photo #9389705

German-American political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt in 1933. She was a leading 20th Century intellectual who wrote extensively on power, totalitarianism and the banality of evil... Hannah Arendt escaped Nazi Germany, survived statelessness, and then wrote one phrase that made people furious with her for the rest of her life. Born into a German Jewish family in 1906, Arendt studied philosophy under some of Europe’s greatest thinkers. Then Hitler came to power. In 1933, the Gestapo arrested her while she was gathering evidence of antisemitic propaganda. She was released, fled Germany, eventually reached Paris, and worked helping Jewish refugees. When Germany invaded France, the French government interned her as an “enemy alien.” She escaped again. In 1941, Arendt reached the United States. For years she had been effectively stateless. She became an American citizen in 1951 and emerged as one of the twentieth century’s most formidable political thinkers. Then came Adolf Eichmann. Arendt traveled to Jerusalem in 1961 to report on the trial of the Nazi official who had helped organize the deportation of European Jews to ghettos and extermination camps. She expected a monster. Instead, she saw something she found more disturbing: a bureaucrat speaking in clichés, insisting he had followed orders and presenting himself as a functionary rather than a murderer. Arendt called it “the banality of evil.” She did not mean the Holocaust was banal, harmless or ordinary. Her argument was that enormous evil could be committed by people who surrendered moral judgment and treated atrocity as administrative work. But her reporting went further. Her discussion of the behavior of some Jewish councils under Nazi rule provoked outrage. Friends broke with her. Critics accused her of arrogance, insensitivity and blaming victims. Arguments over what she got right and wrong continue today. That controversy has never disappeared because neither has her question. Hannah Arendt died in 1975. The argument she started is still very much alive. #archaeohistories