reading. Martha kept the household as a place of cultural and intellectual life, and Hannah read Goethe, Kant, and Kierkegaard young, with solid training in Greek and Latin.

The academic formation

The academic formation.

Arendt began university at Marburg in the fall of 1924, at eighteen. The faculty there included Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), whose philosophy courses she attended. Her relationship with Heidegger, both intellectual and personal, began at Marburg and would shape much of her later philosophy and a good deal of her personal life.

She spent a semester at Freiburg studying with Edmund Husserl, then moved to Heidelberg, where she completed her doctoral dissertation under Karl Jaspers (1883–1969). Jaspers became her intellectual mentor and lifelong correspondent. Their letters, exchanged over some forty years until his death in 1969 and published in 1992, are among the main sources for her intellectual development.

Her dissertation, The Concept of Love in Augustine, was finished in 1928 and published in 1929. Augustine of Hippo (354–430), a North African bishop, was among the most influential theologians of the early Church, and his writings also shaped Christian teaching about Jews. Arendt engaged him on the philosophy of love, not on that teaching. The idea she drew from it, amor mundi (“love of the world”), runs through her later political thought.

In 1929 she married Günther Stern, a philosopher and writer from a German Jewish family. They divorced in 1937.

The Gestapo arrest and escape

The Gestapo arrest and the escape.

On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany, and the Nazi takeover upended Arendt’s life. For the German Jewish academic world the consequences came fast: dismissals from university posts that spring, rising emigration, and the first measures of twelve years of Nazi anti-Jewish policy.

Arendt’s response was to set aside the academic philosophy she had been doing and turn to Jewish politics. Working with the German Zionist Organization (Zionism: the movement to build a Jewish homeland in Palestine), under its leader Kurt Blumenfeld, she began collecting evidence of antisemitic statements and acts in Germany for use against the Nazis. The work put her under Gestapo surveillance.

In the spring of 1933 the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, arrested her and held her for about eight days. She was released without charge, but it was clear that the research she had been doing could not continue. She left Germany, and after brief stays in Prague and Geneva she reached Paris by late 1933. She never lived in Germany again.

The refugee years in Paris

The refugee years in Paris.

In Paris, Arendt became a working figure in Jewish refugee politics rather than an academic philosopher. The main threads:

• Youth Aliyah. From 1935 to 1939 she worked for Youth Aliyah, the organization founded by Recha Freier and directed by Henrietta Szold from Jerusalem, which arranged the emigration of Jewish children from Nazi-controlled lands to Palestine. Arendt’s Paris office ran the French side of the work, preparing young refugees to emigrate to Palestine.
• Rahel Varnhagen. In the Paris years she worked on a biography of Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833), a German Jewish woman who hosted a Berlin literary salon. The book follows Varnhagen’s attempts to find a place in German society as a Jew. It was not published until 1957.
• Walter Benjamin. The Paris years brought her close friendship with the German Jewish philosopher and critic Walter Benjamin (1892–1940). Benjamin’s suicide at Portbou, on the French-Spanish border, on September 26, 1940, facing arrest after Spain refused to let him pass toward Lisbon and America, hit her hard. She carried his manuscript of the Theses on the Philosophy of History to America. In 1968 she edited Illuminations, the collection that introduced his essays to English-language readers.
• Marriage to Heinrich Blücher. In January 1940 she married Heinrich Blücher (1899–1970), a German former communist turned political thinker who had fled Germany. Their marriage lasted until his death in 1970, and their conversation across more than thirty years shaped much of her thinking.
• Internment at Gurs. When Germany invaded France in May 1940, the French Republic classified Arendt, like many German Jewish refugees, as an enemy alien and interned her at the Gurs camp in southwestern France. She escaped in the chaos right after the June 1940 armistice, the surrender that ended the fighting, and reunited with Blücher and her mother. With help from Varian Fry and the Emergency Rescue Committee, an American group that helped refugees escape France, they obtained emergency U.S. visas and reached the United States in 1941.

The American career

The American career.

Arendt reached New York in May 1941, at thirty-four. The American period lasted thirty-four years and produced her major books. Its main features:

• Early work. Her first American years were spent in Jewish organizations. She was research director at the Conference on Jewish Relations and an editor at Schocken Books, the German Jewish publisher reestablished in New York. She was also executive director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., which recovered and redistributed Jewish cultural and religious property taken by the Nazis.
• Academic posts. After The Origins of Totalitarianism appeared in 1951, she held academic posts at Princeton, Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. At Princeton in 1959 she became the first woman to hold the rank of full professor there, as a visiting professor of politics. From 1967 she taught at the New School for Social Research in New York, where she stayed until her death.
• Citizenship. Arendt became a U.S. citizen at the start of the 1950s, ending the statelessness that had begun when Germany stripped her citizenship in 1937. That experience shaped her thinking about “the right to have rights.”
• Books. The American period produced her major works. They include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), and On Revolution (1963). Later came Men in Dark Times (1968), On Violence (1970), Crises of the Republic (1972), and the unfinished Life of the Mind (published after her death in 1978).

Her first major work

The Origins of Totalitarianism.

The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) was Arendt’s first major book and the one that established her as a leading American intellectual. It comes in three parts:

• Antisemitism. A study of how modern antisemitism developed across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Arendt set the modern racial form apart from the older theological tradition, placing its rise within the political and economic life of nineteenth-century Europe.
• Imperialism. An argument that the European imperial project of the late nineteenth century laid the ground for twentieth-century totalitarianism. In her account, the administrative habits, racial thinking, and methods of mass rule developed in the colonies were carried back into European politics during the crises of the First World War and after.
• Totalitarianism. A study of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia as a single new political form. In her account it was marked by total control of the population, the destruction of private life, terror as a permanent tool of government, and the replacement of political reality with ideology. The claim that Nazism and Stalinism were comparable as totalitarian regimes, controversial when she made it, became a foundational idea in Cold War political thought.

The book was widely reviewed and debated. Her account of totalitarianism became a standard reference in postwar political analysis, though how well it fits each regime is still argued over. Its idea of “the right to have rights,” drawn from the refugee experience Arendt had lived, has been influential in later human rights thinking. Her argument ran as follows. When the European nation-state system collapsed in the early twentieth century, it left whole populations stripped of citizenship. Without citizenship they had no standing from which to claim rights at all, so the right to belong to a political community must itself be treated as a right.

Her work on the political

The Human Condition.

The Human Condition (1958) is Arendt’s major philosophical work, a sustained look at what makes a distinctively human life possible. It is built around three kinds of activity she distinguished:

• Labor: the activity that keeps us biologically alive, producing what gets consumed in the act of living.
• Work: the activity that builds the durable world, the objects and structures that outlast their makers and form the human environment.
• Action: the activity through which people engage one another politically, the speech and deed by which we appear to each other as distinct persons. Arendt looked to the ancient Greek polis as the model for the space where action happens.

Her argument is that modern society has blurred these three together. In her account, labor has become the organizing category, in both capitalist and Marxist forms, and work has shrunk to industrial production. Political action, she argued, has been displaced by administrative management, shrinking the political life she valued most. The Human Condition is widely cited in political theory, philosophy, and sociology, and it has drawn far less controversy than the Origins or the Eichmann book.

The most contested book

Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) is Arendt’s most controversial book and the one that has most shaped how she is received. Adolf Eichmann, an officer of the SS, the Nazi Party’s elite corps, had coordinated the deportation of Jewish populations to the killing centers. Israeli agents seized him in Argentina in May 1960 and brought him to Israel. He was tried from April to August 1961 for crimes against the Jewish people, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. He was convicted in December 1961, sentenced to death, and hanged on the night of May 31 to June 1, 1962.

Arendt covered the trial for The New Yorker, on assignment from its editor William Shawn. Her reports ran in five installments in February and March 1963, then as a book that May.

The book’s central argument is in its subtitle, “A Report on the Banality of Evil.” Watching Eichmann at the trial, Arendt argued that the man she saw was not a monstrous fanatic but a bureaucratic functionary who had carried out genocide through administrative routine. In her account he showed what she called “thoughtlessness” rather than fierce ideological hatred. His capacity for the crime, she argued, came from a collapse of moral and political judgment, not from sadistic intent. She did not argue that this made him less guilty. Her Epilogue ends with the judgment she would have had the court give him: “This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.”

The book also made two secondary arguments that became controversies of their own:

• The Israeli trial. She raised questions about the legal framework, Israel’s jurisdiction over crimes committed before the state existed, and its trial procedures.
• The Jewish Councils. She wrote that the recognized Jewish leaders, who sat on the Jewish Councils (the Judenräte), had cooperated with the Nazis “almost without exception.” She went further: “if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.” (Today’s figure is about six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators.) This was deeply controversial, both as a historical claim about what alternatives those leaders actually had under Nazi coercion, and in its tone, over whether she fairly reckoned with the impossible position they were in.

The controversy that followed

The controversy that followed.

The response to the Eichmann book was large and, within much of the Jewish community, sharply negative. Its main parts:

• The Scholem exchange. Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), the historian who founded the modern academic study of Jewish mysticism, wrote to Arendt on June 23, 1963. He argued that her book showed too little “love of the Jewish people” (Ahavat Yisrael) and that her treatment of the Judenräte was unjust. Arendt replied on July 24, 1963, in one of the most-cited documents of the controversy. She wrote that she did not “love” peoples or collectives, that her love was for individuals, and that she was Jewish without grounding her judgments in collective loyalty. The break between them lasted until her death.
• The critics. Much of the Jewish community, including the Anti-Defamation League, parts of the American Jewish establishment, the Israeli intellectual world, and figures such as Lionel Abel, Norman Podhoretz, Marie Syrkin, and Jacob Robinson, responded with strong criticism. Robinson’s book And the Crooked Shall Be Made Straight (1965) was a detailed point-by-point rebuttal of her factual claims.
• The defenders. She also had defenders, among them Mary McCarthy, Karl Jaspers, Alfred Kazin, Dwight Macdonald, and Hans Morgenthau. They argued that her thesis about the banality of evil held even where particular claims in the book were disputed.
• The scholarship since. Over six decades, scholars have kept engaging both the argument and the criticism. The picture is mixed. Her thesis about administrative, functionary participation in genocide has been influential in later Holocaust scholarship (Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men, 1992, is part of that line). Her specific picture of Eichmann himself, however, has been revised. Bettina Stangneth, in Eichmann Before Jerusalem (2014), argued from his Argentine-period writings that his courtroom self-presentation as a mere bureaucrat badly understated his ideological commitment. The Judenräte question has likewise been reexamined in later scholarship, including Isaiah Trunk’s Judenrat (1972) and the work of Yehuda Bauer.

The argument has lasted: “the banality of evil” remains widely cited in writing on mass violence, and opinion of Arendt within the Jewish community remains divided.

The final years

The final years.

Arendt’s later books were completed between 1963 and 1975:

• On Revolution (1963): a comparison of the American and French Revolutions as the founding moments of two different political traditions. Her argument that the American Revolution succeeded in establishing freedom while the French subordinated freedom to the problem of poverty has been influential in American political thought.
• Men in Dark Times (1968): essays on twentieth-century figures including Jaspers, Rosa Luxemburg, Walter Benjamin, Pope John XXIII, and Bertolt Brecht.
• On Violence (1970): a study of violence as a political category, which she argued was distinct from power rather than identical to it.
• Crises of the Republic (1972): essays on American politics of the moment: the Pentagon Papers, civil disobedience, the late 1960s.
• The Life of the Mind (1978, posthumous): her unfinished return to philosophy, planned in three volumes on “Thinking,” “Willing,” and “Judging.” The first two were mostly done, and the third was unwritten at her death. The published edition, edited by Mary McCarthy, includes the first two and notes for the third.

Arendt died of heart failure at her New York apartment on December 4, 1975, at sixty-nine. When she died, the page in her typewriter was the first page of the “Judging” volume. She is buried at Bard College, where Heinrich Blücher had taught, beside him.

The Heidegger question

The Heidegger question.

Arendt’s relationship with Martin Heidegger is among the most complicated parts of her record. Its dimensions:

• Marburg (1924–1926). Arendt entered an intimate relationship with Heidegger at Marburg, beginning when she was about eighteen and he was thirty-five, married, and the rising star of German philosophy. The relationship, documented in their later-published correspondence (1998), lasted about four years and shaped much of her intellectual development.
• The break and the Nazi years. The relationship broke off in the late 1920s, and the break was sharpened by Heidegger’s joining the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933 and his appointment as Rector of the University of Freiburg that April. The record of his Nazi engagement is well established. It includes his 1933 rectoral address celebrating the Nazi takeover, the university’s forced alignment with the regime under his leadership, and his denunciations of colleagues. It also includes the removal of his dedication to his Jewish-born teacher Edmund Husserl from a later edition of Being and Time, and the antisemitic passages in his posthumously published Black Notebooks.
• The postwar reconnection. Arendt and Heidegger reconnected in February 1950, when she visited him at Freiburg during her work with Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. The renewed relationship, no longer romantic but real in intellectual and personal terms, lasted the next twenty-five years, until her death in December 1975. Heidegger died six months later. She engaged his philosophy seriously in the postwar years and supported the rehabilitation of his academic standing.
• The contested question. How to read her postwar engagement with Heidegger, given his Nazi record, is contested. Some read it as her decision to weigh his philosophy apart from his politics. Others see it as a serious ethical failure on her part.

Other contested questions

What historians still debate.

Beyond the Eichmann book and the Heidegger relationship, several parts of the Arendt record remain contested:

• The ambivalence about Zionism. Arendt’s relationship to Zionism was complicated throughout her life. Her work in 1933 for the German Zionist Organization, and from 1935 to 1939 for Youth Aliyah, put her inside the daily work of Zionist refugee aid. Her 1940s essays, collected in The Jewish Writings (2007), argued for binationalism, one state shared by Jews and Arabs. That position was associated with the philosopher Martin Buber and with Judah Magnes, the first chancellor of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. It differed from the Labor Zionist mainstream that led the founding of the state, and her later writing on Israel was critical from that binationalist standpoint. How to read this, neither mainstream Labor Zionist nor an opponent of Jewish national life, is contested in the scholarship.
• Jewish identity. Her sense of her own Jewishness was complex. Her rule, as she put it in a 1964 television interview, was that if one is attacked as a Jew, one must defend oneself as a Jew. But her later writing described a Jewishness mostly separate from religious practice, ethnic-national identification, and collective loyalty. What her Jewishness amounted to, and whether her work should be read as Jewish thought, German philosophy, American political theory, or some blend, is debated.
• The scholarly reception. Scholars themselves are divided, between those who regard her as the most important political theorist of the twentieth century and those who see her work as seriously flawed in its handling of specific historical material.

The continuing engagement

The continuing engagement.

Arendt’s work has been engaged steadily in the half-century since her death:

• The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College, founded in 2006 at the campus where she and Blücher are buried, holds annual conferences and maintains the Arendt Library.
• The Hannah Arendt Centre at the University of Oldenburg, a center of Arendt scholarship in Germany, which holds copies of her papers.
• The Arendt Papers, held at the Library of Congress, and digitized for research access.
• The scholarship. The standard biography is Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982, revised 2004). Samantha Rose Hill’s Hannah Arendt (2021) is a recent study. The published correspondences, with Jaspers, Heidegger, McCarthy, and Scholem, have widened the primary-source base.
• The cultural reception. Her reach extends past the academy. The 2012 film Hannah Arendt (directed by Margarethe von Trotta, with Barbara Sukowa) brought the Eichmann controversy to a wider audience, and “the banality of evil” and “the right to have rights” are now common in journalism and public debate.

Arendt was stateless from 1937 to 1951. Ideas she developed from that experience and from the history she lived through, among them statelessness, “the right to have rights,” and the role of ordinary functionaries in mass crimes, remain in wide use in political theory and public debate.

Key takeaways

• Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) was arrested by the Gestapo in 1933, fled Germany, spent stateless refugee years in Paris, and reached New York in 1941.
• The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) treated Nazism and Stalinism as a new form of rule and became a standard work on totalitarianism.
• The Human Condition (1958) distinguished labor, work, and action. It has drawn far less controversy than her other major books.
• Reporting the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, she argued the man in the glass booth was an ordinary functionary rather than a monster. “The banality of evil” became one of the most argued-about phrases of the postwar era. Later research on Eichmann’s own writings showed that he was a committed Nazi.
• The book set off a fierce controversy, above all over her treatment of the Jewish Councils. The argument has never fully closed.
• Her relationship with Martin Heidegger, who joined the Nazi Party, remains one of the most debated parts of her biography.
• Her terms, among them statelessness and “the right to have rights,” are still widely used in discussions of mass violence and human rights.

Object Spotlight

The glass booth.

The best-known object from the trial is a booth of bulletproof glass on a dark metal frame, built for one man. It stood at the left of the stage at Beit Ha’am, the Jerusalem hall converted into a courtroom. Israel had brought Eichmann from Argentina to stand trial, and the glass was there to protect him from assassination before the court had judged him.

Inside it he sat for four months with headphones on. The trial ran in Hebrew, a language he did not speak. The headphones carried the interpreters to him in German, and his answers went back out through the microphone. Survivors and other witnesses testified a few meters away. Cameras recorded the proceedings, and the trial was widely televised.

Hannah Arendt watched the man in the glass from the press section. What she believed she saw there, an ordinary careerist rather than a monster, became the basis of her phrase “the banality of evil.”

The booth was preserved after the trial. Today it is displayed, empty, in the exhibition “Facing the Glass Booth” at the Ghetto Fighters’ House Museum in Israel’s Western Galilee. The museum was founded in 1949 by Holocaust survivors, among them veterans of the ghetto uprisings.

Discussion questions

Working from the evidence.

Classroom Connections

Where this Chapter fits.

Teaching Connections

• World History. This Chapter supports study of the postwar world by examining how one major political thinker interpreted totalitarianism, statelessness, mass violence, responsibility, and the legal and moral aftermath of the Holocaust.
• Classroom Applications. Possible activities:
  • analyze how historical concepts are created and contested
  • compare Arendt’s interpretation of Eichmann with later scholarship (e.g., Bettina Stangneth)
  • evaluate the criticism of Arendt’s treatment of the Jewish Councils
  • examine the relationship between biography and interpretation
  • distinguish a thinker’s argument from the historical record itself
  • construct evidence-based arguments using primary and secondary sources.
• International Classroom Relevance. Because this Chapter examines totalitarianism, refugee experience, statelessness, political theory, Holocaust interpretation, and the Eichmann trial, it supports Holocaust education, political thought, human rights education, philosophy, civics, and source-based historical inquiry.

Standards Alignment

• NYS Social Studies Framework: NY Global History 10.10 (Human Rights Violations).
• NYS Holocaust Education Mandate, Education Law §801. Supports Holocaust instruction by examining the postwar interpretation of the Holocaust, the Eichmann trial, perpetrator accountability, and the continuing scholarly debate over responsibility under totalitarian rule.
• Common Core RH.11–12.6 & RH.11–12.9. Learners analyze philosophical writing, trial reporting, correspondence, criticism, biography, and historical scholarship while evaluating point of view, authorial purpose, competing interpretations, and source-based argument.
• C3 Framework, D2.His.1 & D2.His.14. Learners investigate historical context, continuity and change, historical interpretation, and evidence-based inquiry while examining how later thinkers interpreted the meaning of totalitarianism and mass violence.

For further classroom use

• Comparative biography. Arendt pairs well with other twentieth-century figures whose work shaped the reckoning with mass violence. Primo Levi was an Italian Jewish chemist and writer imprisoned at Auschwitz. Elie Wiesel wrote Night, his memoir of the Holocaust. Viktor Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist who survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz, wrote Man’s Search for Meaning. Simon Wiesenthal, freed from Mauthausen in 1945, tracked down Nazi criminals and turned them over to the courts.