On Revolution Hannah Arendt

Germany (1929–1933)

Berlin-Potsdam (1929)

In 1929, Arendt met Günther Stern again, this time in Berlin at a New Year's masked ball,[86] and began a relationship with him.[n][38][68] Within a month she had moved in with him in a one-room studio, shared with a dancing school in Berlin-Halensee. Then they moved to Merkurstraße 3, Nowawes,[87] in Potsdam[88] and were married there on 26 September.[o][90] They had much in common and the marriage was welcomed by both sets of parents.[69] In the summer, Hannah Arendt successfully applied to the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft for a grant to support her Habilitation, which was supported by Heidegger and Jaspers among others, and in the meantime, with Günther's help was working on revisions to get her dissertation published.[91]

Wanderjahre (1929–1931)

After Arendt and Stern were married, they began two years of what Christian Dries refers to as the Wanderjahre (years of wandering) with the ultimately fruitless aim of having Stern accepted for an academic appointment.[92] They lived for a while in Drewitz,[93] a southern neighborhood of Potsdam, before moving to Heidelberg, where they lived with the Jaspers. After Heidelberg, where Stern completed the first draft of his Habilitation thesis, the two then moved to Frankfurt where Stern hoped to finish his writing. There, Arendt participated in the university's intellectual life, attending lectures by Karl Mannheim and Paul Tillich, among others.[94] The couple collaborated intellectually, writing an article together[95] on Rilke's Duino Elegies (1923)[96] and both reviewing Mannheim's Ideologie und Utopie (1929).[97] The latter was Arendt's sole contribution in sociology.[68][69][98] In both her treatment of Mannheim and Rilke, Arendt found love to be a transcendent principle "Because there is no true transcendence in this ordered world, one also cannot exceed the world, but only succeed to higher ranks".[p] In Rilke she saw a latter day secular Augustine, describing the Elegies as the letzten literarischen Form religiösen Dokumentes (ultimate form of religious document). Later, she would discover the limitations of transcendent love in explaining the historical events that pushed her into political action.[99] Another theme from Rilke that she would develop was the despair of not being heard. Reflecting on Rilke's opening lines, which she placed as an epigram at the beginning of their essay

Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? (Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angelic orders?)

Arendt and Stern begin by stating:[100]

The paradoxical, ambiguous, and desperate situation from which standpoint the Duino Elegies may alone be understood has two characteristics: the absence of an echo and the knowledge of futility. The conscious renunciation of the demand to be heard, the despair at not being able to be heard, and finally the need to speak even without an answer–these are the real reasons for the darkness, asperity, and tension of the style in which poetry indicates its own possibilities and its will to form[q]

Arendt also published an article on Augustine (354–430) in the Frankfurter Zeitung[101] to mark the 1500th anniversary of his death. She saw this article as forming a bridge between her treatment of Augustine in her dissertation and her subsequent work on Romanticism.[102][103] When it became evident Stern would not succeed in obtaining an appointment,[r] the Sterns returned to Berlin in 1931.[29]

Return to Berlin (1931–1933)

In Berlin, where the couple initially lived in the predominantly Jewish area of Bayerisches Viertel (Bavarian Quarter or "Jewish Switzerland") in Schöneberg,[105][106] Stern obtained a position as a staff-writer for the cultural supplement of the Berliner Börsen-Courier, edited by Herbert Ihering, with the help of Bertold Brecht. There he started writing using the pen name Günther Anders, i.e. "Günther Other".[s][68] Arendt assisted Günther with his work, but the shadow of Heidegger hung over their relationship. While Günther was working on his Habilitationsschrift, Arendt had abandoned the original subject of German Romanticism for her thesis in 1930, and turned instead to Rahel Varnhagen and the question of assimilation.[83][108] Anne Mendelssohn had accidentally acquired a copy of Varnhagen's correspondence and excitedly introduced her to Arendt, donating her collection to her. A little later, Arendt's own work on Romanticism led her to a study of Jewish salons and eventually to those of Varnhagen. In Rahel, she found qualities she felt reflected her own, particularly those of sensibility and vulnerability.[109] Rahel, like Hannah, found her destiny in her Jewishness. Hannah Arendt would come to call Rahel Varnhagen's discovery of living with her destiny as being a "conscious pariah".[110] This was a personal trait that Arendt had recognized in herself, although she did not embrace the term until later.[111]

Back in Berlin, Arendt found herself becoming more involved in politics and started studying political theory, and reading Marx and Trotsky, while developing contacts at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik.[112] Despite the political leanings of her mother and husband she never saw herself as a political leftist, justifying her activism as being through her Jewishness.[113] Her increasing interest in Jewish politics and her examination of assimilation in her study of Varnhagen led her to publish her first article on Judaism, Aufklärung und Judenfrage ("The Enlightenment and the Jewish Question", 1932).[114][115] Blumenfeld had introduced her to the "Jewish question", which would be his lifelong concern.[116] Meanwhile, her views on German Romanticism were evolving. She wrote a review of Hans Weil's Die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsprinzips (The Origin of German Educational Principle, 1930),[117] which dealt with the emergence of Bildungselite (educational elite) in the time of Rahel Varnhagen.[118] At the same time she began to be occupied by Max Weber's description of the status of Jewish people within a state as Pariavolk (pariah people) in his Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (1922),[119][120] while borrowing Bernard Lazare's term paria conscient (conscious pariah)[121] with which she identified.[t][122][123][124] In both these articles she advanced the views of Johann Herder.[115] Another interest of hers at the time was the status of women, resulting in her 1932 review[125] of Alice Rühle-Gerstel's book Das Frauenproblem in der Gegenwart. Eine psychologische Bilanz (Contemporary Women's Issues: A psychological balance sheet).[126] Although not a supporter of the women's movement, the review was sympathetic. At least in terms of the status of women at that time, she was skeptical of the movement's ability to achieve political change.[127] She was also critical of the movement, because it was a women's movement, rather than contributing with men to a political movement, and abstract rather than striving for concrete goals. In this manner she echoed Rosa Luxemburg. Like Luxemburg, she would later criticize Jewish movements for the same reason. Arendt consistently prioritized political over social questions.[128]

By 1932, faced with a deteriorating political situation, Arendt was deeply troubled by reports that Heidegger was speaking at National Socialist meetings. She wrote, asking him to deny that he was attracted to National Socialism. Heidegger replied that he did not seek to deny the rumors (which were true), and merely assured her that his feelings for her were unchanged.[35] As a Jew in Nazi Germany, Arendt was prevented from making a living and discriminated against and confided to Anne Mendelssohn that emigration was probably inevitable. Jaspers had tried to persuade her to consider herself as a German first, a position she distanced herself from, pointing out that she was a Jew and that "Für mich ist Deutschland die Muttersprache, die Philosophie und die Dichtung" (For me, Germany is the mother tongue, philosophy and poetry), rather than her identity. This position puzzled Jaspers, replying "It is strange to me that as a Jew you want to be different from the Germans".[129]

By 1933, life for the Jewish population in Germany was becoming precarious. Adolf Hitler became Reichskanzler (Chancellor) in January, and the Reichstag was burned down (Reichstagsbrand) the following month. This led to the suspension of civil liberties, with attacks on the left, and, in particular, members of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (German Communist Party: KPD). Stern, who had communist associations, fled to Paris, but Arendt stayed on to become an activist. Knowing her time was limited, she used the apartment at Opitzstraße 6 in Berlin-Steglitz that she had occupied with Stern since 1932 as an underground railway way-station for fugitives. Her rescue operation there is now recognized with a plaque on the wall.[130][131]

Arendt had already positioned herself as a critic of the rising Nazi Party in 1932 by publishing "Adam-Müller-Renaissance?"[132] a critique of the appropriation of the life of Adam Müller to support right wing ideology. The beginnings of anti-Jewish laws and boycott came in the spring of 1933. Confronted with systemic antisemitism, Arendt adopted the motiv "If one is attacked as a Jew one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man."[44][133] This was Arendt's introduction of the concept of Jew as Pariah that would occupy her for the rest of her life in her Jewish writings.[134] She took a public position by publishing part of her largely completed biography of Rahel Varnhagen as "Originale Assimilation: Ein Nachwort zu Rahel Varnhagen 100 Todestag" ("Original Assimilation: An Epilogue to the One Hundredth Anniversary of Rahel Varnhagen's Death") in the Kölnische Zeitung on 7 March 1933 and a little later also in Jüdische Rundschau.[u][84] In the article she argues that the age of assimilation that began with Varnhagen's generation had come to an end with an official state policy of antisemitism. She opened with the declaration:[136]

Today in Germany it seems Jewish assimilation must declare its bankruptcy. The general social antisemitism and its official legitimation affects in the first instance assimilated Jews, who can no longer protect themselves through baptism or by emphasizing their differences from Eastern Judaism.[v]

As a Jew, Arendt was anxious to inform the world of what was happening to her people in 1930–1933.[44] She surrounded herself with Zionist activists, including Kurt Blumenfeld, Martin Buber and Salman Schocken, and started to research antisemitism. Arendt had access to the Prussian State Library for her work on Varnhagen. Blumenfeld's Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (Zionist Federation of Germany) persuaded her to use this access to obtain evidence of the extent of antisemitism, for a planned speech to the Zionist Congress in Prague. This research was illegal at the time.[138] Her actions led to her being denounced by a librarian for anti-state propaganda, resulting in the arrest of both Arendt and her mother by the Gestapo. They served eight days in prison but her notebooks were in code and could not be deciphered, and she was released by a young, sympathetic arresting officer to await trial.[29][53][139]

Exile: France (1933–1941)

Paris (1933–1940)

On release, realizing the danger she was now in, Arendt and her mother fled Germany[29] following the established escape route over the Ore Mountains by night into Czechoslovakia and on to Prague and then by train to Geneva. In Geneva, she made a conscious decision to commit herself to "the Jewish cause". She obtained work with a friend of her mother's at the League of Nations' Jewish Agency for Palestine, distributing visas and writing speeches.[140]

From Geneva the Arendts traveled to Paris in the autumn, where she was reunited with Stern, joining a stream of refugees.[141] While Arendt had left Germany without papers, her mother had travel documents and returned to Königsberg and her husband.[140] In Paris, she befriended Stern's cousin, the Marxist literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin and also the Jewish French philosopher Raymond Aron.[141]

Arendt was now an émigrée, an exile, stateless, without papers, and had turned her back on the Germany and Germans of the Nazizeit.[44] Her legal status was precarious and she was coping with a foreign language and culture, all of which took its toll on her mentally and physically.[142] In 1934 she started working for the Zionist-funded outreach program Agriculture et Artisanat,[143] giving lectures, and organizing clothing, documents, medications and education for Jewish youth seeking to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine, mainly as agricultural workers. Initially she was employed as a secretary, and then office manager. To improve her skills she studied French, Hebrew and Yiddish. In this way she was able to support herself and her husband.[144] When the organization closed in 1935, her work for Blumenfeld and the Zionists in Germany brought her into contact with the wealthy philanthropist Baroness Germaine Alice de Rothschild (born Halphen, 1884–1975),[145] wife of Édouard Alphonse James de Rothschild, becoming her assistant. In this position she oversaw the baroness' contributions to Jewish charities through the Paris Consistoire, although she had little time for the family as a whole.[140][w]

Later in 1935, Arendt joined Youth Aliyah (Youth immigration),[x] an organization similar to Agriculture et Artisanat that was founded in Berlin on the day Hitler seized power. It was affiliated with Hadassah,[147][148] which later saved many from the Holocaust,[149][150][29] and there Arendt eventually became Secretary-General (1935–1939).[17][141] Her work with Youth Aliyah also involved finding food, clothing, social workers and lawyers, but above all, fund raising.[53] She made her first visit to British Mandate of Palestine in 1935, accompanying one of these groups and meeting with her cousin Ernst Fürst there.[y][142] With the Nazi annexation of Austria and invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Paris was flooded with refugees, and she became the special agent for the rescue of the children from those countries.[17] In 1938, Arendt completed her biography of Rahel Varnhagen,[37][152][153] although this was not published until 1957.[29][154] In April 1939, following the devastating Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, Martha Beerwald realized her daughter would not return and made the decision to leave her husband and join Arendt in Paris. One stepdaughter had died and the other had moved to England, Martin Beerwald would not leave and she no longer had any close ties to Königsberg.[155]

Heinrich Blücher

In 1936, Arendt met the self-educated Berlin poet and Marxist philosopher Heinrich Blücher in Paris.[29][156] Blücher had been a Spartacist and then a founding member of the KPD, but had been expelled due to his work in the Versöhnler (Conciliator faction).[116][157][158] Although Arendt had rejoined Stern in 1933, their marriage existed in name only, with their having separated in Berlin.[z] She fulfilled her social obligations and used the name Hannah Stern, but the relationship effectively ended when Stern, perhaps recognizing the danger better than she, emigrated to America with his parents in 1936.[142] In 1937, Arendt was stripped of her German citizenship and she and Stern divorced. She had begun seeing more of Blücher, and eventually they began living together. It was Blücher's long political activism that began to move Arendt's thinking towards political action.[116] Arendt and Blücher married on 16 January 1940, shortly after their divorces were finalized.[159]

Internment and escape (1940–1941)

On 5 May 1940, in anticipation of the German invasion of France and the Low Countries that month, the military governor of Paris issued a proclamation ordering all "enemy aliens" between 17 and 55 who had come from Germany (predominantly Jews) to report separately for internment. The women were gathered together in the Vélodrome d'Hiver on 15 May, so Hannah Arendt's mother, being over 55, was allowed to stay in Paris. Arendt described the process of making refugees as "the new type of human being created by contemporary history ... put into concentration camps by their foes and into internment camps by their friends".[159][160] The men, including Blücher, were sent to Camp Vernet in southern France, close to the Spanish border. Arendt and the other women were sent to Camp Gurs, to the west of Gurs, a week later. The camp had earlier been set up to accommodate refugees from Spain. On 22 June, France capitulated and signed the Compiègne armistice, dividing the country. Gurs was in the southern Vichy controlled section. Arendt describes how, "in the resulting chaos we succeeded in getting hold of liberation papers with which we were able to leave the camp",[161] which she did with about 200 of the 7,000 women held there, about four weeks later.[162] There was no Résistance then, but she managed to walk and hitchhike north to Montauban,[aa] near Toulouse where she knew she would find help.[160][163]

Montauban had become an unofficial capital for former detainees,[ab] and Arendt's friend Lotta Sempell Klembort was staying there. Blücher's camp had been evacuated in the wake of the German advance, and he managed to escape from a forced march, making his way to Montauban, where the two of them led a fugitive life. Soon they were joined by Anne Mendelssohn and Arendt's mother. Escape from France was extremely difficult without official papers; their friend Walter Benjamin had taken his own life after being apprehended trying to escape to Spain. One of the best known illegal routes operated out of Marseilles, where Varian Fry, an American journalist, worked to raise funds, forge papers and bribe officials with Hiram Bingham, the American vice-consul there.

Fry and Bingham secured exit papers and American visas for thousands, and with help from Günther Stern, Arendt, her husband, and her mother managed to secure the requisite permits to travel by train in January 1941 through Spain to Lisbon, Portugal, where they rented a flat at Rua da Sociedade Farmacêutica, 6b.[ac][167] They eventually secured passage to New York in May on the Companhia Colonial de Navegação's S/S Guiné II.[168] A few months later, Fry's operations were shut down and the borders sealed.[169][170]

New York (1941–1975)

World War II (1941–1945)

Upon arriving in New York City on 22 May 1941 with very little, Hannah's family received assistance from the Zionist Organization of America and the local German immigrant population, including Paul Tillich and neighbors from Königsberg. They rented rooms at 317 West 95th Street and Martha Arendt joined them there in June. There was an urgent need to acquire English, and it was decided that Hannah Arendt should spend two months with an American family in Winchester, Massachusetts, through Self-Help for Refugees, in July.[171] She found the experience difficult but formulated her early appraisal of American life, Der Grundwiderspruch des Landes ist politische Freiheit bei gesellschaftlicher Knechtschaft (The fundamental contradiction of the country is political freedom coupled with social slavery).[ad][172]

On returning to New York, Arendt was anxious to resume writing and became active in the German-Jewish community, publishing her first article, "From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today" (in translation from her German) in July 1941.[ae][174] While she was working on this article, she was looking for employment and in November 1941 was hired by the New York German-language Jewish newspaper Aufbau and from 1941 to 1945, she wrote a political column for it, covering antisemitism, refugees and the need for a Jewish army. She also contributed to the Menorah Journal, a Jewish-American magazine,[175] and other German émigré publications.[29]

Arendt's first full-time salaried job came in 1944, when she became the director of research and executive director for the newly emerging Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, a project of the Conference on Jewish Relations.[af] She was recruited "because of her great interest in the Commission's activities, her previous experience as an administrator, and her connections with Germany". There she compiled lists of Jewish cultural assets in Germany and Nazi occupied Europe, to aid in their recovery after the war.[178] Together with her husband, she lived at 370 Riverside Drive in New York City and at Kingston, New York, where Blücher taught at nearby Bard College for many years.[29][179]

Post-war (1945–1975)

In July 1946, Arendt left her position at the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction to become an editor at Schocken Books, which later published some of her works.[29][180] In 1948, she became engaged with the campaign of Judah Magnes for a solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict.[116] She famously opposed the establishment of a Jewish nation state in Palestine and initially also opposed the establishment of a binational Arab-Jewish state. Instead, she advocated for the inclusion of Palestine into a multi-ethnic federation. Only in 1948 in an effort to forestall partition did she support a binational one-state solution.[181] She returned to the Commission in August 1949. In her capacity as executive secretary, she traveled to Europe, where she worked in Germany, Britain and France (December 1949 to March 1950) to negotiate the return of archival material from German institutions, an experience she found frustrating, but provided regular field reports.[182] In January 1952, she became secretary to the Board, although the work of the organization was winding down[ag] and she was simultaneously pursuing her own intellectual activities; she retained this position until her death.[ah][178][183][184] Arendt's work on cultural restitution provided further material for her study of totalitarianism.[185]

In the 1950s Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951),[186] The Human Condition (1958)[187] followed by On Revolution (1963).[29][188] Arendt began corresponding with the American author Mary McCarthy, six years her junior, in 1950 and they soon became lifelong friends.[189][190] In 1950, Arendt also became a naturalized citizen of the United States.[191] The same year, she started seeing Martin Heidegger again, and had what the American writer Adam Kirsch called a "quasi-romance", lasting for two years, with the man who had previously been her mentor, teacher, and lover.[35] During this time, Arendt defended him against critics who noted his enthusiastic membership in the Nazi Party. She portrayed Heidegger as a naïve man swept up by forces beyond his control, and pointed out that Heidegger's philosophy had nothing to do with National Socialism.[35] She suspected that loyal followers of Horkheimer and Adorno in Frankfurt were plotting against Heidegger. For Adorno she had a real aversion: "Half a Jew and one of the most repugnant men I know".[192][80] According to Arendt, the Frankfurt School was willing, and quite capable of doing so, to destroy Heidegger: "For years they have branded anti-Semitism on anyone in Germany who opposes them, or have threatened to raise such an accusation".[192][80]

In 1961 she traveled to Jerusalem to report on Eichmann's trial for The New Yorker. This report strongly influenced her popular recognition, and raised much controversy (see below). Her work was recognized by many awards, including the Danish Sonning Prize in 1975 for Contributions to European Civilization.[44][193]

A few years later she spoke in New York City on the legitimacy of violence as a political act: "Generally speaking, violence always rises out of impotence. It is the hope of those who have no power to find a substitute for it and this hope, I think, is in vain. Violence can destroy power, but it can never replace it."[194]

Teaching

Arendt taught at many institutions of higher learning from 1951 onwards, but, preserving her independence, consistently refused tenure-track positions. She was a visiting scholar at the University of Notre Dame, University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University (where she was the first woman to be appointed a full professor in 1959) and Northwestern University. She also taught at the University of Chicago from 1963 to 1967, where she was a member of the Committee on Social Thought, [179][195] Yale University, where she was a fellow and the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University (1961–62, 1962–63). From 1967 she was a professor at the New School for Social research in Manhattan, New York City.[29][196]

She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1962[197] and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1964.[198] In 1974, Arendt was instrumental in the creation of Structured Liberal Education (SLE) at Stanford University. She wrote a letter to the president of Stanford to persuade the university to enact Stanford history professor Mark Mancall's vision of a residentially-based humanities program.[179] At the time of her death, she was University Professor of Political Philosophy at The New School.[179]