October 14: Hannah Arendt

Political theorist Hannah Arendt was born on this date in Germany in 1906. Arrested by the Gestapo in 1933 for her analyses of Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda, she managed to escape imprisonment and flee to France. In 1941 Arendt escaped to the U.S., aided by American diplomat Hiram Bingham IV (who illegally issued life-saving visas to some 2,500 Jewish refugees) and Varian Fry (see Jewdayo for September 13th). Arendt was the first woman appointed to a full professorship at Princeton, in 1959, and also held posts at the University of Chicago, the New School, Yale, and Wesleyan, among other institutions; her gravesite and her personal library are at Bard College. Her most influential books were The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which recognized both the Nazi and Communist systems as radical betrayals of Enlightenment ideals of human rights; The Human Condition (1958), which philosophized about differences among labor, work, and action in human life; and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), which sparked great controversy over her comments on Jewish collaboration with the mechanisms of the Holocaust.

“No cause is left but the most ancient of all, the one, in fact, that from the beginning of our history has determined the very existence of politics, the cause of freedom versus tyranny.” —Hannah Arendt

Watch an hourlong 1964 interview with Hannah Arendt (in German with English subtitles). A transcript of this interview is reprinted in The Portable Hannah Arendt as “ ‘What Remains? The Language Remains’ A Conversation with Günter Gaus.”