Home > Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity > Arendt, Hannah

[OCTOBER 14, 1906–DECEMBER 4, 1975]

German political philosopher

A political theorist with a gift for grand historical generalization, Hannah Arendt focused contemporary thought, particularly in scholarly circles, on the experience of exile and in her most influential book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, confronted the worst horrors of European tyranny.

Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, and died in New York City. She studied theology and philosophy at the University of Marburg, and then philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. As the National Socialists drew closer to power, she became a political activist and, beginning in 1933, helped German Zionists publicize the plight of the victims of Nazism. Arrested by the Gestapo, Arendt managed to escape to Paris, remaining there for the rest of the decade and aiding in the efforts to relocate German Jewish children to Palestine. In 1940 she married an ex-communist, Heinrich Blücher, but they were separated and interned in southern France along with other stateless Germans when the Wehrmacht invaded later that year. Arendt was sent to Gurs, a camp from which she escaped. She soon joined her husband, and the two reached the United States in May 1941. While living in New York during World War II, Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), published the year she secured U.S. citizenship.

No book was more reverberant in tracing the steps toward the distinctive twentieth-century tyrannies of Hitler and Stalin, or in measuring how grievously wounded Western civilization had become. Arendt demonstrated how embedded racism had become in central and western Europe by the end of the nineteenth century; by then imperialist governments had also succeeded in experimenting with the possibilities of cruelty and mass murder. The third section of her book exposed the operations of "radical evil," with the superfluity of life in the death camps marking an important discontinuity in the very notion of what it meant to be human. Totalitarianism put into practice what had only been imagined in medieval images of hell.

During the cold war of the 1950s, The Origins of Totalitarianism made its author an intellectual celebrity, but also engendered much doubt about her theories. Arendt's insistence on drawing parallels between Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia—given their obvious ideological conflicts and the savage warfare between the two countries from 1941 to 1945—was especially criticized. When Arendt wrote her book, Soviet sources were barely available, nor could the author read Russian. But her emphasis on the plight of the Jews amid the decline of Enlightenment ideals of human rights, and her assertion that the Third Reich was conducting two wars—one against the Allies, the other against the Jewish people—have become commonplace in the historiography of the Holocaust. More than any other scholar, Arendt made meaningful the idea of totalitarianism as a novel form of autocracy, pushing to unprecedented extremes murderous fantasies of domination and revenge.

Arendt's most controversial work was published in 1963: Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. This political and psychological portrait of the SS lieutenant-colonel who had directed the transportation of Jews to their deaths emphasized duty rather than fanaticism as his motivation. She believed that Israel had rightly hanged him in 1962. But Arendt's view that Eichmann had committed evil not because of a sadistic will to do so, or deep-rooted anti-Semitism, but because of thoughtlessness (a failure to think through what he was doing), led Arendt back in the final phase of her career to the formal philosophical approaches that had marked its beginning.

SEE ALSO Eichmann Trials; Evil, Banality of Radical; Psychology of Perpetrators

Stephen J. Whitfield