Family
Hannah Arendt was born as Johanna Arendt[16][17] in 1906, in the Wilhelmine period. Her Jewish family in Germany were comfortable, educated and secular in Linden, Prussia (now a part of Hanover). They were merchants of Russian extraction from Königsberg.[a] Her grandparents were members of the Reform Jewish community. Her paternal grandfather, Max Arendt, was a prominent businessman, local politician,[18] and leader of the Königsberg Jewish community, a member of the Central Organization for German Citizens of Jewish Faith (Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens). Like other members of the Centralverein he primarily saw himself as German, disapproving of Zionist activities including Kurt Blumenfeld, a frequent visitor and later one of Hannah's mentors. Of Max Arendt's children, Paul Arendt was an engineer and Henriette Arendt a policewoman and social worker.[19][20]
Hannah was the only child of Paul and Martha Arendt (née Cohn), who were married on 11 April 1902. She was named after her paternal grandmother.[21][22] The Cohns had originally come to Königsberg from nearby Russian territory (now Lithuania) in 1852, as refugees from antisemitism, and made their living as tea importers, J. N. Cohn & Company being the largest business in the city. The Arendts reached Germany from Russia a century earlier.[23][24] Hannah's extended family contained many more women, who shared the loss of husbands and children. Hannah's parents were more educated and politically more to the left than her grandparents. The young couple were Social Democrats,[16] rather than the German Democrats that most of their contemporaries supported. Paul Arendt was educated at the Albertina (University of Königsberg). Though he worked as an engineer, he prided himself on his love of Classics, with a large library that Hannah immersed herself in. Martha Cohn, a musician, had studied for three years in Paris.[20]
In the first four years of their marriage, the Arendts lived in Berlin, and were supporters of the socialist journal Socialist Monthly Bulletins (Sozialistische Monatshefte).[b][25] At the time of Hannah's birth, Paul Arendt was employed by an electrical engineering firm in Linden, and they lived in a frame house on the market square (Marktplatz).[26] They moved back to Königsberg in 1909 because of Paul's deteriorating health.[7][27] He suffered from chronic syphilis and was institutionalized in the Königsberg psychiatric hospital in 1911. For years afterward, Hannah had to have annual WR tests for congenital syphilis.[28] He died on 30 October 1913, when Hannah was seven, leaving her mother to raise her.[21][29] They lived at Hannah's grandfather's house at Tiergartenstraße 6, a leafy residential street adjacent to the Königsberg Tiergarten, in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Hufen.[30] Although Hannah's parents were non-religious, they were happy to allow Max Arendt to take Hannah to the Reform synagogue. She also received religious instruction from the rabbi, Hermann Vogelstein, who would come to her school for that purpose.[c] Her family moved in circles that included many intellectuals and professionals. It was a social circle of high standards and ideals. As she recalled it:[31]
My early intellectual formation occurred in an atmosphere where nobody paid much attention to moral questions; we were brought up under the assumption: Das Moralische versteht sich von selbst, moral conduct is a matter of course.
This time was a particularly favorable period for the Jewish community in Königsberg, an important center of the Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment).[32][33] Arendt's family was thoroughly assimilated ("Germanized")[34] and she later remembered: "With us from Germany, the word 'assimilation' received a 'deep' philosophical meaning. You can hardly realize how serious we were about it."[35] Despite these conditions, the Jewish population lacked full citizenship rights, and although antisemitism was not overt, it was not absent.[36] Arendt came to define her Jewish identity negatively after encountering overt antisemitism as an adult.[35] She came to greatly identify with Rahel Varnhagen, the Prussian socialite[29] who desperately wanted to assimilate into German culture, only to be rejected because she was born Jewish.[35] Arendt later said of Varnhagen that she was "my very closest woman friend, unfortunately dead a hundred years now."[35][d]
In the last two years of the First World War, Hannah's mother organized social democratic discussion groups and became a follower of Rosa Luxemburg as socialist uprisings broke out across Germany.[25][38] Luxemburg's writings would later influence Hannah's political thinking. In 1920, Martha Cohn married Martin Beerwald, an ironmonger and widower of four years, and they moved to his home, two blocks away, at Busoldstrasse 6,[39][40] providing Hannah with improved social and financial security. Hannah was 14 at the time and acquired two older stepsisters, Clara and Eva.[39]
Education
Early education
Hannah Arendt's mother, who considered herself progressive, brought her daughter up on strict Goethean lines. Among other things this involved the reading of Goethe's complete works, summed up as Was aber ist deine Pflicht? Die Forderung des Tages (And just what is your duty? The demands of the day).[e] Goethe, was then considered the essential mentor of Bildung (education), the conscious formation of mind, body and spirit. The key elements were considered to be self-discipline, constructive channeling of passion, renunciation and responsibility for others. Hannah's developmental progress (Entwicklung) was carefully documented by her mother in a book, she called Unser Kind (Our Child), measuring her against the benchmark of what was then considered normale Entwicklung ("normal development").[41]
Arendt attended kindergarten from 1910 where her precocity impressed her teachers and enrolled in the Szittnich School, Königsberg (Hufen-Oberlyzeum), on Bahnstraße in August 1913,[42] but her studies there were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, forcing the family to temporarily flee to Berlin on 23 August 1914, in the face of the advancing Russian army.[43] There they stayed with her mother's younger sister, Margarethe Fürst, and her three children, while Hannah attended a girl's Lyzeum school in Berlin-Charlottenburg. After ten weeks, when Königsberg appeared to be no longer threatened, the Arendts were able to return,[43] where they spent the remaining war years at her grandfather's house. Arendt's precocity continued, learning ancient Greek as a child,[44] writing poetry in her teenage years,[45] and starting both a Graecae (reading group for studying classical literature) and philosophy club at her school. She was fiercely independent in her schooling and a voracious reader,[f] absorbing French and German literature and poetry (committing large amounts to heart) and philosophy. By the age of 14, she had read Kierkegaard, Jaspers' Psychologie der Weltanschauungen and Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason). Kant, whose home town was also Königsberg, was an important influence on her thinking, and it was Kant who had written about Königsberg that "such a town is the right place for gaining knowledge concerning men and the world even without travelling".[47][48]
Arendt attended the Königin-Luise-Schule for her secondary education, a girls' Gymnasium on Landhofmeisterstraße.[49] Most of her friends, while at school, were gifted children of Jewish professional families, generally older than she and went on to university education. Among them was Ernst Grumach, who introduced her to his girlfriend, Anne Mendelssohn,[g] who would become a lifelong friend. When Anne moved away, Ernst became Arendt's first romantic relationship.[h]
Higher education (1922–1929)
Hannah, 1924Berlin (1922–1924)
Arendt was expelled from the Luise-Schule in 1922, at the age of 15, for leading a boycott of a teacher who insulted her. Her mother sent her to Berlin to Social Democrat family friends. She lived in a student residence and audited courses at the University of Berlin (1922–1923), including classics and Christian theology under Romano Guardini. She successfully sat the entrance examination (Abitur) for the University of Marburg, where Ernst Grumach had studied with Martin Heidegger (appointed as a professor in 1923). Her mother had engaged a private tutor, and her aunt Frieda Arendt, a teacher, also helped, while Frieda's husband Ernst Aron provided financial tuition assistance.[52]
Marburg (1924–1926)
In Berlin, Guardini had introduced her to Kierkegaard, and she resolved to make theology her major field.[48] At Marburg (1924–1926) she studied classical languages, German literature, Protestant theology with Rudolf Bultmann and philosophy with Nicolai Hartmann and Heidegger.[53] She arrived in the fall in the middle of an intellectual revolution led by the young Heidegger, of whom she was in awe, describing him as "the hidden king [who] reigned in the realm of thinking".[54][55]
Heidegger had broken away from the intellectual movement started by Edmund Husserl, whose assistant he had been at University of Freiburg before coming to Marburg.[56] This was a period when Heidegger was preparing his lectures on Kant, which he would develop in the second part of his Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) in 1927 and Kant und das Problem der Metaphysik (1929). In his classes, he and his students struggled with the meaning of "Being" as they studied Aristotle's and Plato's Sophist concept of truth, to which Heidegger opposed the pre-Socratic term ἀλήθεια.[56] Many years later Arendt would describe these classes, how people came to Marburg to hear him, and how, above all he imparted the idea of Denken ("thinking") as activity, which she qualified as "passionate thinking".[57]
Arendt was restless, finding her studies neither emotionally or intellectually satisfying. She was ready for passion, finishing her poem Trost (Consolation, 1923) with the lines:[58]
Die Stunden verrinnen,Die Tage vergehen,Es bleibt ein GewinnenDas bloße Bestehen. (The hours run down.The days pass on.One achievement remains:merely being alive.)
Her encounter with Heidegger represented a dramatic departure from the past. He was handsome, a genius, romantic, and taught that thinking and "aliveness" were but one.[59] The 18-year-old Arendt then began a long romantic relationship with the 35-year-old Heidegger,[60] who was married with two young sons.[i][56] Arendt later faced criticism for this because of Heidegger's support for the Nazi Party after his election as rector at Freiburg University in 1933. Nevertheless, he remained one of the most profound influences on her thinking,[61] and he would later relate that she had been the inspiration for his work on passionate thinking in those days. They agreed to keep the details of the relationship a secret although preserving their letters.[62] The relationship was unknown until Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography of Arendt appeared in 1982. At the time of publishing, Arendt and Heidegger were deceased but Heidegger's wife, Elfride, was still alive. The affair was not well known until 1995, when Elzbieta Ettinger gained access to the sealed correspondence[63] and published a controversial account that was used by Arendt's detractors to cast doubt on her integrity. That account,[j] which caused a scandal, was subsequently refuted.[65][66][64]
At Marburg, Arendt lived at Lutherstraße 4.[67] Among her friends was Hans Jonas, her only Jewish classmate. Another fellow student of Heidegger's was Jonas' friend, the Jewish philosopher Günther Siegmund Stern, who would later become her first husband.[68] Stern had completed his doctoral dissertation with Edmund Husserl at Freiburg, and was now working on his Habilitation thesis with Heidegger, but Arendt, involved with Heidegger, took little notice of him at the time.[69]
Die Schatten (1925)
In the summer of 1925, while home at Königsberg, Arendt composed her sole autobiographical piece, Die Schatten (The Shadows), a "description of herself"[70][71] addressed to Heidegger.[k][73] In this essay, full of anguish and Heideggerian language, she reveals her insecurities relating to her femininity and Jewishness, writing abstractly in the third person.[l] She describes a state of "Fremdheit" (alienation), on the one hand an abrupt loss of youth and innocence, on the other an "Absonderlichkeit" (strangeness), the finding of the remarkable in the banal.[74] In her detailing of the pain of her childhood and longing for protection she shows her vulnerabilities and how her love for Heidegger had released her and once again filled her world with color and mystery. She refers to her relationship with Heidegger as "Eine starre Hingegebenheit an ein Einziges" ("an unbending devotion to a unique man").[35][75][76] This period of intense introspection was also one of the most productive of her poetic output,[77] such as In sich versunken (Lost in Self-Contemplation).[78]
Freiburg and Heidelberg (1926–1929)
After a year at Marburg, Arendt spent a semester at Freiburg, attending the lectures of Husserl.[5] In 1926 she moved to the University of Heidelberg, completing her dissertation in 1929 under Karl Jaspers.[38] Jaspers, a friend of Heidegger, was the other leading figure of the then new and revolutionary Existenzphilosophie.[44] Her thesis was entitled Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation (On the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine: Attempt at a philosophical interpretation).[79] She remained a lifelong friend of Jaspers and his wife, Gertrud Mayer, developing a deep intellectual relationship with him.[80] At Heidelberg, her circle of friends included Hans Jonas, who had also moved from Marburg to study Augustine, working on his Augustin und das paulinische Freiheitsproblem. Ein philosophischer Beitrag zur Genesis der christlich-abendländischen Freiheitsidee (1930),[m] and also a group of three young philosophers: Karl Frankenstein, Erich Neumann and Erwin Loewenson.[81] Other friends and students of Jaspers were the linguists Benno von Wiese and Hugo Friedrich (seen with Hannah, below), with whom she attended lectures by Friedrich Gundolf at Jaspers' suggestion and who kindled in her an interest in German Romanticism. She also became reacquainted, at a lecture, with Kurt Blumenfeld, who introduced her to Jewish politics. At Heidelberg, she lived in the old town (Altstadt) near the castle, at Schlossberg 16. The house was demolished in the 1960s, but the one remaining wall bears a plaque commemorating her time there (see image below).[82]
On completing her dissertation, Arendt turned to her Habilitationsschrift, initially on German Romanticism,[83] and thereafter an academic teaching career. However 1929 was also the year of the Depression and the end of the golden years (Goldene Zwanziger) of the Weimar Republic, which was to become increasingly unstable over its remaining four years. Arendt, as a Jew, had little if any chance of obtaining an academic appointment in Germany.[84] Nevertheless, she completed most of the work before she was forced to leave Germany.[85]
