Denktagebuch hannah arendt biography

Inafter having completed her high school studies, she went to Marburg University to study with Martin Heidegger. The encounter with Heidegger, with whom she had a brief but intense love-affair, had a lasting influence on her thought. After a year of study in Marburg, she moved to Freiburg University where she spent one semester attending the lectures of Edmund Husserl.

In the spring of she went to Heidelberg University to study with Karl Jaspers, a philosopher with whom she established a long-lasting intellectual and personal friendship. She completed her doctoral dissertation, entitled Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin LA under Jaspers's supervision in The poem is about memory, the past, and the question of whether to recall the past or to live in the present.

One of the poem's central images is of the burden of logs that one carries on one's shoulders. Shortly after Arendt receives Heidegger's letter, she begins her Denktagebuchwith the opening line:. That Arendt would initiate her book of thoughts with a meditation on the burden of past wrongs is not surprising. After all, she had recently finished the manuscript for The Origins of Totalitarianism —originally entitled The Burden of Our Times —which explored not simply the elements of totalitarianism, but more importantly the burden that such a past, a recent past, places on people in the present day: to comprehend and come to terms with what men had done as well as to acknowledge what any of us is capable of doing again.

And, of course, she had just returned from a reunion with her past in Germany and Heidegger. The past is this burden that we bear on our shoulders, and Arendt begins her Denktagebuch with a reflection that is at once personal and yet also deeply abstract and universal. The question of how to respond to the burden of wrongful deeds is woven through Arendt's writing.

What is fascinating is that in the first pages of the Denktagebuch and then throughout the 1, pages, Arendt continues to think about the response to wrongs as a kind of reconciliation. This is surprising because reconciliation is not an idea prevalent in much of Arendt's published work. In an article published last year, I explore the meaning and sense of reconciliation in Arendt's thinking.

In it, I argue. Above all, I argue that the question—"Ought I to reconcile myself to the world?

Denktagebuch hannah arendt biography

The quote above comes from a section that is unique even within this context of the varied forms of the Denktagebuch. The full entry has two columns of text side by side comprised of key terms, punctuation, and additional operator markings such as arrows and equal signs. In their spatial division, order of terms, and employment of symbols, these two columns offer a compelling challenge to readers of Arendt who seek to discover specific insights of the Thought Diary that may go beyond those of the her published work.

It might just be a blip in her run of thought, a speed bump, so to speak. Up to her death in Decemberher work returned many times to the fundamental issues of personal responsibility for political activities in totalitarian states, before the backdrop of her experience of the Nazi dictatorship and exile. Hannah Arendt October 14, - December 04,