Hannah Arendt

Samantha Rose Hill

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781789143799
• eBook ISBN: 9781789143805

Hannah Arendt is one of the most renowned political thinkers of the twentieth century, and her work has never been more relevant than it is today. Born in Germany in 1906, Arendt published her first book at the age of twenty-three, before turning away from the world of academic philosophy to reckon with the rise of the Third Reich. After World War II, Arendt became one of the most prominent—and controversial—public intellectuals of her time, publishing influential works such as The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, and Eichmann in Jerusalem. Samantha Rose Hill weaves together new biographical detail, archival documents, poems, and correspondence to reveal a woman whose passion for the life of the mind was nourished by her love of the world.

1

Inner Awakening

‘Johanna Arendt was born in Linden, Hannover, Germany on 14 October 1906 at a quarter past nine on a Sunday evening.’ These words inscribed by her mother, Martha Cohn, in her Kinderbuch mark the appearance of Hannah Arendt into the world. Martha’s labour lasted 22 hours; Johanna weighed 3,695 grams (8.14 lb).

Hannah Arendt was born at the beginning of the twentieth century amidst vast social and political transformation: a century she would later say was defined by ‘an uninterrupted chain of wars and revolutions’.¹ She was the first and only child of Martha and Paul Arendt. Paul was an electrical engineer, well read in the Greek and Roman classics; Martha had studied French and music with a private tutor before travelling abroad. Unlike their parents and grandparents who had emigrated from Russia, Martha and Paul were considerably more left-leaning in their politics and religiously secular.

From the moment Hannah Arendt drew her first breath, her mother monitored her growth, recording her development in a book she titled Unser Kind (Our Child). The 71 pages dating from 1906 to 1917 contain longform notes that catalogue Hannah’s evolution into personhood: ‘The temperament is quiet but alert. We thought we detected sound perceptions as early as the fourth week; sight perceptions, aside from general reactions to light, in the seventh week. We saw the first smile in the sixth week, and observed a general inner awakening.’²

Familiar with the writings of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Wilhelm von Humboldt on educational philosophy, Martha wanted to make sure Hannah received a proper upbringing. This distinctly German notion of a Bildung, or education, as a form of socialization and self-cultivation, was instilled in all good middle-class citizens. In the 1790s Bildung had become a secular social ideal, corresponding to the experiences of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, offering a philosophy of education for individual success while demanding a reconsideration of social relations. It was not only up to parents to ensure that their children succeeded, it was the task of society to facilitate this process as well. Value was placed on guaranteeing individual freedom, autonomy and self-harmony in order to perfect inner and outer refinement.³

But Arendt’s sense of inner harmony was challenged early on. At the age of three, her family moved from Hannover to Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, seeking treatment for her father’s syphilis. Paul Arendt had contracted the disease in his youth before he married Martha, and they thought it was in remission when they decided to conceive a child, but by the time Hannah was born he was already in steady decline. After a couple of years he was forced to give up his job as an engineer, and by the summer of 1911 he was placed in a psychiatric hospital, suffering from dementia and paralysis caused by advanced syphilis. Hannah was taken to see him until he could no longer recognize her. She was seven when he died.

After the funeral Martha reflected on Hannah’s response to her father’s illness and death:

Difficult and sad years lie behind us. The child experiences all of the terrible changes her father suffers from the illness. She is good and patient with him, spent the entire summer of 1911 playing cards with him, doesn’t let me say a harsh word about him, but sometimes wishes he wasn’t here anymore. She prays for him in the mornings and evenings, without having been taught . . . Paul died in October. She takes that this is something sad for me. She herself is not affected by it. To comfort me she says, ‘Remember mom, this happens to a lot of women’. She attended the funeral and cried, ‘because the singing was so beautiful’. Otherwise she feels satisfied so many people are paying attention to her. Otherwise, she is a sunny, cheerful child with a good and warm heart.⁴

Königsberg, capital of East Prussia, 1900.

The experience of losing her father did not diminish Hannah Arendt’s inherent wonder at being in the world. From an early age she possessed a combination of shyness, independence and curiosity, coupled with a strong imagination and love of storytelling. Martha records how her daughter’s days in kindergarten gave her a variety of ideas for playing at home, re-enacting her lessons from school. She wrote: ‘She is always the teacher.’⁵

Hannah was enrolled in kindergarten at the age of four and was required to attend Christian Sunday School like most German children, regardless of their religious background. Martha was not observant, but she insisted on sending Hannah to synagogue with Paul’s father Max and his second wife Klara, so she might have some religious education. Hannah became a student of Rabbi Vogelstein, seeing him several times a week for religious instruction. It did not take her long to develop a crush on the rabbi, and she liked to tell her friends that she intended on marrying him when she grew up. But her mother warned her that if she did marry the rabbi, she’d have to give up eating pork, to which she replied: ‘Well, then, I’ll marry a Rabbi with pork.’ Hannah did not remain the student for long: soon she was instructing Rabbi Vogelstein that all prayers should be offered to Christ,⁶ and not long after that she announced she did not believe in God (though this pronouncement would not stick throughout her life). Religion was something to be understood, not believed. And while she would go on to study theology, this was her first and only taste of religious life.

Paul Arendt.

Hannah’s lack of faith, however, did not signal an absence of Jewish identity. Her parents never talked about being Jewish, but she grew up knowing she ‘was different’. And it was this difference that would define the terms of her life as a German Jewish woman in the twentieth century. Reflecting on her childhood in a 1964 interview with Günter Gaus, Arendt recounts how she became aware of her Jewish identity:

Hannah Arendt with her father, Paul.

The word ‘Jew’ never came up when I was a small child. I first encountered it through anti-Semitic remarks – they are not worth repeating – from children on the street. After that I was, so to speak, ‘enlightened’ . . . It wasn’t a shock for me at all. I thought to myself: That is how it is. Did I have the feeling that I was something special? Yes. But I could no longer unravel that for you today . . . Objectively, I am of the opinion that it was related to being Jewish. For example, as a child – a somewhat older child then – I knew that I looked Jewish. I looked different from other children. I was very conscious of that. But not in a way that made me feel inferior, that was just how it was . . . You see, all Jewish children encountered anti-Semitism. And the souls of many children were poisoned by it. The difference with me lay in the fact that my mother always insisted that I not humble myself. One must defend oneself!⁷

There was a large Jewish population in Königsberg in the early twentieth century. Martha Cohn’s father, Jacob Cohn, had fled Russia in 1852 to escape Tsar Nicholas I, whose reign was marked by the oppression of religious minorities. He proclaimed that the Jewish people were a harmful, alien group and adopted policies to systematically destroy Jewish culture through the assimilation of Jewish people. He required compulsory military service for all men, and the seizure of Jewish children from their mothers so that they could be educated within the Christian religion. Jacob Cohn left with his family and founded a tea import firm in Königsberg. Within a few years it developed into a successful business that was able to sustain the family. Jacob died in 1906, the same year that Hannah was born.

The Arendts had been in Königsberg since the eighteenth century and were a well-established and respected family. Max Arendt was chairman of the city council assembly and the liberal Jewish community organization.⁸ When Paul and Martha married, they moved into a large house in the Hufen district on Tiergartenstrasse, which came to be known as ‘little Moscow’. And even though the Jewish Question was being discussed in Königsberg at the time, it was not talked about in the Arendt home. Her family, like many émigré Jewish families, had assimilated to German life, but when Arendt told her mother what the other schoolchildren had said, Martha instructed her that if she was attacked as a Jew, she had to defend herself as a Jew. Her Jewish identity was not a question or a choice; she was Jewish.

Only a year after her father’s death, Hannah’s life was disrupted again when the First World War began. After the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife Sophie on 28 June 1914 in Sarajevo, Austria declared war on Serbia, provoking the Russians to declare war on Austria. As an ally of Austria, Germany entered the war, but instead of going to the Eastern Front, they moved through Belgium to stop the French, which caused the United Kingdom to enter the war. Large red posters announced the declaration of war in Königsberg and called for mobilization; the barracks were flooded with volunteers. Arendt’s school class was taken to entertain soldiers as they waited for deployment. Being so close to Russia, East Prussia was a dangerous region to be in, especially for Russian Jews such as Arendt’s family. As Russian troops advanced towards Königsberg, tens of thousands of people escaped to occupied territories, including Martha and Hannah. For several weeks they lived in Berlin with Martha’s sister Margarete, who was married with three children of her own. Martha described the time in her Kinderbuch:

Terrible days full of excitement, knowing the Russians are near Königsberg. On 23 August we fled to Berlin. Hannah is enrolled in a Lyzeum in Charlottenburg, where she gets along well despite the more advanced classes. She finds a lot of love and pampering here with relatives and friends. Though there is a strong desire in her for home and to return to Königsberg. After a ten-week stay, we drive back to the now liberated province.

The German troops had launched a counter-offensive in East Prussia, forcing the Russians to turn back, making it safe for Martha and Hannah to return to Königsberg. Despite the flurry of war activity, Hannah’s life mostly returned to normal, but the economic depression facing Germany had impacted the family’s finances.⁹ After Paul’s death, Martha was left with her inheritance and the legacy of the Cohn business to provide for her and Hannah. By the end of the war, with a flailing economy, her resources were dwindling rapidly, and to supplement their income Martha rented a room in their house to a young Jewish student.

The conditions of exile and new home life did not suit Hannah’s temperament. In an entry marked January 1914, Martha records Hannah’s chronic illnesses, which often corresponded to trips she took. She suffered from a series of nosebleeds, headaches, sore throats, fevers, flu, measles, whooping cough and a case of diphtheria, which the doctor could not confirm. When she was well enough she took piano lessons and learned how to swim, even though, as Martha notes, she didn’t have much ability for music or swimming.

During these years Hannah’s relationship with her mother changed. The fluctuating social and political circumstances caused her to retreat inward, and her inclination towards always being the teacher became even stronger. She took great pleasure in reading Homer and learning Greek, but she wanted to do it on her own terms, not at the instruction of another. In Martha’s penultimate Kinderbuch entry, she describes her daughter as ‘difficult’ and ‘opaque’, and adds that she ‘is a very good student, has ambition to be better than the others . . . she learned Latin with her book according to her school’s curriculum so well, she wrote the best exam when she returned to school’. Hannah was flourishing intellectually, but the difficult days of her childhood were not over.

Hannah, age eight, with her mother, Martha.

On 9 November 1918, during the final days of the war, Kaiser Wilhelm II was forced to abdicate his throne and go into exile, ending the empire and heralding the birth of a new German republic. Two days later on 11 November Germany signed an armistice agreement with the Allies ending the war. The news shocked Germans who thought they were winning. Anger mounted, setting the groundwork for the November Revolution. Although Martha did not support Rosa Luxemburg in the debates with Eduard Bernstein about reform or revolution, she was enthusiastic about the Spartacist uprisings and saw them as a historic moment in German politics. Martha was a lifelong social democrat, and a member of the Communist Party. Other social democrats would often gather at her house to spend long hours around the table in heated debate. Martha introduced Hannah to the ideas of Rosa Luxemburg and took her to see Luxemburg speak at a general strike rally.

Arendt was only thirteen when Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murd...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Understanding
• 1. Inner Awakening
• 2. Shadows
• 3. Love and Saint Augustine
• 4. Life of a Jewess
• 5. Turn Towards Politics
• 6. ‘We Refugees’
• 7. Internment
• 8. State of Emergency
• 9. Transition
• 10. Friendship
• 11. Reconciliation
• 12. The Origins of Totalitarianism
• 13. Amor Mundi
• 14. Between Past and Future
• 15. Eichmann in Jerusalem
• 16. On Revolution
• 17. Men in Dark Times
• 18. Crises of the Republic
• 19. The Life of the Mind
• 20. Storytelling
• References
• Select Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Photo Acknowledgements