Hannah Arendt

What has Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) to do in this blog ? I don’t really know much about her, except that one is likely to find her name in any article about political philosophy, being as she was an influential German-American philosopher and political theorist.

Just by seeing her photograph I’m sure she was an intelligent and deep thinker. But, why mention her in a blog like this one ?

Because, being a Jew, she had to flee Germany in 1933 ? She was far from being the only one.

Because she had had a brief affair with Martin Heidegger, under whom she studied in Marburg back in the 1920s ? That makes her of course, if not unique, in any case remarkable, as Heidegger, considered one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, later turned out to be a nazi.

Because she played a role in the famous Eichmann trial in Israel 1961 ? She did, but…

What has Arendt to do in a blog dealing with Berlin in the 1920s ? Well, the fact is, she lived in Berlin back in those years, even if she was born in Hannover and died in New York.

More exactly, at the Opitzstrasse, in the Bayerisches Viertel, a neighbourhood favored by other celebrities like Albert Einstein and Walter Benjamin.

It was in Berlin that she started studying political theory, and reading Marx and Trotsky, without ever defining herself as a political leftist. She was more interested in Jewish issues as well as in women’s status in society.

From 1951, she taught at many universities in the U.S. She’s buried in the Bard College, at Annandale-on-Hudson, state of New York.