Chapter 1The Girl from Hanover

Foreword

Five words.

"The banality of evil" is very likely the most quoted phrase produced by any philosopher of the twentieth century, and the overwhelming majority of the people who use it mean something Hannah Arendt did not.

It is used, now, to say that evil is ordinary, that anyone might do it, that the perpetrator was just a man like you. That is a comfortable proposition and it is not hers. What she was arguing, in the 1963 New Yorker pieces that became Eichmann in Jerusalem, was something narrower and more disturbing: that the specific man in the specific glass booth in Jerusalem exhibited no demonic depth whatsoever, that his defining characteristic was an inability to think from anyone else's position, and that a bureaucratic apparatus could convert that ordinary emptiness into industrial murder without requiring a monster anywhere in the chain. She was not making a general claim about human nature. She was describing a mechanism, and she thought the mechanism was the frightening part.

The phrase escaped the argument almost immediately and has been running loose ever since.

My previous books have been about American women of letters and what public attention does to them, and I came to Arendt because she is the most extreme instance I have found. Didion and Sontag were consumed by their own personae. Arendt was consumed by a phrase. The celebrity attached itself to five words rather than to a face or a style, and the woman became the host organism for a formulation most of her readers cannot source and have not read in context.

What that cost her, in 1963 and afterwards, is the spine of this book.

Friendships of thirty years ended over it. Gershom Scholem told her she lacked love for the Jewish people and she answered that she had never in her life loved any people or collective, and the exchange is one of the great pieces of intellectual correspondence of the century and it was also the end of something. Jewish organizations mounted an organized campaign against the book. She was accused, at length and in print, of blaming the victims and of exonerating Eichmann, and a version of what she had written about the Jewish councils circulated for decades in a form considerably harsher than anything she actually put on the page.

And the fame obliterated the work. She had already written The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 and The Human Condition in 1958, which are the books she would have wanted to be known for and which are demanding, systematic and largely unread by people who can quote her fluently. A biography of Arendt that spends its length on the trial is reproducing the distortion it should be describing, and I have tried to keep the proportions honest: the reportage is one part of a career, and not the most important part.

Two other things this book has to hold.

She was a refugee, and the refugee years are not background. She was briefly detained by the Gestapo in 1933 for documenting anti-Semitic propaganda, left Germany, spent seven years in Paris working with Youth Aliyah, was interned by the French government at Gurs in 1940, escaped, and reached New York in 1941 with almost nothing. The woman who would later be accused of insufficient feeling for her own people had spent a decade doing practical work to get Jewish children out of Europe.

And there is Martin Heidegger, who was her teacher at Marburg and with whom she began an affair at eighteen, and who joined the Nazi party in 1933, and with whom she resumed contact after the war and maintained a relationship until her death. I have not written that as a scandal to be adjudicated, and I have not written it as a footnote either. It sits in the middle of the book because it sat in the middle of her life, and because any account of her thinking about complicity that pretends she had no personal stake in the question is not describing her.

On method: the archive here is enormous. She wrote constantly, and the correspondence, above all with Karl Jaspers, who supervised her doctorate and who remained her closest intellectual relationship, is the richest source available on what she actually thought as she was thinking it. She died in 1975. I conducted no interviews. Where I have reconstructed her view of something, it is from what she wrote at the time rather than from what she or anyone else said about it later.

Her own phrase for what she was trying to do, late in life, was thinking without a banister. She meant it as a description of a method, not as a boast. It is also a fair description of what this book has had to do with her.

Chapter 1 · The Girl from Hanover

The house on Lindener Marktplatz in Hanover was solid, bourgeois, and unremarkable. It belonged to a family that understood itself as German first and Jewish second, or perhaps third or fourth, after cultured, educated, and modern. Paul Arendt was an engineer. Martha Cohn Arendt was the daughter of a prosperous family from Königsberg, East Prussia. Their daughter Johanna, Hannah from the start, was born on October 14, 1906, into a world that would spend the next four decades trying to destroy people like her.

Nothing about the Arendts' circumstances suggested the catastrophe to come. They were assimilated German Jews of the educated middle class, the Bildungsbürgertum, that particular stratum of German society that believed in Goethe and Schiller and the life of the mind with the fervor other people reserved for religion. Paul Arendt had studied engineering in Königsberg, where both families had deep roots. Martha was intelligent, politically aware, and an admirer of Rosa Luxemburg, a detail that proved significant, given what her daughter would eventually write about revolution. They were Social Democrats. They read widely. They expected their daughter to do the same.

Hannah's earliest years were shaped not by politics but by illness and death. Paul Arendt had contracted syphilis before his marriage, a fact Martha knew and accepted, a decision that speaks to the complexity of early-twentieth-century bourgeois marriages more than any generalization could. The disease was in remission when Hannah was born, but it returned. Throughout her early childhood, her father's condition deteriorated. He suffered periods of dementia, was eventually hospitalized, and died in 1913, when Hannah was seven.

She would later say she had no memory of him. Whether this was literally true or a form of self-protection is impossible to determine. What is clear is that his absence, and the particular nature of his absence, the slow fading rather than the sudden departure, left her in the care of a mother who was both fiercely devoted and formidably independent. Martha Arendt raised her daughter alone, and she raised her to think.

The first political event Hannah experienced was the First World War, which broke out a year after her father's death and which arrived, in East Prussia, with a directness that the western parts of Germany did not yet feel. The Russian Imperial Army invaded East Prussia in August 1914. Königsberg was within the line of advance. The civilian population of the eastern districts was evacuated west. Martha and Hannah, eight years old, joined the trains of refugees streaming toward Berlin. They spent ten weeks there, in the apartment of Martha's younger sister, Margarethe Fuerst, while the Battle of Tannenberg in late August 1914 destroyed the Russian Second Army and the subsequent Battle of the Masurian Lakes pushed the front back east. The family returned to Königsberg before the end of the year. Hannah remembered this displacement, in fragments, for the rest of her life: the suitcases, the train compartment, the strangeness of arriving in a city she did not know, the relief of going home, the recognition that home was a place that other people could take from you and that you could lose without warning. The First World War was, for the German children of Hannah's class and generation, a distant catastrophe conducted by their absent fathers. For the children of East Prussia, it was a war that came to the door.

The household moved to Königsberg, Martha's home city, the city of Immanuel Kant. This was not a minor geographical detail. Königsberg was the city where the greatest of German philosophers had lived his entire life without ever leaving, walking the same streets at the same hour every day, and producing from that extraordinary confinement a body of work that remade Western philosophy. Hannah Arendt grew up in a city where the question of what it meant to think, to truly think, rigorously and without comfort, was embedded in the very streetscape. Kant's house was a landmark. His grave was a destination. His presence was inescapable.

The Königsberg of Hannah's childhood was a city of about a quarter million people on the Pregel River, the easternmost major German city, nearer to Vilnius and Warsaw than to Berlin. It had been the coronation city of the Prussian kings. It had a university, the Albertina, founded in 1544. It had a substantial Jewish community, integrated by the standards of the period and hostile by them in equal measure, depending on which neighbor you asked. It had a working-class district along the docks, a bourgeois district where the Cohns and Arendts lived, and an aristocratic district inhabited by the Junker families whose estates surrounded the city. It was a city that thought of itself as German in a way that the other German cities did not need to think about themselves: defensively, conscious of the Slavic populations to the east and the Lithuanian populations to the north, conscious of being a frontier outpost of the German cultural sphere rather than a comfortable interior city. The Russian invasion of 1914 confirmed every defensive instinct the city had developed. The Soviet conquest of 1945 destroyed the city the defensive instincts had been developed to protect. By the time Hannah Arendt was an old woman in New York, the Königsberg of her childhood existed only in her memory and in the memories of the dwindling number of people who had survived to remember it with her.

Martha's parenting was unusual for the period. She kept what she called a notebook, Unser Kind — "Our Child" — in which she recorded Hannah's development with the meticulous attention of a scientist observing an experiment, noting her first words, her early questions, the moments in which her daughter's emerging intelligence made itself visible to a mother who was paying close attention. The notebook survives; it is now part of the Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress, catalogued among the earliest documents in a collection that spans some ninety-five archival boxes. It records a child who was precocious, intense, and strikingly independent. Hannah spoke early and well. She asked questions that unsettled adults. She had what Martha described as a strong sense of justice that manifested before she could have understood the concept. When other children were punished unfairly, Hannah protested. When rules struck her as arbitrary, she said so.

This was not a child who would learn to be quiet.

She acquired a friend in the early Königsberg years who would matter for the rest of her life: Anne Mendelssohn, who became Anne Mendelssohn Weil after her marriage to the German-born French philosopher Éric Weil. They met at school, recognized each other within an afternoon, and were inseparable from that point forward. Anne was Hannah's intellectual peer in a way that the other Königsberg girls were not. They read together. They argued together. They walked the streets of Königsberg in the long northern evenings and discussed Goethe and Heine and what they would do with the rest of their lives. The friendship survived everything: the rise of Nazism, the separate exiles, the war, the postwar reconstruction. Anne would receive Hannah in Paris in 1933 and again in 1948 and again, repeatedly, until Hannah's death. The Anne Mendelssohn correspondence, which spans more than fifty years, is one of the great records of female friendship in twentieth-century intellectual life. It is also, in its early letters, a record of two adolescent girls in Königsberg trying to figure out, in the years right after the First World War, what the future could possibly mean for people like them.

Martha remarried in 1920, when Hannah was fourteen. Her new husband was Martin Beerwald, a prosperous Königsberg businessman with two daughters of his own. The marriage was practical rather than passionate, a common enough arrangement, and it gave Martha financial stability and Hannah two stepsisters she did not particularly want. The household dynamics were complicated in the ordinary ways of blended families, but they were also shaped by the fact that Hannah was, by fourteen, already the kind of person who lived primarily in her own mind. She was reading Kant. She was reading Kierkegaard. She was reading everything she could find, with the indiscriminate voracity of a genuinely hungry intelligence.

Her formal education was conducted at the Luisenschule, a girls' school in Königsberg. The German gymnasium system of the period was rigorous by any standard, and Hannah excelled. But she was also difficult. She argued with teachers. She refused to accept assertions on authority. In one well-documented incident, a teacher made a remark that Hannah considered insulting, the exact nature of the insult varies in different accounts, and Hannah organized her classmates to boycott the teacher's lessons. She was expelled.

Martha Arendt did not panic. She arranged for Hannah to continue her studies privately, and she enrolled her daughter at the University of Berlin as an auditor, Hannah was only sixteen, to attend lectures in classics and theology. This was Martha's solution to having a daughter who was too brilliant and too stubborn for the ordinary institutions: she found extraordinary ones. The decision to send a sixteen-year-old girl to university lectures in 1922 Berlin was not typical parenting, even for the educated German-Jewish bourgeoisie. It was Martha's recognition that her daughter required something the conventional system could not provide.

Berlin in 1922 was the Weimar Republic at its most febrile: inflation was beginning its catastrophic acceleration, the political situation was unstable, and the cultural life was electric. Hannah attended lectures by the theologian Romano Guardini, whose work on the nature of faith and its relationship to reason would leave traces in everything she later wrote about religion, secularism, and the public square. She was absorbing ideas at a rate that would have been remarkable in a graduate student, let alone a teenager.

The reading list of those Berlin months survives in fragments, in letters and in later recollections. She was reading Kierkegaard, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and the Sickness Unto Death, with the kind of immersion that the Danish theologian rewards in adolescent readers and that often misleads them. She was reading Karl Jaspers's Psychologie der Weltanschauungen, the 1919 book that had launched Jaspers's reputation as a philosopher and that would, four years later, draw Hannah herself to Heidelberg. She was reading the Greek tragedians in the original. She was reading Augustine, whose Confessions would become the subject of her doctoral dissertation. She was reading Heinrich Heine, the Jewish poet whose conversion and exile and bitter wit had marked the previous century's most acute statement of the German-Jewish predicament. She was, in other words, reading the writers who would constitute her intellectual furniture for the rest of her life, and she was reading them at sixteen, in the brief intermission between her expulsion from gymnasium and the resumption of her formal education.

But the Berlin period was brief. Hannah returned to Königsberg, completed her gymnasium qualifications through a combination of private study and special examinations, she was readmitted to the school system and passed her Abitur early, in 1924, and faced the question that would determine the rest of her life: where to study, and with whom.

The answer came in the form of a name that was circulating among German philosophy students with the force of rumor and revelation: Martin Heidegger. He was teaching at Marburg. He was, by all accounts, the most exciting philosopher in Germany. He had not yet published his masterwork, Being and Time would not appear until 1927, but his lectures were already legendary. Students spoke of them the way earlier generations had spoken of Hegel's lectures in Berlin: as events, as transformations, as encounters with thinking itself.

Hannah Arendt enrolled at the University of Marburg in the autumn of 1924. She was eighteen years old. She had lost her father, survived her expulsion, devoured Kant and Kierkegaard, studied theology in Berlin, and developed a mind that was already formidable in its independence and its appetite. She was about to walk into the lecture hall of a man who would change her life in ways that neither of them could have predicted and that both of them would spend decades trying to understand.

What she carried with her to Marburg was a set of dispositions that her childhood had already established. She had Martha's independence and political awareness. She had the Königsberg tradition of rigorous thought. She had the experience of being Jewish in a culture that accepted Jews conditionally, that extended every privilege of German Bildung while reserving the right to withdraw them. She had watched her father disappear by degrees, and she had learned that the people and institutions you depended on could fail you. She was expelled from school for standing on principle, and she had not concluded that the principle was wrong.

She also carried something harder to name: a quality that her friends and contemporaries later describe as Leidenschaft, passion, but that was really closer to a refusal to be half-hearted about anything. Hannah Arendt did not dabble. She did not skim. She did not hold herself in reserve. When she read a philosopher, she read everything. When she loved, she loved completely. When she thought, she followed the thought to its conclusion regardless of where it led. This quality would make her one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. It would also lead her, at eighteen, into the most consequential and most damaging relationship of her young life.

The Germany into which Hannah Arendt was born and in which she spent her first eighteen years was not one country but several, layered on top of each other like geological strata. There was the Germany of the Kaiser, militarist and expansionist, which had sent Paul Arendt's generation to die in the trenches and which had collapsed in 1918. There was the Germany of Weimar, democratic and fragile, culturally brilliant and politically unstable, which was the country of Hannah's adolescence. There was the Germany of the Jews, which was itself multiple, the Orthodox communities of the east, the assimilated professionals of the west, the Zionists who argued that assimilation was a fatal illusion, and the vast majority who simply lived their lives and hoped for the best.

The Arendts belonged to the last category, with a tilt toward the secular and the intellectual. Hannah's grandfather, Max Arendt, was active in the Königsberg Jewish community and was a leader in liberal Jewish politics. He was a city councillor. He was a member of the board of the Reform synagogue. He represented the liberal tendency within German Judaism, the tendency that believed Jewish life and German life could be reconciled through the modernization of Jewish religious practice and the full integration of Jews into German civic life. He took his granddaughter to the synagogue when she was small, less for religious instruction than because he wanted her to know where she came from. Hannah's memories of these visits, which she recorded in fragments late in her life, were affectionate. She remembered the building, the music, the rabbi's voice, the particular smell of old books. She did not remember being moved religiously. She remembered being moved socially, by the sense that she belonged to a community that had its own forms and its own dignity. The grandfather died when she was seven, the same year as her father, and the deaths together produced the formative loss of her early childhood: two paternal figures gone in the same season, and a mother left to construct, alone, the framework that would hold the daughter together.

But the family's Judaism was cultural rather than religious. They observed some traditions. They identified as Jewish. They did not pretend to be anything else. But they also did not imagine that their Jewishness defined the limits of their world. They were Germans. They were Europeans. They were citizens of a culture that had produced Kant and Beethoven, and that culture was theirs.

This confidence, which was shared by millions of German Jews in the early twentieth century, became both the foundation of Arendt's intellectual achievement and the source of her most painful disillusionment. She never stopped believing in the German intellectual tradition. She never stopped reading in German, thinking in German, writing her first drafts in German. But she learned, at a cost that cannot be measured in any currency, that the tradition had not protected anyone. The country that produced Kant also produced Adolf Eichmann. The culture of Bildung had not prevented the Holocaust. Understanding how this was possible became the work of her life.

But that understanding was decades away. In 1924, Hannah Arendt was an eighteen-year-old Jewish girl from Königsberg who loved philosophy and had never been in love, heading to Marburg to study with a man everyone said was a genius. The catastrophe was ten years in the future. The philosophy was right now.

She packed her books and took the train.

A note on the Königsberg of Arendt's childhood is necessary, because the city no longer exists, at least not as the place she knew. Königsberg was destroyed by British bombing in 1944 and by the Soviet assault in 1945, and it was annexed by the Soviet Union after the war and renamed Kaliningrad. The German population was expelled. The buildings, the streets, the physical world in which Arendt grew up, were obliterated, first by bombs and then by the systematic Soviet reconstruction that replaced the old German city with Soviet apartment blocks. Kant's grave survived. Almost nothing else did.

This destruction gives Arendt's childhood a particular poignancy. The world she grew up in was not left behind; it was erased. The streets she walked, the school she attended, the library where she read Kant, the house where Martha kept her notebook, all gone, as completely as if they had never existed. The only record of that world is in the memories of the people who lived in it, and those people are gone too. What survives is Arendt's work, which was shaped by a city that was shaped by a philosopher who never left it.

The loss of Königsberg was one of the many losses of the twentieth century that Arendt experienced and that informed her thinking about the fragility of the human world. The world she described in The Human Condition, the durable world of objects and institutions that gives human life stability and meaning, was a world she had watched disappear. She knew, from personal experience, that the world was not permanent. It could be destroyed. It was destroyed. The question was how to build it again, and how to protect what was built, and how to ensure that the next destruction, which was always possible, always threatened, did not occur.

These were not abstract questions for a woman whose childhood city was bombed into rubble and whose childhood culture had been extinguished by the regime it had produced. They were questions that arose from the ground of her experience, from the losses of a particular life, and they gave her political philosophy a urgency that purely academic thought could not have achieved. She was not theorizing about the fragility of the world. She was testifying to it.

Martha Arendt's notebook, Unser Kind, survived because Hannah carried it with her into exile. It is now in the Library of Congress, among the Hannah Arendt Papers, which constitute one of the most important archives of twentieth-century intellectual life. The archive contains her manuscripts, her correspondence, her lecture notes, her reading notebooks, and the accumulated documentary record of a mind that was in continuous productive activity for five decades. It is a treasure, and it is also, like all archives, a fragment, a selection of what was preserved from the vast quantity of what was lived, thought, felt, and lost.

The archive tells us what Arendt wrote. It tells us, through her correspondence, what she said to the people she trusted. It does not tell us what she thought in the silences between the letters, what she felt in the moments that did not generate documents, what the inside of her mind was like when she was not performing for an audience. No archive can tell us that. The biographer works with what survives, acknowledges what does not, and constructs, from the available evidence, an account that is as honest as the limitations of the evidence allow.

What the evidence from Arendt's childhood establishes with reasonable certainty is this: she was a child of exceptional intelligence, raised by a mother of exceptional determination, in a city of exceptional philosophical heritage, at a time of exceptional danger. Each of these facts shaped the person she became. None of them, taken individually, explains her. Taken together, they constitute the ground from which her life grew, the soil, the climate, the conditions of possibility. What she made of those conditions was her own achievement, and it was an achievement that the conditions alone could not have predicted.

She was a girl from Hanover who grew up in Königsberg and went to Marburg. She became the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century. The distance between those two facts is the subject of this book.