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The Week in Germany: Culture

October 13, 2006

Hannah Arendt’s Political Theories Resonate 100 Years after her Birth

Hannah Arendt in 1963, Photo: dpa

Scholars across the world are contemplating the political theorist Hannah Arendt’s legacy at conferences to be held on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of her birth on October 14, 2006. Arendt, a Jew who escaped Nazi Germany during World War II, was one of the 20th century’s most influential thinkers on the nature totalitarianism.

Arendt’s theories are gaining currency once again as the world struggles to come to grips with Islamic radicalism and protecting personal liberties while addressing the threat of terrorism. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the term has returned to public discourse with politicians like George Bush and Joschka Fischer and public intellectuals like Salman Rushdie and Bernard-Henri Levy making reference to Islamic radicalism as a new form of totalitarianism.

The conferences to be held in Berlin, Munich, New York, Melbourne, and Paris until the end of this year will revisit Arendt’s work to examine how her theories may apply to today’s world.

Arendt, a student of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers before she escaped to the United States, saw totalitarianism as a phenomenon of the 20th century that went beyond previous categories like despotism or dictatorship to completely control all aspects of culture and social life. The controversial thesis at the center of her 1951 book “The Origins of Totalitarianism” identified both Nazi Germany and Stalin’s Soviet Union as essentially similar in their imperialist roots and the way in which they collapsed the boundaries between arbitrary and legitimate power.

Arendt also reported on the trial of the Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem in the early 1960’s for the New Yorker. Arendt portrayed how the mild-mannered Eichmann, who was responsible for the mass deportation and murder of European Jews in his administrative position with the SS, embodied the “banality of evil” in a totalitarian regime.

At a conference at Bard College later this month, where Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher are buried, and which now administers Arendt’s personal library, the journalists Christopher Hitchens will give a keynote address on anti-Semitism. At a conference in Berlin in November, former German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer will discuss “Global domination and the international order of peace” in a panel.

Links:

Article in The New York Times

Article in Forward, The Jewish Daily

Article in The New York Sun

Information Hannah Arendt Conferences Worldwide

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