Johanna Arendt – A Pluralistic Thinker

Johanna Arendt was one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century and is also considered a pluralistic thinker.

Although some saw her as a philosopher, she herself did not like to fall into such a category. Perhaps because it is too restrictive for an intellectual person and a pluralistic thinker with broad interests.

One could say that Johanna Arendt was one of the foremost experts on the “Jewish question”. Unlike other thinkers, she was very broad and critical as she approached the subject.

Her work The Origin of Totalitarianism is a true classic in political theory. In it she expresses the historical development of anti-Semitism, racism and imperialism.

In the end, she describes what she calls “total dominance”, which is exemplified in Nazism and Stalinism.

An intelligent young woman and pluralistic thinker

Hannah Arendt was born on October 14, 1906 in Linder-Limmen, Germany. She came from a Jewish family that was originally from Linden in the region of Prussia.

Arendt’s father was an engineer who died of syphilis when she was only seven years old. And her mother, Martha Cohn, was a woman with liberal ideas. She wanted to give her daughter the same education that boys received at this time.

Hannah Arendt showed early signs of having great intellectual abilities and a rebellious personality. Some say that at the age of 14 she had already read the works of Emmanuel Kant and Karl Jasper.

However, she was expelled from school due to “disciplinary problems” at the age of 17.

Hannah then traveled alone to Berlin where she took courses in theology and philosophy. She then started with self-study and took and passed the entrance exam to Marburg University at the age of 18.

Johanna Arendt, a Jewish intellectual and a pluralistic thinker

A popular man named Martin Heidegger was one of Arendt’s teachers. The two fell in love and had a secret romance. He was married and already had children.

The situation became unbearable for Hannah, who then moved for a semester to Albert Ludwig’s University in Freiburg.

There she received a doctorate in philosophy in 1928 after studying under Edmund Husserl. Karl Jaspers was her essay supervisor and he later became one of her closest friends.

At that time she was also close friends with many famous philosophers.

The progressive antics of Nazism began with a gradual increase in anti-Semitism. Hannah Arendt used her own house to help many children and young people escape.

In 1933 she was arrested by the Gestapo and detained for eight days. She then fled to France where she met her first husband Gunther Stern.

A stateless thinker

Johanna Arendt was one of the few European intellectual thinkers who spoke radically about Nazism from the beginning, unlike other philosophers who tried to reconcile with the new regime.

In 1937 Hannah divorced Gunther and the same year the German government revoked her nationality. She managed to get her mother out of Germany in 1939. In 1940 she married Heinrich Blucher.

Shortly afterwards, she was sent to a concentration camp in France because “she was German”, even though she was not. She managed to escape and emigrated to the United States with her husband and mother.

When she came to the USA, she started working as a journalist because she already had experience of this. In 1951 she became an American citizen even when she always said that her heart was connected to the German language, art and poetry.

Johanna Arendt had a fantastic career

When she became a US citizen, she “liberated” herself from her stateless state. She even said that a citizenship was “the right to have rights”.

She then had a fantastic career and wrote her foremost works in the United States.

In 1961, she worked as a correspondent for The New Yorker and reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann. In 1959, she became the first woman to teach at Princeton University.

In 1963 she became a professor at the University of Chicago and then worked at other academic departments.

Her husband died in 1970. Four years later, Hannah suffered a heart attack from which she recovered. She continued to work until 1975, when a second heart attack took her life during an academic meeting.