Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher who escaped Hitler's Germany and later scrutinized its morality in “Eichmaim in Jerusalem” and other books, died Thursday night in her apartment at 370 Riverside Drive. She was 69 years old.
Dr. Arendt collapsed, apparently of a heart attack, while entertaining friends. A physician who was called pronounced her dead. At her death Dr. Arendt was University Professor of Political Philosophy at the New School.
“Hannah Arendt was a strong voice for sanity and reason in the world's intellectual community, devoted not only to writing but to teaching,” Dr. John R. Everett, president of the New School, said yesterday. “She loved students, and she worked with them in a way few great scholars are able to do without being tyrannical or overbearing.”
At the same time Dr. Arendt was working on a major three‐volume work, “The Life of the Mind.”
Her publisher, William Jovanovich, president of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, said she had completed the first volume, “Thinking,” was on the third draft of the second, “Willing,” arid had completed the first draft and some additional notes for the third, “Judging.”
“She was absolutely fearless intellectually,” Mr. Jovanovich said. “I would say, and this may sound sexist, that she is the outstanding woman thinker of our time, one of the 10 or 12 seminal thinkers of our time.”
Edited Current Work
Mr. Jovanovich said he worked with Dr. Arendt on editing the current work. “We Usually sat opposite each other in a Socratic way, me asking questions and she responding,” he said. “She was never pedantic.”
Dr. Arendt was the author of at least eight major books in addition to the last work. Her reputation as a writer and scholar became firmly estabished with the publication of “The Origins of Totalitariansm” in 1951.
That work analyzed the two ajor forms of 20th‐century totalitarianism — Nazism and Communism—and Dr. Arendt linked their origins to the antiSemitism and imperialism of the 19th‐century. It was widely acclaimed, and even some of those who disagreed with the thesis praised the professional quality of the work.
A reviewer in The New York Times suggested that the book was “written throughout under the stress of deep emotion” and was the “work of one who has thought as well as suffered.”
Dr. Hans Jonas, a professor at the New School whose friendship with Dr. Arendt dates to 50 years ago in Germany, described her yesterday as a “truly exceptional person, not only intellectually but in the intensity of her commitment. There was a supreme relevance of what she had to say. Whether you thought her right or wrong, what she had to say was invariably important.”
Controversial Book
Dr. Arendt stirred the most controversy with the publication in 1963 of “Eichmann in Jerusalem, a Report on the Banality of Evil,” which grew out of her coverage for The New Yorker of the trial of Adolf Eichmann for his role in the “final solution of the Jewish problem” in the Hitler era.
Eichmann was hanged after the trial, but Dr. Arendt wrote that it was simplistic to pin all the guilt on him. She said that others were responsible as well —other Germans, other Western countries and even the Jews, who had assented actively or passively to the growing evil.
Dr. Arendt said she was trying to make a calm analysis of the situation, to get beyond the histrionics. The book drew criticism from those who wanted to focus on Eichmann, the man, as a principal creator of the horror. Dr. Arendt said that this was giving him a power beyond his capacity.
At the Boston Bicentennial Forum this year, Dr. Arendt warned against trying to avoid unpleasant facts. The totalitarian governments dug, she said, “giant holes in which to bury unwelcome facts and events, a gigantic enterprise which could be achieved only by killing people who had been the actors or witnesses of the past.”
Her conclusion in that paper presented in Boston was: “When the facts come home to roost, let us try at least to make them welcome, let us not try to escape into some utopias—images, theories, or sheer follies. It was the greatness of this Republic to give due account to the best and the worst in man, all for the sake of Freedom.”
Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, on Oct. 14, 1906, the only child of her Jewish parents, Paul Arendt, an engineer, and his wife, Martha Cohn Arendt. Although in later life she worked in Jewish cultural activities she professed no religious affiliation.
After completing her undergraduate work she went on to the University of Heidelberg where she majored in philosophy under Karl Jaspers and received her doctorate there at the ape of 22.
With Hitler's ascent to power In 1933, Dr. Arendt left Germany for Paris. There she studied and wrote and did social work for the French branch of Youth Aliyah, a relief agency that placed Jewish orphan children in Palestine.
In 1940, with the Nazis pressing in on France, Dr. Arendt fled to the United States. Here she served as research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations and then as chief editor of Schocker Books, where she was responsible for the publication of such classics as the Max Brod edition of the Franz Kafka diaries.
Out of her work with the Conference on Jewish Relations there grew an association in the postwar period with an organization called Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, of which she became executive secretary. It succeeded in recapturing and redistributing much of the cultural property looted by the Nazis from the Jews of Europe.
Before leaving Europe, Dr. Arendt was married to Heinrich Bluecber, who became an art historian at Bard College, He died several years ago.
Despite her scholarship credentials, Dr. Arendt was unable in her early years in this country to find an academic position. Then in 1952, she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. The next year she was invited to deliver the Christian Gauss lectures at Princeton University, beginning a teaching career that included service on the faculties of the University of California at Berkeley, the University of Chicago, Columbia, Northwestern, Cornell and other universities before joining the New School.
While at the University of Chicago, Dr. Arendt delivered a series of lectures that were later published in a book called “The Human Condition.” Brand Blanshard, writing in The Times, called it a work “of intense and brooding reflection.”
Mary McCarthy, in The New Yorker, said “the combination of tremendous intellectual power with great common sense makes Miss Arendt's insights into history and politics seem both amazing and obvious.”
In the spring semester of 1959, Dr. Arendt returned to Princeton as visiting professor of politics, the only woman to hold the rank of full professor at that institution.
“I am not at all disturbed about being a woman professor, Dr. Arendt told an interviewer at the time, “because I am quite used to being a woman.”
A longtime friend, Dr. Lotte Kohler, professor of German at City College, described Dr. Arendt yesterday as “a most inspiring teacher. She had so much intellectual courage, so much human warmth. When she was teaching, she somehow changed, becoming more alive, more spiritual — that may not be the word—but you couldn't think of anything following her.”
Another of Dr. Arendt's major works was “On Revolution” published in 1963.
“It is Hannah Arendt's special talent,” Harrison E. Salisbury said, reviewing it for The Times, “that she has applied her wonderfully imaginative, deeply philosophical mind to an examination of what revolution really is; what produces it, what really happens in the maelstrom which so often resembles the hurricane's eye and why almost invariably, the end result differs so completely from the aspiration and desires of the participants.”
With her increasing fame, Dr. Arendt received many honorary degrees from American universities including Princeton, Dartmouth, Smith, Notre Dame, Yale and the New School.
This year she became the first woman and the first United States citizen (she was naturalized in 1951) to be awarded Denmark's Sonning Prize for contributions to European civilization. Other winners of the prize have, been Winston Churchill, Albert Schweitzer, Bertrand Russell, Niels Bohr, Laurence Olivier and Arthur Koestler.
Although Dr. Arendt achieved wide fame, “she curiously enough was a very shy woman,” Mr. Jovanovich, her publisher recalled yesterday. “She worried and fretted and agonized over having to meet strangers. Then within minutes after meeting someone, she would be enjoying herself immensely.”
“After all these years, she was unsure of herself,” Mr. Jovanovich said. “She worried if a speech was right. She worried about her English and would ask people to go over her manuscripts and ‘English’ them.”
She wanted ideas to have free flight and was happy when people borrowed from her.
“Once when I wrote a paper I borrowed some of Hannah's ideas and later confessed that I had stolen something from her,” Mr. Jovanovich said. “She replied: “Isn't that marvelous! That's what it's for.”
Dr. Arendt had suffered from heart trouble. Last year she collapsed with a heart attack while delivering the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen; Scotland.
Dr. Arendt leaves no survivors. A funeral service will be held Monday at 11:30 A.M., in the Riverside Memorial Chapel, Amsterdam Avenue and West 76th Street.
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