Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany, to a Jewish family of some education and means. She studied philosophy at several universities and was influenced by existentialism and phenomenology. She was brilliant, committed, and believed in thinking seriously about difficult questions. In 1933, when the Nazis came to power, she was arrested briefly and then fled Germany. She spent time in France and eventually made her way to America in 1941, settling in New York. In America, she became a philosopher and political theorist, writing about totalitarianism, power, and the human condition. In 1961, she traveled to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official responsible for organizing the logistics of the Holocaust. From the trial, she wrote a series of articles and then a book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she reported on the trial and reflected on what it meant. She introduced the phrase “the banality of evil,” arguing that Eichmann was not a monstrous demon but an ordinary man who followed orders, thought in cliches, and did not really think at all. She was attacked viciously for this; many people believed she was excusing Eichmann or diminishing the evil he had done. She was not. She was doing something more dangerous: she was insisting that massive evil does not require monstrous individuals; it requires ordinary people who stop thinking. As Foreign Correspondent, she is a Witness, someone called by the urgency of what she has seen, received by the Spirits because the conversation they are having has always been wider than any single nation’s founding. Her voice is intellectual, precise, unafraid of complexity. She insists on thinking even when thinking is uncomfortable.