Hannah arendt eichmann

In , the journalist Hannah Arendt travelled from New York to Jerusalem to report on the trial of the Nazi criminal Adolf Eichmann. In Beit Ha’am, a theatre that had been converted into a courtroom with a stage and seating for spectators, she observed how this slim man wearing glasses and a suit stepped silently into the glass defendant’s box.

Eichmann, formerly an Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) in the SS, was one of the key figures in the Holocaust and among those responsible for the murder of six million people in Europe. His trial made headlines around the world.

Lorigine du mal hannah arendt biography book Hannah Arendt was born Johanna Arendt [16] [17] in , in the Wilhelmine period. Her secular and educated Jewish family lived comfortably 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.

In a letter to Karl Jaspers, her former teacher and doctoral supervisor, she wrote: “I would never have forgiven myself if I hadn’t gone there.”

A childhood overshadowed by loss 

Hannah Arendt, born to secular Jewish parents in Hanover on 14 October , grew up in a family of intellectuals. Her father, an engineer and amateur scholar, had a library full of classical works of Greek and Latin literature, while her mother had studied French and music in Paris.

When her father became seriously ill, the family moved back to Königsberg, her parents’ home city in what was then East Prussia. Her father died in In her autobiographical work, Hannah Arendt recalls how she often felt abandoned during this time - including by her mother, who in her grief would undertake long journeys and leave Hannah with her grandparents.

At the same time, her mother taught Hannah to stand up for herself: if anti-Semitic remarks were made in the classroom, Hannah was to get up, leave the room and tell her mother all about it at home.

Lorigine du mal hannah arendt biography Hannah Arendt (–) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organisations.

In , Hannah Arendt began studying philosophy. “I had always wanted to study philosophy, ever since I was 14,” she explained in a television interview in the mids. “It was a question of having to understand,” a way of “thinking without a banister,” as she called it. She first studied under Martin Heidegger in Marburg and then under Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg.

The shock of and the path into exile 

On the evening of 27 February , one month before Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of the Reich, the Reichstag building in Berlin went up in flames - an arson attack that played into the hands of the Nazi party .

Lorigine du mal hannah arendt biography wikipedia

Hannah Arendt (–) was one of the most influential political philosophers of the twentieth century. Born into a German-Jewish family, she was forced to leave Germany in and lived in Paris for the next eight years, working for a number of Jewish refugee organizations.

Issuing the “Reichstag Fire Decree”, it nullified basic rights and paved the way for a dictatorship. “What then happened was monstrous. This was an immediate shock for me, and from that moment on I felt responsible,” recalls Hannah Arendt.