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Hannah Arendt
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The thirtieth anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s death is generating broad coverage in the French literary world.
Timed to coincide with the anniversary, the recently released biography “In the steps of Hannah Arendt” by journalist and writer Laure Adler traces the life and work of this leading thinker who died in 1975 in New York.
Born in 1906 in Germany Hannah Arendt is one of the leading intellectuals of the 20th century. Even thirty years after her death her works on philosophy, politics and ethics are still highly relevant
A human rights activist and a strong critic of totalitarianism, she wrote about the dangers threatening democracy.
“She experienced all the things she later wrote about and abstracted into theory,” explains Adler to the monthly “Tribune Juive” magazine.
“That‘s maybe why her work still resonates so deeply thirty years after her death. I tried to put follow her life’s path, to recreate her itinerary, meet her friends and trace her love life, in particular her relationship with Martin Heidegger”.
The book seeks to reveal the identity of this generous, politically incorrect and exceptionally courageous woman, “the philosopher of a chaotic present who analysed the causes of evil which plagued our societies”.
After seven years of studying Arendt, Adler says she is inspired by her strength of character, her independent mind and the questions she raised about her people.
“She was a loyal and strong woman but also a conflicted woman who spent her life searching for an identity, torn between German language and Jewish culture, between her love for Heidegger and her wife life with Blucher, between her passion for philosophy and her taste for politics, between the world of thought and an active life,” she comments.
Ambiguous Jewishness
Arendt belonged to a generation of German intellectuals who broke their ties to the synagogue. She was ecumenical and saw her Jewishness not as spirituality, but as an aspect of her identity.
“Nevertheless, she had the urge to know her roots and her people, and clung to what she described as a “fact of birth”, her identity as a Jewish woman,” Adler said.
“I come from an old Jewish family but the word ‘Jewish’ was not used at home when I was young. I first heard it in anti-Semitic jokes,” Arendt said.
However, Arendt was also blind, according to Adler. “She didn’t recognise the void that the Holocaust represents in the history of humanity. This was most striking during Adolf Eichmann’s trial whom she saw as a victim of the war.”
In 1933, Arendt was arrested by the Gestapo and released. She then escaped to Paris where she worked for Zionist organisations planning the emigration of Jewish teenagers to Palestine.
She had strong and controversial views on Israel. When the state was founded in 1948, Arendt had strong reservations about it. In 1943 she said that the country would be created, but that it would comprise two nationalities.
“’Thought is life and life is thought’ – this sums Arendt up perfectly,” Adler concludes.
“In the steps of Hannah Arendt” by Laure Adler is published by Editions Gallimard.
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