Summary: The brief biography below was a written for a German language Hannah Arendt Handbuch, which will be published in 2010 by Metzler Verlag. It condenses my full-scale biography Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, published by Yale University Press in 1982, with a second edition in 2006.
HANNAH ARENDT (1906-1975)
On October 14, 1906, Hannah Arendt was born in Hannover, Germany, the only child of Paul Arendt, an engineer, and Martha Cohn Arendt. Both of her parents had been born and raised in Konigsberg, Immanuel Kant’s hometown. Their families were middle-class Jewish merchants. descended from Russians who had emigrated to East Prussia during the 19th century Czarist persecutions of the Jews. Several years after their daughter’s birth, the Arendts returned to Konigsberg, where Paul Arendt was institutionalized in 1911 with tertiary syphilis. In 1913, deterioratd and unable to recognize his family, he died, as did his father, Max Arendt, who had been like a father to Hannah Arendt during her own father’s illness. The next year, as the Russian army swept across East Prussia in the opening hostilities of the First World War, Martha Arendt fled with her daughter to the safety of Berlin. When Hannah was able to begin school, she was under the public shadow of the war as well as the private one of the family’s grief.
Arendt had been precocious as a child, learning to read before she entered kindergarten. Her mother was a broad-minded, progressive woman, active as a Social Democrat. She supported her daughter’s education and her entry into a girls’ Gymnasium in Konigsberg, even backing her up when she was expelled from the Luiseschule for a breach of discipline and had to continue her studies on her own. Antisemitism did not often affect assimilated business families, but when Hannah Arendt encountered it at school, her mother encouraged her to defend herself and lodged protest letters of her own with the school authorities.
In 1920, Martha Arendt married Martin Beerwald, a widowed merchant with two teenage daughters, Clara and Eva. The Beerwald house became a center for Hannah Arendt’s talented young friends –including her best girlfriend Anne Mendelsohn (who remained close to her for all her life) and a boyfriend named Ernst Grumach, who was five years her senior–and was the meeting place for her Greek reading circle. From 1922 to 1924, she prepared to take the Abitur, required for university entrance, both by working at home with a private tutor and by auditing courses at the University of Berlin, where she encountered the theologian Romano Guardini, a “Christian existentialist” who lectured on Kierkegaard. Her main bent for reading was toward philosophy and she was excited by the emerging critical trend led by Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger. With her exam passed, she went off to start her university studies at Marburg, where Heidegger was teaching and attracting to his seminars the young people who went on to be Germany’s philosophical elite –although in exile, as most of them were Jewish.
When Arendt arrived in Marburg in 1924, the political storm that broke in 1933 was already beginning to gather. But her year was one of purely personal upheaval. She threw herself into study of Greek, and of New Testament theology with Rudolf Bultmann. But her eighteen-year-old focus was on Heidegger –and his, increasingly, was on her. The student-teacher relationship turned into a clandestine affair, known only to one of her student friends, Hans Jonas, and carefully hidden from Heidegger’s wife and children. The only documentation of this affair is in the lovers’ letters, some of which survived (mostly Heidegger’s) and were published as Letters: 1925-1975 some twenty-five years after both had died.
From the surviving letters, it is clear that the romance continued until 1926, when Arendt left Marburg, eventually to study and complete her doctoral dissertation with Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg. But the two kept in communication until the political situation in Germany shifted decisively, and Heidegger, who had been accused of being an anti-Semite but had denied this to Arendt when she queried him in the winter of 1932-33, aligned himself formally with the Nazi Party and took the post of Rector at Freiburg University, which, like all the German universities after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, expelled its Jewish faculty. Arendt did not communicate with him again until 1950.
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Heidegger to Hannah Arendt’s launch as a thinker, or to her personal development. He was her model thinker, and he instilled in her a seriousness about thinking that stayed with her for the rest of her life, remaining long after she found the Romantic anti-modernism underlying his infatuation with National Socialism ridiculous and rejected his unworldliness. Heidegger had a vision of European philosophy from Plato to Nietzsche as a unity, a continuous tradition of “oblivion to Being,” and he resolutely set himself outside of it, at “the end of metaphysics,” as he pondered in a great solitude what might come, what form a new receptivity to Being might take. His initial commitment to a phenomenological “back to the things themselves” approach of his Being and Time (1926), inspired Arendt, and continued to even after she eventually described the end of the European tradition quite differently and hoped not for a philosophy of Being but for a “new science of politics,” a way of thinking about politics that would not be unworldly and solitary, contemplative, but attentive to “the human condition.” Heidegger, although he never seems to have taken any interest in her philosophical development after the break in their relationship, told her that while he was writing his first book, and always afterward, she had been his inspiration and the love of his life.
After she decided to resume contact with Heidegger in 1950, Arendt was relieved that she had let herself respect her need for what she called “continuity” with her past and her great love, and relieved that she –then forty-four years old–was able to speak much more frankly and honestly to him. But a complex journey and crucial new loves had brought her to her decision. In Jaspers, she found both a father figure and a new philosophical model: a man whose personal integrity and commitment to Enlightenment political ideals –his affinity was for Kant– led him to make a courageous stand against National Socialism. With his encouragement, Arendt’s philosophical concern shifted toward exploring bonds of community (her dissertation was on Augustine’s notion of neighborly love), and she then used a biography of Rahel Varnhagen to explore Jewish salon life in the 18th century and what it had meant to the Jews then not to have a political community. In Kurt Blumenfeld, the leader of the German Zionists, she found a political mentor, and it was at his suggestion that she began to do practical political work for the Zionists in 1933 –a mission that led to her arrest by the Gestapo and her flight from Germany to France soon after she was, by a stroke of good fortune, released by her Nazi captors. She separated at this time from Gunther Stern (later Anders), a Jewish philosophy student she had married in 1929 and lived with in Berlin, and their marriage, which had not been a love match for her, effectively ended.
In Paris, Arendt continued to align herself with the German Zionists, and worked for Jugend Aliyah, an organization that arranged passage for German Jewish young people to Palestine (and she accompanied one group to Palestine herself). She also found in Paris a community of exiles, many of them leftist political activists and intellectuals from Berlin, who gathered in the cafes with sympathetic French writers and artists. A friendship developed with the literary critic Walter Benjamin. But the most important relationship was with Heinrich Bluecher, a gentile Berliner of working class origins, self-educated, independent-minded, who had been a follower of Rosa Luxemburg and active in the Spartakusbund. At first, Arendt, who had resigned herself to the idea that no relationship could succeed the one she had had ten years earlier with Heidegger, was tentative. But it is clear in the letters she exchanged with Bluecher in 1936/37, which are now preserved in a published edition entitled Between Four Walls, that he –such a different kind of man, worldly, humanly wise, capable of deep friendship, and devotedly interested in her and her thought—converted her. In 1940, when she had freed herself of her legal tie to Stern, she married Bluecher in Paris, and they were able to emigrate together to New York after both of them had endured weeks of internment in the camps the Third Republic government built in southern France for rounding up “enemy aliens.” Their escape route, across southern France and the Pyrenees to Lisbon, was the same one that Walter Benjamin took but did not complete, as he committed suicide after being stopped at the Spanish border.
Arendt was able to arrange for her mother to join them in New York and the threesome began a stretch of precarious refugee existence, scrapping for money, learning English, wondering what horrifying news the morning papers would bring as the war in Europe raged. Bluecher became a day laborer, Martha Arendt made lace by the piece, and Hannah Arendt produced book reviews in her serviceable English while she wrote political columns in German for Aufbau, a widely read daily. As in Paris, they found an exile community, where everyone gave everyone else a hand, and they slowly met Americans, particularly the group that would later found the Partisan Review. Arendt found part-time jobs teaching at Brooklyn College, working as a researcher at the Conference on Jewish Relations (with the great Jewish historian Salo Baron), and finally as an editor at Schocken Books, where she was able to bring Franz Kafka to American readers. But nothing in their slow march toward personal stability could keep the Bluechers from their preoccupation, starting in the winter of 1942/43, when word reached them that the Nazis were operating exterminaton camps, with trying to understand what had happened in Europe and to the world. Arendt began to move beyond her political columns for Aufbau toward the book that eventually had the title The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Even though she was using almost every waking moment that she was not at one of her paying jobs to work on her monumental book, Arendt did make a last foray into political work in 1948. This stint was not for the German Zionist Organization (in exile) but against it, and against all Zionists who could not forsee the danger or the moral disaster in making a people –the Arabs of Palestine—stateless in their quest for a Jewish state that would bring their own statelessness to an end. Arendt joined Judah Magnes, the President of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, who led a small group of mostly German Jews in Palestine in advocating for a bi-national state. Magnes drew Hannah Arendt to his cause after reading her articles in Aufbau and in various American publications like The Nation and recognizing her as a kindred thinker. She acted as the Magnes group’s position paper writer in New York, but retreated when the idea of a bi-national state disappeared in the 1948 War for Independence that brought a Jewish state into being and did, in fact, make huge numbers of Palestinian Arabs into stateless refugees. Her reflections in The Origins of Totalitarianism on the European-style nation-state as a political form that oppresses peoples living in a state territory but not members of the dominating national group owe much to her critique of Zionism and then of Israeli nationalism.
In articles she wrote between 1946 and 1950 and in her book, Arendt made the argument that in the 19th century, in the era of European overseas and continental imperialisms, a range of elements –including the nation-state—developed in Europe which eventually crystallized into totalitarianism in Germany (and also, she said in extending her argument, in the Soviet Union, the other continentally imperialistic nation). Totalitarianism, as a novel form of government, could not come about without key proto-totalitarian developments. She studied in intricate detail how nation-state class relations developed, rigidified, and then collapsed; how mass societies emerged and how uprooted and disenfranchised “superfluous people” became instruments and victims of imperialism. She explored the nature of the bureaucracies imperialist states needed, and the agencies and types of ideologies they generated to justify a totalitarian regime as the unfolding of Nature or the inevitable march of History. (When she wrote about collaborationist intellectuals in Germany as ideologues, she included the one she had called in a 1946 Partisan Review article “the last German Romantic” –Heidegger.)
Each of the three parts of The Origins of Totalitarianism –Antisemitism, Imperialism, and Totalitarianism—and the book as a whole became, when published in 1951, a classic, a reference point for all subsequent study. In the context of the Cold War, which was then –just as Hannah Arendt became an American citizen—turning very threatening inside America because of the histrionics of Senator Joseph McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, Arendt’s argument that the Soviet Union was a totalitarian regime sparked a great deal of controversy. Anti-Communists welcomed it; those on the American left who suffered from McCarthyism and still hoped that Communism was the solution to the crisis Arendt had studied, thought Arendt’s book was too helpful to Cold Warriors. Her book, like all of her subsequent books, did not fit easily into prevailing notions of Right and Left –categories which, she had argued, had become nearly meaningless in the era of totalitarianism. Those trapped in the categories had trouble hearing the urgent message of her Preface: “An insight into the nature of totalitarian rule, directed by our fear of the concentration camp, might serve to devaluate all outmoded political shadings from left to right, and, beside and above them, to introduce the most essential political criterion for judging the events of our time: will it lead to totalitarian rule or will it not?” Those trapped in old categories also had trouble hearing her hope that totalitarianism be answered with a vision of a “comity of nations,” and with federations of multi-national states that would, unlike the newly founded United Nations, not be locked into forms blocked from “comity” by Cold War rivalry.
Soon after she completed the manuscript of Origins, which she wrote in English (and had further “Englished” by an American friend, Rose Feitelsohn), Arendt began to translate it into German. When she returned to Germany in the winter of 1949/50 as an employee of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, an agency dedicated to locating Jewish cultural objects stolen and displaced during the war, she took her translation project with her and used pieces of it as lecture texts when she visited in various German universities –bringing the story of German totalitarianism home.
The reception of Hannah Arendt’s ideas in Germany was especially complex, in part because the Nazi past remained—in the familiar term– “unmastered.” In addition, Arendt’s commitment to a “comity of nations”–which she imagined as including a federation of European states—challenged unreconstructed German nationalists of all kinds. Initially, however, her work was enthusiastically received by a small group around the journal Die Wandlung, directed by Karl Jaspers, Dolf Sternberger, Werner Kraus and Alfred Weber. As a European rather than a German journal, Die Wandlung was closer to being beyond “all outmoded political shadings from left to right” than any publication in post-War Germany. The journal had not only published translations of the essays Hannah Arendt had written while she was composing The Origins of Totalitarianism, but had issued them as a collection under the title Sechs Essays through Springer Verlag in 1948.
Arendt’s association with Die Wandlung came about through Karl Jaspers, who had survived the War, along with his Jewish wife, Gertude, in Heidelberg. She had the first of many reunions with Jaspers there and began the friendship that is chronicled so thoroughly and beautifully in their published Correspondence: 1926-1969. With Jaspers, she was able eventually to share freely her feelings about Heidegger –and her theory that Heidegger had a divided character, half shallow and mendacious and half profound and true—and her unambivalent feelings about her husband. Jaspers, who had cut off his relationship with Heidegger because Heidegger had refused to recant his Nazi affiliation, was happy to establish a relationship of his own with Bluecher via a correspondence. With Jaspers Arendt could also share the impressions of Germany that she recorded in an article called “The Aftermath of Nazi Rule,” published in the American Jewish magazine Commentary in 1950-–an article that can be read as an addendum to The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Nazism had been worse than a tyranny for the Germans, she noted, because totalitarianism “kills the roots” of a people’s political, social and personal life with its “radical evil,” the essence of which was the concentration camps. Not until 1952 did she express any confidence that the German people’s roots had not been killed and might regenerate. At this point, German voters made what she saw at first as a halting start at repudiating the Nazi past. Abandoning their “primitive nationalism,” they committed themselves to a vision of a future Europe, represented by Konrad Adenauer’s support for the proposed European Defense Community (EDC). But Arendt soon came to distrust this vote and indeed, Adenauer himself, whose advocacy of a “Christian Europe” and restoration of the national army she viewed as re-Nazification. When she finally found a German publisher for her translation of Origins, she dejectedly expected that her views in that book on Nazi and Soviet totalitarianism would be distorted and exploited by the Adenauer majority, just as they were by the American anti-Communists–and she was right.
When Arendt was revising and updating Origins once more for a 1958 re-edition, she moved her “Concluding Remarks,” where she had expressed her hope for a “comity of nations” dedicated to securing “the right to have rights,” into the second and third parts. Instead of this original conclusion, she ended the volume with an essay called “Ideology and Terror.” Here, she justified in more detail her claim that Stalin’s Soviet Union had been totalitarian. She also added an Epilogue focused on the 1956 Hungarian Revolution. In this addition, she explored the Soviet Union after Stalin and praised an institution that arose in Hungary and was diametrically opposed to concentration or labor camps: revolutionary councils. These revisions to Origins heralded Arendt’s shift through the late 1950’s and into the 1960’s toward exploring revolutionary traditions in Europe and America. She never again wrote about a possible “comity of nations,” although her cosmopolitanism and rejection of any national chauvinism were always obvious.
The 1960’s brought another revision to The Origins of Totalitarianism as well. When Arendt went to Jerusalem in 1961 to witness the trial of Adolf Eichmann, her response to this event brought a new dimension to her thinking. Her controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, first published in The New Yorker and then as a book, became, in effect, part of the unfolding story of The Origins of Totalitarianism with its discussion of “radical evil.” Arendt was aware that by locating “radical evil” in the lack of military or political purpose that characterized the Nazi concentration camps, she had not addressed the question of motivation in Origins; that she had looked at Nazi ideology but not at any individual Nazi–not even Hitler—as a purposeful person or a thinker. Observing Eichmann in the Jerusalem court, she concluded that he was precisely not someone who thought or judged, but only someone who thoughtlessly obeyed his Führer’s will and reflected the moral environment in which he lived. This conclusion, along with her reflections on how the Nazis in their ruthlessness had manipulated the Jewish Councils, made Arendt’s report the center of an internationally conducted controversy. In Germany, this controversy spilled into a furor over Rolf Hochhuth’s play The Deputy (1963), with its questions about why Pope Pius XII had remained silent when he learned of the Nazi camps. It was Eichmann in Jerusalem that became, in Germany, the primer for the generation of 1968 as it tried to make its break with the generation of its Nazi fathers.
By the mid-1960’s, the possibility that totalitarianism–in the mid-century form she had analyzed–would recur was no longer Arendt’s galvanizing fear or her sole criterion for political judgment. Origins became a book that could be reissued as three books, each encompassing one of the three parts of the original, Antisemitism, Imperialism, Totalitarianism, each with a new preface describing the political realities of the mid- and late-1960’s world. The Totalitarianism preface could discuss the “detotalitarianizing” of the Soviet Union, its return to political purposes, national interests, and a late twentieth-century form of continental imperialism–a match for the late twentieth-century form of overseas economic imperialism being practiced by America in, for examples, Latin America and southeast Asia.
During the decade between Arendt’s return to America after her extended 1950 visit to Germany and her 1961 decision to go to the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, she did not need to take jobs with Jewish organizations or publishing companies. Bluecher had been recruited –despite his lack of any formal credential or any love for universities—for a teaching position at Bard College, and she was invited for semester-long stays at various American universities, given prizes (including the Lessing Prize) and grants. They entered into a calmer, more prosperous, productive period that was not full of expectation of political disaster –particularly as McCarthyism turned out to be a limited crisis. Arendt used her university appointments to prepare lectures that turned into essays and books. The Human Condition appeared in 1959; a collection of the essays entitled Between Past and Future in 1961; and On Revolution in 1962. (A text on Karl Marx, never published, which will be soon available, stands in the background of the books just cited.)
These are the books that offered the “new science of politics” that Arendt had been imagining since the 1930’s, when she was introduced by Heidegger to the idea that the tradition of European philosophy –indeed, the European tradition generally—had ended. But she was thinking from the other side of a political break, after the emergence of an unprecedented form of government, totalitarianism. In her essays, she took each important concept of political philosophy since Plato and subjected it to historical analysis –using many of the techniques of etymological and philological analysis learned from Heidegger—and to re-conceptualizing, or, as she sometimes put it, to conceptual “unfreezing.” In The Human Condition, she offered, further, new frameworks for thinking: a scheme of six conditions that define human life –life itself, earthboundedness, habitation in a world (a culture), natality, mortality, plurality (life with distinct others); and a scheme of types of human activity –work, labor, action. These schemes allowed her to think very deeply and broadly about the shifts relative to conditions and reversals in activities that characterize human existence now. In On Revolution, using the example of American history, she studied the human drive to act –to bring about novelties and to make new political forms. She compared the American Revolution, which resulted in a constitution, a republic, with the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution, as well as the failed German Revolution of her youth –all revolutions that did not result in republics and whose constitutions did not safeguard freedom. Modern revolutions have characteristically brought into being local councils of various sorts, and these, she thought were the political forms most capable of preserving space for the kinds of words and deeds that brought them about. These were the regenerative political forms most needed for political life in the post-totalitarian world.
When the controversy over her Eichmann in Jerusalem came crashing into Hannah Arendt’s life after it appeared in 1963 in The New Yorker and then in book form (revised in 1965), her peaceful productive decade came to an end. A still very productive but also very agitated decade began during which she was overwhelmed with invitations to lecture but was often on the defensive in public conversations. She found herself a pariah among Jewish intellectuals in America, in Europe, in Israel, at the same time that her reflections on political events were awaited by growing numbers of readers everywhere, particularly younger ones. Mostly, except for a few short statements in English and in German, she left it to her friends to engage the controversy. Mary McCarthy, with whom she had had a close friendship during the preceding decade, wrote a forceful defense in The Partisan Review, but Arendt was, nonetheless, shunned by many in the circle of that magazine. In Europe, Karl Jaspers wrote and gave radio interviews from his home in Basel on her work and on the legal issues involved in the Eichmann trial. In Israel, no defender emerged, and Arendt had to endure the alienation of her old friend Kurt Blumenfeld.
Arendt herself began to reflect on Eichmann again while the controversy swirled: she wanted to go beyond a “report on the banality of evil” to explore philosophically what she had called Eichmann’s “thoughtlessness,” and to consider against the backdrop of Enlightenment moral philosophy his judgment, or his refusal to make judgments, as he obeyed the Fuhrer’s will. As she had watched the man at his trial, she reflected, a question had “imposed itself” on her —one that she could not get away from any more than she could get away from her awareness of his role in the running concentration camps: “Could the activity of thinking as such, the habit of examining whatever comes to pass or to attract attention, regardless of results and specific content, could this activity be among the conditions that make men abstain from evil-doing, or even actually “condition” them against it?”
Gradually, Arendt evolved a plan for a three volume work called The Life of the Mind. It’s volumes, Thinking, Willing, and Judging, would each recall the figure of Eichmann as she wrote about thoughtlessness, about submission of one’s will to another’s domination, and about refusal to judge. But each volume was to be, positively, a historical-philosophical tour –a tour de force—of reviewing and reconceputalizing to arrive at descriptions of the activity of each faculty (thinking was “a dialogue between me and myself,” for example) and an overview of the three faculties in their inter-relations. The book would be a “phenomenology of the mind” without an ounce of Hegelian metaphysics in it; or, better, it would make three Kritiks –as Kant had—without any reliance on imperatives or absolutes.
While Arendt’s philosophical concern went to The Life of the Mind, she kept on writing about American and European politics, and the period of the late 1960’s certainly prompted her to do so with ever greater sense of urgency and danger. Personally, she began to worry about Heinrich Blucher’s health, and this was one reason for accepting an appointment at the Graduate Faculty of the New School For Social Research, which was in New York, close to home, and not requiring her to travel for teaching she had been doing at the University of Chicago and other universities. Politically, she was also facing what she considered ill health: The American republic she had described with such enthusiasm and admiration in On Revolution seemed to her to be threatened with loss of bearings, loss of memory for its revolutionary tradition. The main symptom of this loss was the War in Vietnam, which she, along with her German émigré “tribe” –a tribe that had expanded to include Hans Mogenthau, a national security advisor to President Lyndon Johnson—protested from its inception, as they supported the student movement that arose to carry protest into the public domain. Following her inclination to focus on a key concept the misunderstanding of which was having crucial political consequences, Arendt trained her attention on the concept of violence and composed a long essay called “Reflections on Violence,” “ which was adapted for a February, 1969 issue of The New York Review of Books.
Much of this text, called On Violence in its 1970 book format, was directed toward the students of the American and European student movements, to warn them away from any embrace of violence as a means to their end. She offered withering critiques of the various philosophical advocates of violence, from Sorel to Fanon to Sartre, and the various ideologies justifying it, including Maoism. But, most importantly, she argued for a clear conceptual distinction between violence, which is instrumental, and power, which arises when people come together and act in concert, non-violently. People resort to violence, she said, when they have no power or they are losing what power they had. Witness the “most powerful nation on earth,” which was then, in its loss of power, raining bombs upon Vietnam, where North Vietnamese citizens were demonstrating again and again their power in cities and countrysides. Their guerilla force was embedded in and sustained by the citizenry.
On Violence was the last work of political analysis that Arendt published before the first of two blows –not political, but personal—that she had been fearing all through this agitated decade struck. A precipitous decline in the health of the eighty-six-year old Karl Jaspers ended in his death and brought Arendt a sad telegram from his wife on February 26, 1969: Heute starb mein Lebensgefahrte Karl Jaspers.” Arendt flew immediately to Basel for his funeral, and delivered at his memorial a beautiful eulogy, a reflection on how thinking about and preserving what is “most impermanent and also perhaps most great, his spoken word and his unique comportment” can bring mourners sharing their sorrow into “a relationship with the dead one.”
Jaspers’ death made Arendt intensely fearful for Bluecher, who had begun to have increasingly serious circulatory problems in the late 1960’s. But she was able to keep working on The Life of the Mind, publishing a preliminary essay on “Thinking and Moral Considerations” in 1969, and to keep commenting on the political situation in America with powerful essays on “Civil Disobedience” and “Lying n Politics” (a comment on The Pentagon Papers and how “image-making” was coming to dominate political life). While she worked, and stayed as close to home as her busy schedule allowed, Bluecher suffered several dips in his heath and a general decline in his energy, although there was a respite while they enjoyed a restful summer vacation in 1970. But he unexpectedly suffered a heart attack at their home on Riverside Drive in Manhattan and died hours later in a hospital on October 31st. Her reserved and stoical telegram to friends went: “Heinrich died Saturday of a heart attack. Hannah.”
The mourners who assembled for Bluecher’s memorial came from the oldest stratum of their lives together –from France in the 1930’s—right on through the émigré “tribe” members who had met in New York in the 1940’s, the American friends who grew close to them in the 1950’s, and then to his younger friends and former students at Bard College, where he had been revered. Arendt took comfort in their presence, and was helped in her effort to form “a relationship with the dead one” particularly by Mary McCarthy and by their friend Lotte Kohler, a professor of German at City College who had shard many of the Bluecher’s annual summer vacations together in the Catskill Mountains north of New York City. But she was exhausted and depleted by her loss; for the thirty years of their marriage, he had been her home, her refuge, her continuity.
Arendt was sixty-four when Bluecher died and, although she had extraordinary energy for her work and for being with friends, traveling in Europe –after his death, she shifted her summer vacations away from the Catskills and to the calm of a pensione near Locarno—she had never given any particular attention to her own health. Her attitude toward the advice she got from her doctor to stop smoking was that she would try but that if no cigarettes meant no writing she would stop trying. When she returned to her manuscript for The Life of the Mind, she compromised by cutting back on cigarettes, but worked with great intensity, reading in Philosophy more widely than she had done since her youth when she was a Philosophy student. Being invited to give the prestigious Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen, Scotland, she set herself deadlines for finishing the “Thinking” and “Willing” volumes (the “Judging” volume was never started). But she suffered a heart attack herself in May, 1974, as she was in Aberdeen delivering the second part of her Lecture.
After she recuperated in her Swiss pensione from this heart attack, Hannah Arendt began to be more careful. She allowed herself more leisure, and she spent her evenings relaxing and socializing or going out to movies and concerts with her friends, the old émigré ones, the American ones, and younger people and graduate students. She repaired –when it was possible—friendships that had suffered during the Eichmann controversy, and she reached out to people she had been too sorrowful to see since Bluecher’s death. Into this quieter period came news that she had been selected to receive the Danish government’s Sonning Prize for Contributions to European Civilization. She went to Copenhagen and delivered there an acceptance speech analyzing the complexities and dangers of fame and celebrity, especially for those who try to think. Her speech was a kind of meditation on how to preserve and protect “the life of the mind,” not in order to retreat from concern for politics, but in order to judge well.
Many invitations for university and conference lectures were refused, although Arendt did accept an invitation for a political speech: she joined a distinguished group who made speeches at the Boston Hall Forum to mark the coming year, 1976, as the bi-centennial year of the America republic. Her speech, entitled “Home to Roost” when it was broadcast over National Public Radio and published in The New York Review of Books, was a short but powerful summary of the threats to America’s Constitution and republican form of government that she had seen accumulating during the Vietnam War and into the era of Watergate.
Arendt had a quiet late summer of 1975 at her Swiss pensione, reading Kant for her “Judging” volume, visiting with friends, and trying to recover from a strenuous month spent at the Deutches Literatur Archiv in Marburg sorting through Karl Jaspers’ papers in her capacity as a literary executor, and a strenuous visit to Heidegger, whom she found ill and nearly deaf, remote. She returned to New York that Fall only partly refreshed, and apprehensive, as New York’s streets had grown dangerous during a bleak economic period. She took a fall outside of her apartment building in late November, and a few days later, while visiting with friends she had invited for dinner, she had another heart attack –and this one fatal.
Like Bluecher’s funeral, Hannah Arendt’s funeral at the Riverside Chapel near her home brought out people from all the periods of her life and their lives together. But many who knew her only through her books and political commentaries came, too, and this was the beginning of the posthumous phenomenon of Hannah Arendt readers and admirers gathering to acknowledge her life and her contributions –not just to European Civilization, but to world culture—that has grown more remarkable each of the thirty-three years since the funeral gathering. By the time the centennial of her birth came in 2006, conferences and readings and workshops were organized all around the world, from New York to Paris, Berlin to Rome to Belgrade, Beijing to Caracas. Books by the hundreds have now been published about her work, explaining it, commenting on it, criticizing it. Many intellectual historians judge her to have been the most important political thinker of the post-War period in the 20th century –not because of her direct influence on political actors or events, but because of the depth and breadth of her understanding of what politics was in the 20th century, at its worst in totalitarianism and its best in the spontaneous “new beginnings” of people coming together to act in freedom.
