![]() On the level of historical insight and political thought there prevails an ill-defined, general agreement that the essential structure of all civilizations is at the breaking point. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives. Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest – forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. Under the most diverse conditions and disparate circumstances, we watch the development of the same phenomena – homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth. We no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions, or for the reintegration of the masses of five continents who have been thrown into a chaos produced by the violence of wars and revolutions and the growing decay of all that has still been spared. This moment of anticipation is like the calm that settles after all hopes have died. Two world wars in one generation, separated by an uninterrupted chain of local wars and revolutions, followed by no peace treaty for the vanquished and no respite for the victor, have ended in the anticipation of a third World War between the two remaining world powers. Es kommt darauf an, ganz gegenwärtig zu sein. Weder dem Vergangenen anheimfallen noch dem Zukünftigen. Hannah Arendt’s many books include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), in which she coined the famous phrase ‘the banality of evil’. After this, she left Europe for the United States, and became an American citizen ten years later.ĭuring her time in the US, Arendt was a research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations, chief editor of Schocken Books, executive director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction in New York City and a visiting professor at several universities, including Princeton, where she was the first female lecturer. She married the Marxist philosopher Heinrich Blücher in 1940 the same year, she was detained in an internment camp in southwestern France as an ‘enemy alien’. In 1937, she was stripped of her German citizenship. In 1933, Arendt was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo, after which she fled Germany for Paris, where she worked for the immigration of Jewish refugee children into Palestine. She received her doctorate in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg and began researching antisemitism. At university in Marburg, she was taught by the philosopher Martin Heidegger, with whom she developed a romantic relationship, complicated by his later affiliation with the Nazi party. Hannah Arendt was born into a secular family of German Jews in Hanover in 1906.
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