50 Years After Hannah Arendt's Death: Portrait of an Indispensable Mind, by Thomas Meyer

Hannah Arendt is arguably the thinker who spanned the 20th century and transcended her masters. From central Europe , first, and then the United States , she witnessed the radical transformation of the global political scene that led to the Holocaust , which she called the "sordid sound of the silence of human evil." She was a German philosopher, historian, political scientist, sociologist, university professor, writer, and political theorist, who later became a naturalized American and was a Jew.

The philosopher Thomas Meyer specialized in her thought and took on the challenge of writing Hannah Arendt (Anagrama), an intellectual biography that he published in German in 2023 and that, translated by J. Rafael Hernández Arias, is now available in Spanish. A professor of philosophy at the University of Munich, Meyer had access to previously unpublished documentation on Arendt's life.

Exceptionally well-educated, Arendt began her studies at the University of Marburg (Hesse) in 1924, spending a year attending philosophy classes with Martin Heidegger and Nicolai Hartmann , and Protestant theology classes with Rudolf Bultmann , as well as Greek. In early 1926, she moved to the Albert Ludwig University in Freiburg to study with Edmund Husserl . She then studied philosophy at the University of Heidelberg (Baden-Württemberg) and earned her doctorate in 1928 under the tutelage of Karl Jaspers .

Arendt's life was a permanent dialogue between theory and practice. She was a radically independent thinker, critical of both totalitarianism and her own Jewish community, which generated considerable controversy. Her break with the German academic community began in 1933, when she saw how many intellectuals, including Jews, were aligning themselves with Nazism . This moral betrayal led her to exile: first to Paris, then to the United States, after fleeing the Nazis.

Arendt championed individual freedom and the need to understand evil in order to combat it. Her famous thesis on "the banality of evil," which emerged from the Eichmann trial, expressed this conviction: horror does not always come from monsters, but from silence and obedience. Meyer draws on everything to construct a monumental portrait in which he defined a lucid and combative woman, whose relevance lies in her ability to think against the grain. He referred to her in an email conversation.

Meyer will participate in the conference "Hannah Arendt: From Exile to Post-Truth," from September 4 to 7 at the San Martín Cultural Center , in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the philosopher's death. The conference is organized by the Goethe-Institut and the Walter Benjamin Chair (DAAD) . She will also visit the Goethe-Instituts in Santiago, Córdoba, and Montevideo to present her book. The event is sponsored by Ñ .

Meyer argues: “Hannah Arendt probably really became known in 1942, when she wrote for the newspaper Aufbau, founded by Jewish emigrants from Germany. The newspaper soon dedicated a column to her, which quickly became a success. From then on, “Arendt” became a name to be reckoned with. Her first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), was widely reviewed, as was the German edition of Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (1955). Hannah Arendt became very well known in Germany (through radio and television) and, by the end of the 1950s, she was already considered a ‘star’. Since then, things haven’t changed, for better or worse! Look at the vocabulary used: ‘polemic’, ‘the great thinker’, etc. It sounds like something taken out of context. Arendt has become a label.”

–Why do you think Hannah Arendt took Aeschylus’ tragedies with her when she traveled from Paris to New York in 1941?

–Why Aeschylus ? She had known his plays since her school days, as they were part of the canon of the humanist secondary school. Perhaps it was a coincidence; perhaps she felt her situation didn't allow her to read anything other than Aeschylus. The Persians is also the oldest surviving Greek tragedy, a return to the origins of tradition to understand the present; after all, it's a movement of thought in which Arendt is always involved.

–What did the quote from Aeschylus’s The Persians , “The battle is for all this…”, written in the last letter she sent to her first husband, Günther Stern-Anders, mean to her?

–When Arendt wrote this sentence to Günther Stern-Anders on August 4, 1940, France had surrendered five weeks earlier, preparations for the air battle against England were almost complete, the Battle of the Channel was already in full swing, and Japan had announced its intention to establish a “New Order” in “Greater East Asia.” The Second World War was in full swing, and measures against the Jews in the German Reich and the occupied territories were intensified. The coming battle truly had to be fought for everything.

–How and when did Arendt learn of Walter Benjamin's death? How did it affect her?

–It is unknown from whom and exactly when Hannah Arendt learned that Walter Benjamin had committed suicide in Port Bou in 1940. At the time, she was in Montauban with her husband. In a letter to their mutual friend Gershom Scholem , dated October 21, 1940, she wrote that Benjamin had committed suicide on September 26 and that she and her sister Dora had only found out four weeks later. In another letter dated October 17, 1941, when Arendt was already in New York, she told Scholem everything she had learned about Benjamin's death. For Arendt, Benjamin's death was above all a call to deal with her friend's “life after death” (a term coined by the art historian Aby Warburg ). Together with Scholem, she wanted to edit Benjamin's writings. But he decided to do it with Theodor W. Adorno . A first attempt by the Schocken Verlag publishing house failed, but Arendt later published a volume of texts by Benjamin and wrote several essays about him and his work.

–Why do you maintain that Hannah Arendt “now exists only as a public figure”?

–Well, Arendt is read and interpreted as if there were no more secrets. She's completely transparent. Her life has also been considered completely clear since Elisabeth Young-Bruehl 's biography (1982). Of course, many previously unknown documents came to light, but the "picture," as Arendt called it, could no longer be changed. I consider this a dangerous development. Arendt must once again become a dangerous, or at least surprising, thinker. At least with regard to her life, I've tried to unsettle people with this biography. No one knew these stories before. Given right-wing populism, authoritarian tendencies, the misanthropic Putin, and the countless wars around the world, it's time we convinced ourselves that Arendt was different, more revolutionary .

–When and how did you perceive that Hannah Arendt's prose changed after the completion of her two fundamental works, namely, The Origins of Totalitarianism and The Human Condition ?

–The differences are only noticeable in English. Arendt not only had much more experience and command of that language, but she was also more sophisticated overall. This means that with The Origins... she had laid the foundations for understanding the 19th and 20th centuries, on which she could address issues such as public and private coexistence, the individual and their environment, and a theory of action. Despite all the cultural criticisms contained in The Human Condition , the book is, in short, the positive counterpart to The Origins...

–How did you make your mark as an intellectual and academic in the United States in the 1960s?

Hannah Arendt was simply there! She published from 1941 and was “visible” from then on, arguing in an intelligent and polemical way, unusual and surprising. Others were able to recognize it. She had friends who edited magazines or were publishers, who recognized her talent. With each book, with almost each essay, she achieved a great response. Moreover, by the 1960s she was no longer alone, as more and more women, now a generation younger, were entering the public sphere. Finally, it was clear that the time had come. Let us not delude ourselves: Arendt did not promote anyone, neither Susan Sontag nor anyone else. Mary McCarty was already an important writer and essayist, but other women might have needed Arendt's help, but she was very tough. This had nothing to do with quality, but with a rather fierce competitive spirit toward her own sex...

–What did it mean to you to have witnessed the trial of Eichmann and the publication of the book Eichmann in Jerusalem ?

–Curiosity may have initially influenced her decision to attend the Eichmann trial. In a letter, Arendt wrote that she had “missed” the major war crimes trials at Nuremberg , but that she wouldn’t let this opportunity slip away. Of course, personal reasons played a role, as one can easily imagine. But we mustn’t forget that, ever since the details of the murder of six million Jews became known, Arendt had been preoccupied with “radical evil.” Eichmann personified this idea, so to speak. So Arendt had to go.

No other publication has been subject to as many revisions as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . This speaks volumes about the importance of this work for Arendt. The strong reactions the book provoked awakened in her, above all, a desire to explore the “life of the mind.” This project dominated her thinking from 1964/65 onward, despite the numerous and often significant texts—I recall here only “On Violence”; “Thinking”; “Wanting” and “Judging”: these three categories revolved around everything until her death on December 4, 1975. We all know that the corresponding book, The Life of the Mind , remained unfinished, as the last part could not even be formulated in the slightest. But even the texts on “Thinking” and “Wanting” never received a final revision by Arendt. However, what we can now read for the first time, thanks to a critical edition (Wallstein Verlag, Göttingen), is more than just a quarry. The reflections it contains are a philosophical and political statement on the Holocaust. In this sense, the book goes back not only to Eichmann in Jerusalem , but also to the 1940s.

–You emphasize that there was a moment of change in which “it became politicized and shifted from philosophy to modern Jewish history.” What factors contributed to this? What ideas and contexts were you thinking about at the time?

–If you will, the transition from philosophy to Jewish history marked her turn toward politics . Since then, Arendt has wondered throughout her life why philosophy remained at the level of self-concern, thus remaining committed to the so-called “primacy of theory” and failing to understand that “practice” is not something that contaminates “pure doctrine.” However, human action is precisely the synthesis of theory and practice—which has nothing to do with Marx—and only violently can the two spheres be separated. In this sense, Arendt's work is a complete rejection of the voluntary reduction of philosophy to theory, from which one laboriously accesses practice, but only to subjugate it. Arendt would raise her index finger here and warn: “Kant is the exception!” And the rest is the rule, one would have to say then.

–What role did Karl Jaspers play in your philosophical development? Was he your first major influence?

–Karl Jaspers: that was her teacher, a very close friend, who restored her confidence to be able to interact with Germans again. She spoke with him more intensely than with anyone else in the world, including her husband, Heinrich Blücher . Her correspondence with Jaspers is, much more than the rather bland texts about him, the most significant exploration of another way of thinking. It is impossible to divide it into personal and philosophical, since there are no boundaries between the two. However, one thing was clear to Arendt: Jaspers did not understand that Arendt was Jewish, not German. This disappointed her. That is why Arendt's unpublished correspondence with Jaspers's wife, Gertrud Maier, who was Jewish, is all the more important. What I mean by this can now be read in the volume On Independent Thinking: Hannah Arendt and Her Critics , edited by Georg Hartmann. Jaspers reclaims Arendt for his philosophy, whose greatest challenge lay in what he called “independence.” Arendt supposedly embodied it. But she, like Gertrud Maier , firmly rejected this usage.

–You point out that “one thinks one sees Heidegger’s influence everywhere.” You were referring to the use of terms like “being-here,” “existence,” “entity,” “temporality.” How did she feel about that particular influence? Did she like it or did it bother her?

–Talk of influence is always vague. Arendt read Heidegger for fifty years, from 1924 , thinking with him and against him . She knew manuscripts that no one else knew, sometimes admired him, and deeply disappointed him with her 1960 book Vita Activa (the English original, The Human Condition , is very different), so much so that he remained silent for five years and subsequently wrote insulting, senseless nonsense to her. However, philosophical thought had to be able to confront Heidegger, while for Arendt it had to be inspired by Jaspers. Both, in turn, had to confront the abyss, that is, the Holocaust. Thus, Heidegger was radically reinterpreted by her, at least as far as his intention was concerned. After the war, she spared him the question about his actions and thoughts between 1933 and 1945. She thought she knew that nothing sensible would have come of it (she liked to call him a “liar”). So he embraced his philosophy, his way of thinking. Something many still haven't forgiven him for. But that's how it was.

–What did Heidegger's seminar on Plato's The Sophist , held in Marburg in the winter of 1924-1925, mean to Arendt?

To answer this question, we must first distance ourselves from Arendt's perspective on this lecture. I find her interpretation of Heidegger in 1969, when she publicly congratulated her teacher and brief lover on his 80th birthday, extremely questionable, even disconcerting. In 1924/25, Arendt was a young, intelligent woman who was fluent in ancient Greek and deeply interested in philosophy.

Heidegger's lecture on the Sophists is a paradigmatic example of his immense interpretive power, but also of the violence he exercised—he himself called it "destruction" in Being and Time —against texts. This may have impressed Arendt, but, as far as we know, she did not become dependent on it, either positively or negatively, like so many others who attended this lecture with her. Arendt developed a position on this subject early on, which she characterized with the term "student." A student, in this sense, absorbs what they have learned, applies it, and thereby transforms it. Sometimes more, sometimes less. Her approach to the texts of tradition was never as violent as Heidegger's, but she learned from him not to have a false reverence for 2,500 years of the history of thought. That's something!

–How would you define or explain the tension between Heidegger and Arendt in relation to their differences? Is it directly related to Heidegger's connection to Nazism? Or is it also due to different points of view when, for example, Heidegger argues that humankind suffered existential alienation due to the dominance of technology, an idea Arendt questioned, arguing that the dominance of animal laborans and homo faber was stifling the public sphere?

–You're absolutely right! Vita Activa , even more than The Human Condition , contains a strong rejection of Heidegger's critique of technology . Furthermore, the book opens up anthropological perspectives, while Heidegger seeks to transcend philosophy in favor of "thinking." Arendt also wants to "think," but always with tradition. For Arendt, Heidegger's desire to dwell in Being is simply an escape from the world. A flight that is also an escape from (one's own) responsibility. This is already the essential reason for her critique of technology. Arendt recognized this and criticized it accordingly.