By writing a biography of Rahel Varnhagen, a Jewish salon hostess in Berlin in the early 1800s, Arendt sought to understand how her subject’s conversion to Christianity and repudiation of Jewishness illuminated the conflict between minority status and German nationalism. However, the rising antisemitism afflicting the German polity distracted her from metaphysics and compelled her to face the historical dilemma of German Jews. That year, she also completed her dissertation on the idea of love in the thought of St. In September 1929, Arendt married Günther Stern, who wrote under the name of Günther Anders. A psychiatrist who had converted to philosophy, he became her mentor. Her brief but passionate affair with Heidegger, a married man and a father, began in 1925 but ended when she went on to study at the University of Heidelberg with Karl Jaspers. Also on the faculty was the young philosopher Martin Heidegger, whose lectures, which would form the basis of Sein und Zeit (1927), were already inspiring allegiance to and interest in the emerging Existenzphilosophie. Her mother married Martin Beerwald in 1920, providing Hannah with two older stepsisters, Eva and Clara Beerwald.Īfter graduating from high school in Königsberg in 1924, Arendt began to study theology that fall with Rudolf Bultmann at the University of Marburg.
Her father, an engineer, died of paresis (syphilitic insanity) when Hannah was seven, and episodic battles between Russian and German armies were fought near their home soon thereafter. Arendt’s childhood was punctuated with grief and terror. Raised in Königsberg, she was the only child of Paul and Martha (Cohn) Arendt, both of whom had grown up in Russian-Jewish homes headed by entrepreneurs.
Hannah Arendt was born on October 14, 1906, in Hanover, in Wilhelmine Germany.
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