Andrea Pitzer: What We Get Wrong about Hannah Arendt
Arendt gained
widespread recognition for revealing the common tactics of repressive governments
of varying ideologies, as well as the fertile soil in which they grow. “You can
fight over many things with her,” political theorist Hans Morgenthau said, “but
she was the first to understand fascism.” Covering the trial
of Adolf Eichmann from Jerusalem in 1961, she also recognized that evil did not
require committed ideologues to further its agenda - a well-oiled bureaucracy of ambitious
functionaries would suffice to perpetrate genocide.... Within months of
Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, a political investigator with the Berlin police
detained twenty-six-year-old scholar Hannah Arendt and politely interrogated
her for more than a week. Upon her release, she devised a plan to leave Germany
and headed east with her mother. Taking refuge in the Erzgebirge Mountains, the
two women approached the Czech border without travel papers.
Arendt had already
helped other Jews escape the country, sheltering some in her own apartment, and
was familiar with escape networks. In broad daylight, mother and daughter
entered a house that straddled the border, waiting until nighttime to walk out
the back door on their way to Prague. She soon left for
France, where she lived and worked through the end of the decade before winding
up in detention again in the spring of 1940, interned this time by French
authorities as an enemy alien after the German invasion. Managing to flee her
detention camp after Paris fell that summer, she arrived the following year in
America, which became her home.
Arendt’s mind had
developed in the hothouse realm of philosophy, but under the weight of
circumstance, she reoriented herself toward political considerations. She
understood concretely the crossing of borders, the rapid shift from freedom to
tyranny, and the myriad ways liberties could be preserved or vanish. An orphan
of disintegrating societies, Arendt developed the refugee’s eye for existential
threats. After the end of the war, she began work on The Origins of
Totalitarianism, conducting an autopsy on the unraveling of political
freedoms....
https://longreads.com/2017/01/17/what-we-get-wrong-about-hannah-arendt/
