Hannah Arendt - Life and Career

Life and Career

Arendt was born into a family of secular German Jews in the city of Linden (now part of Hanover). She was the daughter of Martha (née Cohn) and Paul Arendt. She grew up in Königsberg (the birthplace of Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, renamed Kaliningrad and annexed to the Soviet Union in 1946) and Berlin.

At the University of Marburg, she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. According to Hans Jonas, her only German-Jewish classmate, Arendt embarked on a long and stormy romantic relationship with Heidegger, for which she was later criticized because of Heidegger's support for the Nazi party when he was rector of Freiburg University.

In the wake of one of their breakups, Arendt moved to Heidelberg, where she wrote her dissertation, under the existentialist philosopher-psychologist Karl Jaspers, on the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine. In 1929, in Berlin, she married Günther Stern, later known as Günther Anders; they divorced in 1937.

The dissertation was published in 1929. Because she was Jewish, Arendt was prevented from habilitating, a prerequisite for teaching in German universities. She researched anti-Semitism for some time before being interrogated by the Gestapo. Thereupon Arendt fled Germany for Paris. There she befriended the Marxist literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin, her first husband's cousin. While in France, Arendt worked to support and aid Jewish refugees. She was imprisoned in Camp Gurs but was able to escape after a few weeks.

With the German military occupation of northern France during World War II and the deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps even by the Vichy collaborator regime in the unoccupied south, Arendt was compelled to leave France. In 1940, she married the German poet and Marxist philosopher Heinrich Blücher, by then a former member of the Communist Party.

In 1941, Arendt escaped with her husband and her mother to the United States. They relied on the life-saving visas, illegally issued by the American diplomat Hiram Bingham IV, who aided in this way approximately 2,500 other Jewish refugees. Another American, Varian Fry, paid for their travels and helped in securing the visas. Upon arrival in New York, Arendt became active in the German-Jewish community. From 1941 to 1945, she wrote a column for the German-language Jewish newspaper, Aufbau. From 1944, she directed research for the Commission of European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction and traveled frequently to Germany in this capacity.

After World War II she returned to Germany and worked for Youth Aliyah, a Zionist organization that had saved thousands of children from the Holocaust and settled them in Palestine. She became a close friend of Karl Jaspers and his Jewish wife, developing a deep intellectual friendship with him. She began corresponding with Mary McCarthy.

In 1950, she became a naturalized citizen of the United States. Arendt served as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, and Northwestern University. In the spring of 1959, she became the first woman lecturer at Princeton. Arendt also taught at the University of Chicago, where she was a member of the Committee on Social Thought; The New School in New York City; Yale University, where she was a fellow; and, the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University (1961–1962, 1962–1963). Arendt was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1962 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1964.

She died in 1975, at age 69, of a heart attack and was buried at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where her husband taught for many years.

Arendt was instrumental in the creation of Structured Liberal Education (SLE) at Stanford University. She wrote a letter to the then president of Stanford University to convince the university to enact Mark Mancall's vision of a residentially based humanities program.