Hannah Arendt
- Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany in 1906.
- Studied philosophy at the University of Marburg with Martin Heidegger
- Had an affair with Heidegger.
- Worked for the organization Youth Aliyah, which rescued Jewish youth.
- Had a second husband named Heinrich Blücher.
- She was imprisoned.
- She and Blücher fled Nazi Europe and went to New York, in 1941.
- She and Blücher lived on Riverside Drive in NYC and in Kingston, NY near Bard College where Blücher taught for 17 years.
https://hac.bard.edu/about/hannaharendt/
“Banality of Evil” in Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism
- Arendt – a sobering reflection on “the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us — the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.”
- She thought the essence of totalitarianism was to make functionaries and mere cogs in the administrative machinery out of men
- Some accused her of suggesting that the atrocity of the Holocaust had been commonplace, which of course was the very opposite of her point
- Arendt argued that Eichmann, far from being a “monster,” as the Israeli prosecutor insisted, was nothing more than a thoughtless bureaucrat, passionate in his desire to please his superiors\
- Arendt’s book was criticized by the Jewish community
http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/essays/note-banality-evil
Adolf Eichmann
- He was a German high official who was hanged by the State of Israel for his part in the Holocaust, the Nazi extermination of Jews during World War II
- he became a member of Heinrich Himmler’s SS, the Nazi paramilitary corps
- He was the coordinator of the “final solution” which was mass extinction
- He was captured and was put under trial about his acts. And claimed to not be anti-Semite.
- Eichmann portrayed himself as an obedient bureaucrat who merely carried out his assigned duties