Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was a 20th-century German-Jewish political thinker and philosopher. She was born in Linden, Hanover, Germany in 1906. When she was three her family moved to Königsberg so that her father’s syphilis could be treated. He died when she was seven years old.

Königsberg was where Immanuel Kant was born, right?

Yes. It’s where he took his daily constitutionals that the housewives of Königsberg set their clocks to. Arendt actually started reading Kant in her father’s library after his death and was pretty well-versed in his work by the time she was 14. She was also studying Greek and Latin.

From a very early age, one of the things that is clear about Hannah Arendt is that she was always an outsider. She refused to conform to social expectations and liked to do things on her own. Her mother worried about her emotional development because she would appear cold, but she was just incredibly passionate and curious. She had all sorts of ‘illnesses’ as she was growing up, just to get out of going to school so that she could stay at home, study alone, and be with her mother. And then, eventually, she was kicked out of school for leading a protest against one of her professors who’d offended her. That, combined with all her absences meant she couldn’t continue. So, her mom sent her to Berlin to finish her studies and prepare for her Abitur exam. (Students need to pass their Abitur to graduate high school and attend university.) In Berlin she studied philosophy and theology under Romano Guardini.

So where did she go on to study after that?

She’d heard about Martin Heidegger through her childhood friend, Ernst Grumach, who had already gone to sit in on the first seminars Heidegger was teaching at the University of Marburg. He’d told her that thinking had come to life in the classroom when Heidegger discussed Plato and Aristotle. And so, she went to study with Heidegger. She attended his classes on Plato and Aristotle and his lectures on thinking, and, of course, they had what is now an infamous romantic relationship.

After a couple of years, she ended that, recognizing what she called ‘the gap’ between them—basically his work and his wife would always come first, which would prevent the kind of closeness she desired. So, she went to the University of Leipzig to study with his professor, Edmund Husserl, for one semester before going to the University of Heidelberg to write her dissertation on love and Saint Augustine with the great existentialist philosopher and psychologist, Karl Jaspers... (FiveBooks, continues)