Hannah Arendt was born on October 14, 1906 near Hannover in the German Empire. When she was a child, the family moved to Königsberg in East Prussia, now Kaliningrad, in Russia.
Joe Humphreys wrote an interesting piece on her in The Irish Times yesterday.
It was Arendt who coined the phrase the “banality of evil” when she was overing the trial of Adolf Eichmann.
But she was also concerned with everyday human activities and believed “unthinking” to be a factor in general unhappiness and alienation in society.
Samantha Rose Hill writes: "In 1933, after the burning of the Reichstag, Arendt broke with the so-called ‘professional thinkers’. She left the world of academic philosophy, because she was horrified watching friends, colleagues and professors going along with the Nazification of German social, cultural, political and educational institutions.
“The people who spent their whole lives thinking about the good, about morality and ethics, were no better equipped to deal with the rise of fascism than anybody else.
“In her essay on Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship she doesn’t mince her words. She says, the difference between those who went along and those who resisted was that those who resisted chose to think. That is, they realised they wouldn’t be able to live with themselves if they did nothing.
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