title: Groucho Marx

text: Marx did paint the old character mustache over his real one on a few rare occasions, including a TV sketch with Jackie Gleason on the latter's variety show in the 1960s (in which they performed a variation on the song "Mister Gallagher and Mister Shean," co-written by Marx's uncle Al Shean) and the 1968 Otto Preminger film "Skidoo". In his late 70s at the time, Marx remarked on his appearance: "I looked like I was embalmed." He played a mob boss called "God" and, according to Marx, "both my performance and the film were God-awful!"


title: Groucho Marx

text: The exaggerated walk, with one hand on the small of his back and his torso bent almost 90 degrees at the waist, was a parody of a fad from the 1880s and 1890s. Fashionable young men of the upper classes would affect a walk with their right hand held fast to the base of their spines, and with a slight lean forward at the waist and a very slight twist toward the right with the left shoulder, allowing the left hand to swing free with the gait. Edmund Morris, in his biography "The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt", describes a young Roosevelt, newly elected to the State Assembly, walking into the House Chamber for the first time in this trendy, affected gait, somewhat to the amusement of the older and more rural members. Marx exaggerated this fad to a marked degree, and the comedic effect was enhanced by how out of date the fashion was by the 1940s and 1950s.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Marx's three marriages ended in divorce. His first wife was chorus girl Ruth Johnson (m. 1920–1942). He was 29 and she was 19 at the time of their wedding. The couple had two children, Arthur Marx and Miriam Marx. His second wife was Kay Marvis (m. 1945–1951), Catherine Dittig, former wife of Leo Gorcey. Marx was 54 and Kay was 21 at the time of their marriage. They had a daughter, Melinda Marx. His third wife was actress Eden Hartford (m. 1954–1969). He was 64 and she was 24 at the time of their wedding.


title: Groucho Marx

text: During the early 1950s, Marx described his perfect woman: "Someone who looks like Marilyn Monroe and talks like George S. Kaufman."


title: Groucho Marx

text: Marx was denied membership in an informal symphonietta of friends (including Harpo) organized by Ben Hecht, because he could play only the mandolin. When the group began its first rehearsal at Hecht's home, Marx rushed in and demanded silence from the "lousy amateurs". The musicians discovered him conducting the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra in a performance of the overture to "Tannhäuser" in Hecht's living room. Marx was allowed to join the symphonietta.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Later in life, Marx would sometimes note to talk show hosts, not entirely jokingly, that he was unable to actually insult anyone, because the target of his comment would assume that it was a Groucho-esque joke, and would laugh.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Despite his lack of formal education, he wrote many books, including his autobiography, "Groucho and Me" (1959) and "Memoirs of a Mangy Lover" (1963). He was a friend of such literary figures as Booth Tarkington, T. S. Eliot and Carl Sandburg. Much of his personal correspondence with those and other figures is featured in the book "The Groucho Letters" (1967) with an introduction and commentary on the letters written by Marx, who donated his letters to the Library of Congress. His daughter Miriam published a collection of his letters to her in 1992 titled "Love, Groucho."


title: Groucho Marx

text: In "My Life with Groucho: A Son's Eye View", Arthur Marx relates that in his latter years Groucho increasingly referred to himself by the name Hackenbush, referring to the character of that name he played in A Day at the Races (film).


title: Groucho Marx

text: Marx made serious efforts to learn to play the guitar. In the 1932 film "Horse Feathers", he performs the film's love theme "Everyone Says I Love You" for costar Thelma Todd on a Gibson L-5.


title: Groucho Marx

text: In July 1937, an America vs England pro-celebrity tennis doubles match was organized, featuring Marx and Ellsworth Vines playing against Charlie Chaplin and Fred Perry, to open the new clubhouse at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club. Marx appeared on court with 12 rackets and a suitcase, leaving Chaplin – who took tennis seriously – bemused, before he asked what was in it. Marx asked Chaplin what was in his, with Chaplin responding he didn't have one. Marx replied, "What kind of tennis player are you?" After playing only a few games, Marx sat on the court and unpacked an elaborate picnic lunch from his suitcase.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Irving Berlin quipped, "The world would not be in such a snarl, had Marx been Groucho instead of Karl". In his book "The Groucho Phile", Marx says "I've been a liberal Democrat all my life", and "I frankly find Democrats a better, more sympathetic crowd... I'll continue to believe that Democrats have a greater regard for the common man than Republicans do". However, during an episode of "Firing Line" on July 7, 1967, Marx admitted to voting for Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate for president in 1940 over Franklin D. Roosevelt, stating that he did not believe that any man should run for more than two terms. Marx also said in a television interview that he disliked the women's liberation movement.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Marx's radio career was not as successful as his work on stage and in film, though historians such as Gerald Nachman and Michael Barson suggest that, in the case of the single-season "Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel" (1932), the failure may have been a combination of a poor time slot and the Marx Brothers' returning to Hollywood to make another film.


title: Groucho Marx

text: In the mid-1940s, he weathered a depressing lull in his career. His radio show "Blue Ribbon Town" had failed, and he was unable to sell his proposed sitcom "The Flotsam Family" only to see it become a huge hit as "The Life of Riley" with William Bendix in the title role. By that time, the Marx Brothers as film performers had officially retired.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Marx was scheduled to appear on a radio show with Bob Hope. Annoyed that he was made to wait in the green room for 40 minutes, he went on the air in a foul mood. Hope started by saying "Why, Groucho Marx! Groucho, what are you doing out here in the desert?" Marx retorted, "Huh, desert, I've been sitting in the dressing room for forty minutes! Some desert alright ...". Marx continued to ignore the script, ad-libbing at length, and took it well beyond its allotted time slot.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Listening in on the show was producer John Guedel, who had a brainstorm. He approached Marx about doing a quiz show, to which Marx derisively retorted, "A quiz show? Only actors who are completely washed up resort to a quiz show!" Undeterred, Guedel proposed that the quiz would be only a backdrop for Marx's interviews of people, and the storm of ad-libbing that they would elicit. Marx replied, "Well, I've had no success in radio, and I can't hold on to a sponsor. At this point, I'll try anything!"


title: Groucho Marx

text: "You Bet Your Life" debuted in October 1947 on ABC radio (which aired it from 1947 to 1949), sponsored by costume jewelry manufacturer Allen Gellman; and then on CBS (1949–50), and finally NBC. The show was on radio only from 1947 to 1950; on both radio and television from 1950 to 1960; and on television only, from 1960 to 1961. The show proved a huge hit, being one of the most popular on television by the mid-1950s. With George Fenneman as his announcer and straight man, Marx entertained his audiences with improvised conversation with his guests. Since "You Bet Your Life" was mostly ad-libbed and unscripted — although writers did pre-interview the guests and feed Marx ready-made lines in advance — the producers insisted that the network prerecord it instead of it being broadcast live. There were three reasons for this: prerecording provided Marx with time to fish around for funny exchanges, any intervening dead spots could be edited out; and most importantly to protect the network, since Marx was a notorious loose cannon and known to say almost anything. The television show ran for 11 seasons until it was canceled in 1961. Automobile "marque" DeSoto was a longtime major sponsor. For the DeSoto ads, Marx would sometimes say: "Tell 'em Groucho sent you", or "Try a DeSoto before you decide." In the mid-1970s, episodes of the show were syndicated and rebroadcast as "The Best of Groucho".


title: Groucho Marx

text: The program's theme music was an instrumental version of "Hooray for Captain Spaulding," which became increasingly identified as Marx's personal theme song. A recording of the song with Marx and the Ken Lane singers with an orchestra directed by Victor Young was released in 1952. Another recording made by Marx during this period was "The Funniest Song in the World," released on the Young People's Records label in 1949. It was a series of five original children's songs with a connecting narrative about a monkey and his fellow zoo creatures.


title: Groucho Marx

text: One of Marx's most oft-quoted remarks may have occurred during a 1947 radio episode. Marx was interviewing Charlotte Story, who had borne 20 children. When Marx asked why she had chosen to raise such a large family, Mrs. Story is said to have replied, "I love my husband," to which Marx responded, "I love my cigar, but I take it out of my mouth once in a while." The remark was judged too risqué to be aired, according to the anecdote, and was edited out before broadcast. Charlotte Story and her husband Marion, indeed parents of 20 children, were real people who appeared on the program. Audio recordings of the interview exist, and a reference to cigars is made ("With each new kid, do you go around passing out cigars?"), but there is no evidence of the claimed remark. "I get credit all the time for things I never said," Marx told Roger Ebert in 1972. "You know that line in "You Bet Your Life"? The guy says he has seventeen kids and I say, 'I smoke a cigar, but I take it out of my mouth occasionally'? I never said that." Marx's 1976 memoir recounts the episode as fact, but co-writer Hector Arce relied mostly on sources other than Marx himself—who was by then in his mid eighties, in ill health and mentally compromised—and was probably unaware that Marx had specifically denied making the observation. Head writer Bernie Smith recalled in a 1996 interview that the remark was indeed made—but again, well after the fact.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Another anecdote that may or may not be apocryphal recounts how Warner Brothers threatened to sue Groucho when they learned that the next Marx Brothers film was to be called "A Night in Casablanca," contending that that title was too similar to their own film "Casablanca." Groucho is reported to have replied, "What about 'Warner Brothers'? Do you own that too? Professionally, we were 'Brothers' long before you were 'Brothers'. We forbid you ever to use the word 'Brothers' again."


title: Groucho Marx

text: By the time "You Bet Your Life" debuted on TV on October 5, 1950, Marx had grown a real mustache (which he had already sported earlier in the films "Copacabana" and "Love Happy").


title: Groucho Marx

text: During a tour of Germany in 1958, accompanied by then-wife Eden, daughter Melinda, Robert Dwan and Dwan's daughter Judith, he climbed a pile of rubble that marked the site of Adolf Hitler's bunker, the site of Hitler's death, and performed a two-minute Charleston. He later remarked to Richard J. Anobile in "The Marx Brothers Scrapbook," "Not much satisfaction after he killed six million Jews!"


title: Groucho Marx

text: In 1960, Marx, a lifelong devotee of the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, appeared as Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, in a televised production of "The Mikado" on NBC's "Bell Telephone Hour". A clip of this is in rotation on Classic Arts Showcase.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Another TV show, "Tell It to Groucho", premiered January 11, 1962, on CBS, but only lasted five months. On October 1, 1962, Marx, after acting as occasional guest host of "The Tonight Show" during the six-month interval between Jack Paar and Johnny Carson, introduced Carson as the new host.


title: Groucho Marx

text: In 1964, Marx starred in the "Time for Elizabeth" episode of "Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theatre", a truncated version of a play that he and Norman Krasna wrote in 1948.


title: Groucho Marx

text: In 1965, Marx starred in a weekly show for British TV titled "Groucho", broadcast on ITV. The program was along similar lines to "You Bet Your Life", with Keith Fordyce taking on the Fenneman role. However, it was poorly received and lasted only 11 weeks.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Marx appeared as a gangster named God in the comedy movie "Skidoo" (1968), directed by Otto Preminger, and starring Jackie Gleason and Carol Channing. It was released by the studio where the Marx Brothers began their film career, Paramount Pictures. The film received almost universally negative reviews. Writer Paul Krassner published a story in the February 1981 issue of "High Times", relating how Marx prepared for the LSD-themed movie by taking a dose of the drug in Krassner's company, and had a moving, largely pleasant experience.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Marx developed friendships with rock star Alice Cooper—the two were photographed together for "Rolling Stone" magazine—and television host Dick Cavett, becoming a frequent guest on Cavett's late-night talk show, even appearing in a one-man, 90-minute interview. He befriended Elton John when the British singer was staying in California in 1972, insisting on calling him "John Elton". According to writer Philip Norman, when Marx jokingly pointed his index fingers as if holding a pair of six-shooters, Elton John put up his hands and said, "Don't shoot me, I'm only the piano player," thereby naming the album he had just completed. A film poster for the Marx Bros. movie "Go West" is visible on the album cover photograph as an homage to Marx. Elton John accompanied Marx to a performance of "Jesus Christ Superstar". As the lights went down, Marx called out, "Does it have a happy ending?" And during the Crucifixion scene, he declared, "This is sure to offend the Jews."


title: Groucho Marx

text: Marx's previous work regained popularity; new books of transcribed conversations were published by Richard J. Anobile and Charlotte Chandler. In a BBC interview in 1975, Marx called his greatest achievement having a book selected for cultural preservation in the Library of Congress. In a Cavett interview in 1971, Marx said being published in "The New Yorker" under his own name, Julius Henry Marx, meant more than all the plays he appeared in. As a man who never had formal schooling, to have his writings declared culturally important was a point of great satisfaction.


title: Groucho Marx

text: As he passed his 81st birthday in 1971, Marx became increasingly frail, physically and mentally, as a result of a succession of minor strokes and other health issues. In 1972, largely at the behest of his companion Erin Fleming, Marx staged a live one-man show at Carnegie Hall that was later released as a double album, "An Evening with Groucho", on A&M Records. He also made an appearance in 1973 on a short-lived variety show hosted by Bill Cosby. Fleming's influence on Marx was controversial. Some close to Marx believed that she did much to revive his popularity, and the relationship with a younger woman boosted his ego and vitality. Others described her as a Svengali, exploiting an increasingly senile Marx in pursuit of her own stardom. Marx's children, particularly Arthur, felt strongly that Fleming was pushing their weak father beyond his physical and mental limits. Writer Mark Evanier concurred.


title: Groucho Marx

text: On the 1974 Academy Awards telecast which was Groucho Marx's final major public appearance, Jack Lemmon presented him with an honorary Academy Award to a standing ovation. The award honored Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo as well: "in recognition of his brilliant creativity and for the unequalled achievements of the Marx Brothers in the art of motion picture comedy". Noticeably frail, Marx took a bow for his deceased brothers. "I wish that Harpo and Chico could be here to share with me this great honor," he said, naming his two deceased brothers (Zeppo, still alive, was in the audience). He also praised the late Margaret Dumont as a great straight woman who never understood any of his jokes. Marx's final appearance was a brief sketch with George Burns in the Bob Hope television special "Joys" (a parody of the 1975 movie "Jaws") in March 1976. His health continued to decline the following year; when his younger brother Gummo died at age 83 on April 21, 1977, Marx was never told for fear of eliciting still further deterioration of his health.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Marx maintained his irrepressible sense of humor to the very end, however. George Fenneman, his radio and TV announcer, good-natured foil, and lifelong friend, often related a story of one of his final visits to Marx's home: When the time came to end the visit, Fenneman lifted Marx from his wheelchair, put his arms around his torso, and began to "walk" the frail comedian backwards across the room towards his bed. As he did, he heard a weak voice in his ear: "Fenneman," whispered Marx, "you always were a lousy dancer." When a nurse approached him with a thermometer during his final hospitalization, explaining that she wanted to see if he had a temperature, he responded, "Don't be silly—everybody has a temperature." Actor Elliott Gould recalled a similar incident: "I recall the last time I saw Groucho, he was in the hospital, and he had tubes in his nose and what have you," he said. "And when he saw me, he was weak, but he was there; and he put his fingers on the tubes and played them like it was a clarinet. Groucho played the tubes for me, which brings me to tears."


title: Groucho Marx

text: Marx was hospitalized at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center with pneumonia on June 22, 1977, and died there nearly two months later at the age of 86 on August 19, four months after Gummo's death. Media coverage of Groucho's death and legacy was overshadowed by the sudden death of Elvis Presley three days previously.


title: Groucho Marx

text: His body was cremated and the ashes are interred in the Eden Memorial Park Cemetery in Los Angeles. He was survived by his three children and younger brother Zeppo, who outlived him by two years. His gravestone bears no epitaph, but in one of his last interviews he suggested one: "Excuse me, I can't stand up."


title: Groucho Marx

text: Litigation over his estate lasted into the 1980s. Eventually, his three children were awarded the bulk of the estate, and Erin Fleming, his companion during his final years, was ordered to repay $472,000.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Groucho Marx was considered the most recognizable of the Marx Brothers. Groucho-like characters and references have appeared in popular culture both during and after his life, some aimed at audiences who may never have seen a Marx Brothers movie. Marx's trademark eyeglasses, nose, mustache, and cigar have become icons of comedy—glasses with fake noses and mustaches (referred to as "Groucho glasses", "nose-glasses," and other names) are sold by novelty and costume shops around the world.


title: Groucho Marx

text: The cover of The Firesign Theatre's 1969 album, "How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You're Not Anywhere at All", subtitled "All Hail Marx and Lennon", features images of Groucho Marx and John Lennon.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Nat Perrin, close friend of Groucho Marx and writer of several Marx Brothers films, inspired John Astin's portrayal of Gomez Addams on the 1960s TV series "The Addams Family" with similarly thick mustache, eyebrows, sardonic remarks, backward logic, and ever-present cigar (pulled from his breast pocket already lit).


title: Groucho Marx

text: "Minnie's Boys", a 1970 Broadway musical, focused on the younger years of Marx (played by Lewis J. Stadlen), his brothers, and his mother (played by Shelley Winters). Marx received credit as the show's advisor and appeared on "The Dick Cavett Show" to promote the production.


title: Groucho Marx

text: In 1972, at Cannes, Marx was made a Commander in the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, an honour he was very proud of. In a TV episode of MASH titled: "Yankee Doodle Doctor" Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda) portrays Marx in a parody movie along with Trapper John (Wayne Rogers) portraying Harpo Marx.


title: Groucho Marx

text: A meeting with Elton John led to a press photo of Marx pointing both of his index fingers and thumbs at Elton like revolvers. John's spontaneous response of holding up his hands and replying, "Don't shoot me! I'm only the piano player!" was so amusing that Elton John reused it as the title of a 1973 album. An added Marx homage was that a poster for the Marx Brothers' movie "Go West" was included on the cover art.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Marx was also known to influence the Warner Bros. cartoon character Bugs Bunny, who would recite his famous line "Of course you realize this means war!" in two of his cartoons in the "Looney Tunes" series, "Long Haired Hare" and "Bully for Bugs", when his antagonist has offended him.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Two albums by British rock band Queen, "A Night at the Opera" (1975) and "A Day at the Races" (1976), are named after Marx Brothers films. In March 1977, Marx invited Queen to visit him in his Los Angeles home; there they performed "'39" a cappella.


title: Groucho Marx

text: A long-running ad campaign for Vlasic Pickles features an animated stork that imitates Marx's mannerisms and voice. On the famous Hollywood Sign in California, one of the "O"s is dedicated to Marx. Alice Cooper contributed over $27,000 to remodel the sign, in memory of his friend.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Actor Frank Ferrante has performed as Groucho Marx on stage since 1986. He continues to tour under rights granted by the Marx family in a show entitled "An Evening with Groucho" in theaters throughout the United States and Canada with supporting actors and piano accompanist Jim Furmston. In the late 1980s, Ferrante starred as Marx in the off-Broadway and London show "" penned by Marx's son Arthur. Ferrante portrayed the comedian from age 15 to 85. The show was later filmed for PBS in 2001. In 1982, Gabe Kaplan filmed a version of the same show, entitled "Groucho".


title: Groucho Marx

text: In the Hungarian dubbed version of Woody Allen's film "Annie Hall", a famous quotation told by Alvy Singer (Allen) at the beginning of the film is not attributed to Groucho Marx as in the original, but to Buster Keaton. The reason was that in communist Hungary, the name 'Marx' was associated with Karl Marx and it was not allowed to use it in such a light, humorous context.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Woody Allen's 1996 musical "Everyone Says I Love You", in addition to being named for one of Marx's signature songs, ends with a Groucho-themed New Year's Eve party in Paris, which some of the stars, including Allen and Goldie Hawn, attend in full Groucho costume. The highlight of the scene is an ensemble song-and-dance performance of "Hooray for Captain Spaulding"—done entirely in French.


title: Groucho Marx

text: In 2008, "Minnie's Boys" was remounted Off-Broadway with Erik Liberman as Groucho and Pamela Myers as Minnie Marx. Liberman later played Marx in a musical based on "Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel" called "The Most Ridiculous Thing You Ever Hoid" (2010) and at the Obama White House.


title: Groucho Marx

text: Groucho, a supporting character in the Italian horror comics series "Dylan Dog", is a Groucho Marx impersonator whose character became his permanent personality, and he works with Dylan Dog as his professional sidekick. In the English-language version, to avoid legal complications regarding Groucho Marx's estate, the art was altered so that Groucho no longer sports the Marx brother's signature moustache, and was renamed "Felix".


title: Groucho Marx

text: In the M*A*S*H television series several Groucho homage traits are mirrored in Alan Alda’s portrayal of Hawkeye, including in one episode a Groucho impression complete with nose, moustache and glasses.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: Arvind Kejriwal (Hindi: ]; born 16 August 1968) is an Indian politician, former bureaucrat, and activist who is the 7th and current Chief Minister of Delhi since February 2015. Currently, he is the national convener of the Aam Aadmi Party, which won the 2015 Delhi Assembly elections with a historic majority, obtaining 67 out of 70 seats. He was also the Chief Minister of Delhi from December 2013 to February 2014, stepping down after 49 days of assuming power. In 2006, Kejriwal was awarded the Ramon Magsaysay Award for his involvement in the "Parivartan" movement using right to information legislation in a campaign against government corruption. The same year, after resigning from Government service, he founded the Public Cause Research Foundation to campaign for transparant governance.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: Before joining politics, Kejriwal had worked in the Indian Revenue Service. Kejriwal is a mechanical engineer from Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur. In 2012, he launched the Aam Aadmi Party, which got 28 seats in the 2013 Delhi Legislative Assembly election. Following the election, he assumed office as the Chief Minister of Delhi and resigned 49 days later over unability to mobilise support for his proposed anti-corruption legislation. After the 2015 elections, AAP registered an unprecedented majority. In 2020, he retained power handsomely despite the Bharatiya Janata Party's mammoth campaigning. His party registered another massive victory in 2022 Punjab Legislative Assembly election. Kejriwal is the most popular Chief Minister on Twitter and dubbed by media as Prime Minister Narendra Modi's biggest challenger.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: Kejriwal was born in an Agrawal family in Siwani, Bhiwani district, Haryana on 16 August 1968, the first of the three children of Gobind Ram Kejriwal and Gita Devi. His father was an electrical engineer who graduated from the Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra. Kejriwal spent most of his childhood in north Indian towns such as Sonipat, Ghaziabad and Hisar. He was educated at Campus School in Hisar and at Holy Child School at Sonipat. In 1985, he took the IIT-JEE exam and scored All India Rank (AIR) of 563. He graduated from Indian Institute of Technology Kharagpur, majoring in mechanical engineering.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: He joined Tata Steel in 1989 and was posted in Jamshedpur, Bihar. Kejriwal resigned in 1992, having taken leave of absence to study for the Civil Services Examination. He spent some time in Calcutta (present-day Kolkata), where he met Mother Teresa, and volunteered with The Missionaries of Charity and at the Ramakrishna Mission in North-East India and at Nehru Yuva Kendra.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: Arvind Kejriwal joined the Indian Revenue Service (IRS) as an Assistant Commissioner of Income Tax in 1995, after qualifying through the Civil Services Examination. In February 2006, he resigned from his position as Joint Commissioner of Income Tax in New Delhi.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: In 2012, he launched the Aam Aadmi Party, which won in the 2013 Delhi Legislative Assembly election. Till date Arvind Kejriwal act as a national convenor of AAP.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: In December 1999, while still in service with the Income Tax Department, Kejriwal, Manish Sisodia and others found a movement named Parivartan (which means "change"), in the Sundar Nagar area of Delhi. A month later, in January 2000, Kejriwal took a sabbatical from work to focus on Parivartan.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: Parivartan addressed citizens' grievances related to Public Distribution System (PDS), public works, social welfare schemes, income tax and electricity. It was not a registered NGO - it ran on individual donations, and was characterised as a "jan andolan" ("people's movement") by its members. Later, in 2005, Kejriwal and Manish Sisodia launched Kabir, a registered NGO named after the medieval philosopher Kabir. Like Parivartan, Kabir was also focused on RTI and participatory governance. However, unlike Parivartan, it accepted institutional donations. According to Kejriwal, Kabir was mainly run by Sisodia.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: In 2000, Parivartan filed a public interest litigation (PIL) demanding transparency in public dealings of the Income Tax department, and also organised a satyagraha outside the Chief Commissioner's office. Kejriwal and other activists also stationed themselves outside the electricity department, asking visitors not to pay bribes and offered to help them in getting work done for free.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: In 2001, the Delhi government enacted a state-level Right To Information (RTI) Act, which allowed the citizens to access government records for a small fee. Parivartan used RTI to help people get their work done in government departments without paying a bribe. In 2002, the group obtained official reports on 68 public works projects in the area, and performed a community-led audit to expose misappropriations worth 7 million in 64 of the projects. On 14 December 2002, Parivartan organized a "Jan sunvai" (public hearing), in which the citizens held public officials and leaders accountable for the lack of development in their locality.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: In 2003 (and again in 2008), Parivartan exposed a PDS scam, in which ration shop dealers were siphoning off subsidized foodgrains in collusion with civic officials. In 2004, Parivartan used RTI applications to access communication between government agencies and the World Bank, regarding a project for privatization of water supply. Kejriwal and other activists questioned the huge expenditure on the project and argued that it would hike water tariffs ten-fold, thus effectively cutting off the water supply to the city's poor. The project was stalled as a result of Parivartan's activism. Another campaign by Parivartan led to a court order that required private schools, which had received public land at discounted prices, to admit more than 700 poor kids without a fee.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: Along with other social activists like Anna Hazare, Aruna Roy and Shekhar Singh, Kejriwal came to be recognized as an important contributor to the campaign for a national-level Right to Information Act (enacted in 2005). He resigned from his job in February 2006, and later that year, he was given the Ramon Magsaysay Award for Emergent Leadership, for his involvement with Parivartan. The award recognized him for activating the RTI movement at the grassroots and empowering New Delhi's poor citizens to fight corruption.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: By 2012, Parivartan was largely inactive. Sundar Nagri, where the movement was concentrated, suffered from irregular water supply, unreliable PDS system and poorly done public works. Calling it "ephemeral and delusionary in nature", Kejriwal noted that Parivartan's success was limited, and the changes brought by it did not last long.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: In December 2006, Kejriwal established the Public Cause Research Foundation in December 2006, together with Manish Sisodia and Abhinandan Sekhri. He donated his Ramon Magsaysay Award prize money as a seed fund. Besides the three founders, Prashant Bhushan and Kiran Bedi served as the Foundation's trustees. This new body paid the employees of Parivartan. Kejriwal used the RTI Act in corruption cases in many government departments including the Income Tax Department, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the Public Distribution System and the Delhi Electricity Board.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: In 2010, Kejriwal protested against corruption in the Commonwealth Games. He argued that the Central Vigilance Commission (CVC) did not have any powers to take any action against the guilty, while CBI was incapable of launching an unbiased investigation against the ministers who controlled it. He advocated appointment of public ombudsman - Lokpal at the Centre and Lokayuktas in states.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: In 2011, Kejriwal joined several other activists, including Anna Hazare and Kiran Bedi, to form the India Against Corruption (IAC) group. The IAC demanded enactment of the Jan Lokpal Bill, which would result in a strong ombudsman. The campaign evolved into the 2011 Indian anti-corruption movement. In response to the campaign, the government's advisory body - the National Advisory Council - drafted a Lokpal Bill. However, the NAC's Bill was criticized by Kejriwal and other activists on the grounds that it did not have enough powers to take action against the prime minister, other corrupt officeholders, and the judiciary. The activists also criticized the procedure for the selection of Lokpal, the transparency clauses and the proposal to disallow the Lokpal from taking cognizance of public grievances.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: Amid continuing protests, the Government constituted a committee to Draft a Jan Lokpal Bill. Kejriwal was one of the civil society representative members of this committee. However, he alleged that the IAC activists had an unequal position in the committee, and the government appointees kept ignoring their recommendations. The Government argued that the activists could not be allowed to blackmail the elected representatives through protests. Kejriwal retorted that democratically elected representatives could not be allowed to function like dictators, and asked for a public debate on the contentious issues.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: The IAC activists intensified their protests, and Anna Hazare organised a hunger strike. Kejriwal and other activists were arrested for defying a police directive to give a written undertaking that they will not go to JP Park. Kejriwal attacked the government on this and said there was a need for a debate over police power to detain and release people at will. In August 2011, a settlement was reached between the Government and the activists.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: Besides the government, the Jan Lokpal movement was also criticized by some citizens as 'undemocratic' on the grounds that the ombudsman had powers over elected representatives. Arundhati Roy claimed that the movement was not a people's movement; instead, it was funded by foreigners to influence policymaking in India. She pointed out that the Ford Foundation had funded the Emergent Leadership category of the Ramon Magsaysay Award, and also donated $397,000 to Kejriwal's NGO Kabir. Both Kejriwal and Ford Foundation termed the allegations as baseless, stating that the donations were made to support the RTI campaigns. Besides, several other Indian organizations had also received grants from the Ford Foundation. Kejriwal also denied the allegations that the movement was a plot against the ruling Congress by the RSS, or that it was an upper-caste conspiracy against the Dalits.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: By January 2012, the Government had backtracked on its promise to implement a strong Jan Lokpal, resulting in another series of protests from Kejriwal and his fellow activists. These protests attracted lower participation compared to the 2011 protests. By mid-2012, Kejriwal had replaced Anna Hazare as the face of the remaining protestors. In January 2014, Kejriwal said that he will quit from the government if Jan Lokpal Bill is not passed.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: In 2015 during the second term of the AAP government in Delhi the Jan Lokpal Bill was passed by the assembly awaiting presidents approval


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: One of the major criticisms directed at the Jan Lokpal activists was that they had no right to dictate terms to the elected representatives. As a result, Kejriwal and other activists decided to enter politics and contest elections. In November 2012, they formally launched the Aam Aadmi Party; Kejriwal was elected as the party's National Convener. The party name reflects the phrase Aam Aadmi, or "common man", whose interests Kejriwal proposed to represent. The establishment of AAP caused a rift between Kejriwal and Hazare.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: AAP decided to contest the 2013 Delhi Legislative Assembly election, with Kejriwal contesting against the incumbent Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit. Kejriwal became the fifth most-mentioned Indian politician on social media channels in the run-up to the elections.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: During the NDTV Townhall event before the 2022 Gujarat Legislative Assembly election, Arvind Kejriwal said, "The people of Goa have a choice between AAP and BJP. If you want a clean, honest government, you can vote for AAP. The other option is to vote for the BJP directly or indirectly. Indirect voting is when you vote for the Congress, that Congress man will win and go to the BJP." Later on in September 2022, 8 out of 11 Congress MLAs joined BJP.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: In the 2013, Delhi Legislative Assembly elections for all 70 seats, the Bharatiya Janata Party won 31 seats, followed by Aam Aadmi Party with 28 seats. Kejriwal defeated incumbent Chief Minister, Sheila Dikshit of the Indian National Congress (INC), in her constituency of New Delhi by a margin of 25,864 votes.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: AAP formed a minority government in the hung assembly, (claiming support for the action gauged from opinion polls) with outside support from the eight INC MLAs, one Janata Dal MLA and one independent MLA. Kejriwal was sworn in as the second-youngest chief minister of Delhi on 28 December 2013, after Chaudhary Brahm Prakash who became chief minister at the age of 34. He was in charge of Delhi's home, power, planning, finance, services and vigilance ministries.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: On 14 February 2014, he resigned as Chief Minister after failing to table the Jan Lokpal Bill in the Delhi Assembly. He recommended the dissolution of the Assembly. Kejriwal blamed the Indian National Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party for stalling the anti-corruption legislation and linked it with the government's decision to register a First Information Report (FIR) against industrialist Mukesh Ambani, chairman and managing director of Reliance Industries. In April 2014 he said that he had made a mistake by resigning without publicly explaining the rationale behind his decision.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: Kejriwal said in January, prior to his resignation as chief minister, that he would not contest a seat in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections. Party members persuaded him to change his mind, and on 25 March, he agreed to contest against the BJP prime ministerial candidate, Narendra Modi, from Varanasi. He lost the contest by a margin of around 3,70,000 votes.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: Kejriwal led Aam Aadmi Party won 67 of the 70 constituencies in the 2015 Delhi Assembly elections, leaving the BJP with three seats and the INC with none. In those elections, he was again elected from the New Delhi constituency, defeating Nupur Sharma by 31,583 votes. He took oath on 14 February 2015 as Delhi's chief minister for a second time at Ramlila Maidan. Since then his party has passed the Jan Lokpal Bill though with some differences.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: There has been a long-running dispute between Kejriwal's office and that of the Lieutenant-Governor of Delhi during Kejriwal's second term as Chief Minister. Various issues have been involved, relating which office has ultimate responsibility for various aspects of government, including some significant public appointments. Manish Sisodia characterised it as "a battle between the selected and the elected" and indicated after a legal setback that the government was prepared to take the issues to the Supreme Court of India.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: Mohalla Clinics that are primary health centres in Delhi was first set up by the Aam Aadmi Party government in 2015, and as of 2018, 187 such clinics have been set up across the state and served more than 2 million residents. The Government has kept a target of setting up 1000 such clinics in the city before 2020 Delhi Legislative Assembly Elections. Mohalla Clinics offer a basic package of essential health services including medicines, diagnostics, and consultation free of cost. These clinics serve as the first point of contact for the population, offer timely services, and reduce the load of referrals to secondary and tertiary health facilities in the state. Beginning in October 2019, New Delhi began rolling out free bus transit for women on the Delhi Transport Corporation, with women travelling for free when using pink tickets carrying a message from Kejriwal. He has been criticised for his controversial remarks over Biharis and "outsiders".


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: Shunglu Committee submitted a report to LG of Delhi raising questions over decisions of Government of Delhi.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: AAP won 62 seats out of 70 in the 2020 Delhi Legislative Assembly election. He took oath on 16 February 2020 as Delhi's chief minister for a third time at Ramlila Maidan. In May 2021, Kejriwal called for the India central government to immediately stop air travel between India and Singapore, and develop "vaccine alternatives for children", due to "a new variant of coronavirus found in Singapore" which "is being said to be very dangerous for children". However, there is no known Singaporean variant of COVID-19; a recent report discussing the threat of COVID-19 to Singaporean children was discussing a variant of COVID-19 first detected in India: B.1.617. Many of the recent COVID-19 cases in Singapore were of B.1.617. The foreign minister of India, Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, and the foreign minister of Singapore, Vivian Balakrishnan, criticized Kejriwal's comment as "irresponsible" and counter-factual respectively.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: In March 2022, the official residence of CM Kejariwal was attacked by BJP goons. Deputy CM Shishodia called the incident a conspiracy to murder Kejriwal.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: AAP MLA Saurabh Bhardwaj filed a petition in the Delhi High Court (HC) seeking the constitution of a Special Investigation Team (SIT) for investigation in the incident. He petitioned that the attack and vandalization appeared to have been carried out with the "tacit complicity" of Delhi police. The petition said, "On March 30, 2022, several BJP goons, in the garb of a protest, launched an attack on the official residence of the Delhi CM", "Videos and photographs show that these goons casually walked through the security cordon [maintained by Delhi police], kicked and broke the boom barrier, broke the CCTVs cameras with 'lathis', threw paint on the gate of the residence and almost climbed over the gate, while Delhi police personnel simply looked on, doing little to stop the protesters."


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: The petition called the violence directed towards the CM and his family as "especially egregious" and "meant to subdue, by the use of force, the highest elected official in NCT of Delhi and therefore the elected Government of Delhi. This was a direct attack on democracy."


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: On 22 August 2017, the Delhi HC had directed the Delhi Police to ensure that no unnecessary protest occurs on the road in front of the Delhi CM's house, as it is a residential area. The petition noted that the inaction of Delhi Police in this incident, was a violation of the 2017 order. The petiton noted, "It thus appears that Delhi Police was hand in glove with the goons as the goons are members of the ruling party in the Central Government, which has absolute control over the Delhi Police through the Ministry of Home Affairs. It is pertinent to note, that in the past as well, on December 10, 2020, there was an attack on the residence of the Deputy Chief Minister by BJP Goons, where also, the Delhi Police did not take any steps to stop the attackers and thereafter failed to take any concrete criminal action against the attackers."


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: The petition asked the court to issue direction to the Delhi Police and the Union Ministry of Home Affairs for ensuring the security of the Chief Minister and his residence.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: On 31 March 2022 eight persons involved in the incident were arrested. A case was filed with the police pertaining to "Causing obstruction to a public servant" and under "The Prevention of Damage to Public Property Act" of the Indian Penal Code was lodged.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: The Delhi HC noted that the security was not adequate to control the crowd, and sought a status report of the police investigation into the incident.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: Several defamation cases were filed against Arvind Kejriwal by his political opponents. In January 2014, Kejriwal released a list of most corrupt politicians that included several leaders across the political spectrum. Of the several on the list, Nitin Gadkari immediately filed a defamation suit against Kejriwal. Subsequently, Kejriwal apologised to union minister Nitin Gadkari for his unverified allegations and also sought apology from former minister Kapil Sibal.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: In 2016, Kejriwal made allegations against Bikram Majithia, then revenue minister of Punjab of involvement in drug trade for which Majithia filed a defamation case against him and two others from Aam Aadmi party. Kejriwal apologised to Majithia a couple of years later in March 2018.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: Kejriwal made allegations against finance minister Arun Jaitley for irregularities in DDCA. Arun Jaitley filed a 10 crore defamation suit against Kejriwal. On 2 March 2016, Delhi High Court asked Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal and suspended BJP MP Kirti Azad to file their written statements in a civil defamation suit of Rs 5 crores filed by DDCA for their alleged remarks against the cricket body regarding its functioning and finances. Following this in April 2018 Arvind Kejriwal and three others from his party including Sanjay Singh, Raghav Chaddha and Ashutosh apologized Arun Jaitley in a joint letter.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: In his affidavit to Election Directorate before the second term elections in 2015 Kejriwal had declared that he has 10 criminal charges and 47 total charges against him.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: In 2021, a Delhi court dismissed an assault case filed by a Delhi bureaucrat against Kejriwal and ten AAP MLAs and discharged them of all charges. The court noted that "no prima facie case" was made against them.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: Kejriwal discussed his views on corruption and the state of the Indian democracy in his book "Swaraj". He advocates for a decentralisation of government and the involvement of the panchayat in local decisions and budgets. He claims that foreign multinational corporations have too much power in the decision making process of the central government and that the politicians at the centre are not being held accountable for their actions and inaction after their election.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: In 1995, Arvind married Sunita, a 1993-batch IRS officer. She took voluntary retirement in 2016 as Commissioner of Income Tax in the Income Tax Appellate Tribunal.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: The couple have a daughter and a son. Arvind Kejriwal follows Hinduism. Kejriwal is a vegetarian and has been practising the Vipassanā meditation technique for many years. He is diabetic. In 2016, Kejriwal underwent a surgery for his persistent cough problem.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: "An Insignificant Man", a 2017 Hindi/English Indian socio-political documentary co-produced and directed by Khushboo Ranka and Vinay Shukla and also co-produced by filmmaker Anand Gandhi. The documentary is about the rise of anti-corruption protests in India and the formation and rise to power of the Aam Aadmi Party and Arvind Kejriwal. The filmmakers fought a long battle against censorship in India to get the film released theatrically. The filmmakers eventually won the case against the Indian government. An "Insignificant Man" was sanctioned for public release without any cuts in a landmark judgement. The film ran in theatres successfully for 8 weeks. Kejriwal himself, however, refused to acknowledge the film or associate with it publicly due to creative differences with the filmmakers.


title: Arvind Kejriwal

text: Kejriwal has appeared on the talk-shows and interviews of News channels. He has also appeared in stand-up comedian Kunal Kamra's YouTube interview series "Shut Up Ya Kunal".


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Hannah Arendt (, , ; 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a political philosopher, author, and Holocaust survivor. She is widely considered to be one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Arendt was born in Linden, which later became a district of Hanover, in 1906, to a Jewish family. When she was three, her family moved to Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia, so that her father's syphilis could be treated. Paul Arendt had contracted the disease in his youth, and it was thought to be in remission when Arendt was born. He died when she was seven. Arendt was raised in a politically progressive, secular family; her mother was an ardent supporter of the Social Democrats. After completing secondary education in Berlin, Arendt studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a four-year affair. She obtained her doctorate in philosophy writing on "Love and Saint Augustine" at the University of Heidelberg in 1929 under the direction of the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Hannah Arendt married Günther Stern in 1929, but soon began to encounter increasing anti-Jewish discrimination in 1930s Nazi Germany. In 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, Arendt was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism in Nazi Germany. On release, she fled Germany, living in Czechoslovakia and Switzerland before settling in Paris. There she worked for Youth Aliyah, assisting young Jews to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. Divorcing Stern in 1937, she married Heinrich Blücher in 1940, but when Germany invaded France in 1940 she was detained by the French as an alien, despite having been stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. She escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941 via Portugal. She settled in New York, which remained her principal residence for the rest of her life. She became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming an American citizen in 1950. With the publication of "The Origins of Totalitarianism" in 1951, her reputation as a thinker and writer was established and a series of works followed. These included the books "The Human Condition" in 1958, as well as "Eichmann in Jerusalem" and "On Revolution" in 1963. She taught at many American universities, while declining tenure-track appointments. She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, at the age of 69, leaving her last work, "The Life of the Mind", unfinished.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of power and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. In the popular mind she is best remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann, her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, which was considered by some an apologia, and for the phrase "the banality of evil". She is commemorated by institutions and journals devoted to her thinking, the Hannah Arendt Prize for political thinking, and on stamps, street names and schools, amongst other things.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Hannah Arendt was born Johanna Arendt in 1906 into a comfortable educated secular family of German Jews in Linden, Prussia (now a part of Hanover), in Wilhelmine Germany. Her family were merchants of Russian extraction from Königsberg, the East Prussian capital. Arendt's grandparents were members of the Reform Jewish community there. Hannah's paternal grandfather, (1843–1913), was a prominent businessman, local politician, one of the leaders of the Königsberg Jewish community and a member of the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens (Central Organization for German Citizens of the Jewish Faith). Like other members of the Centralverein he primarily saw himself as a German and disapproved of the activities of Zionists, such as the young Kurt Blumenfeld (1884–1963), who was a frequent visitor to their home and would later become one of Hannah's mentors. Of Max Arendt's children, Paul Arendt (1873–1913) was an engineer and Henriette Arendt (1874–1922) was a policewoman who became a social worker.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Hannah was the only child of Paul and Martha Arendt (née Cohn) (1874–1948), who were married on 11 April 1902. She was named after her paternal grandmother. The Cohns had originally come to Königsberg from nearby Russian territory (now Lithuania) in 1852, as refugees from anti-Semitism, and made their living as tea importers; J. N. Cohn & Company became the largest business in the city. The Arendts had reached Germany from Russia a century earlier. Hannah's extended family contained many more women, who shared the loss of husbands and children. Hannah's parents were more educated and politically more to the left than her grandparents. The young couple became members of the Social Democrats, rather than the German Democratic Party that most of their contemporaries supported. Paul Arendt was educated at the Albertina (University of Königsberg). Though he worked as an engineer, he prided himself on his love of Classics. He collected a large library, in which Hannah immersed herself. Martha Cohn, a musician, had studied for three years in Paris.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: In the first four years of their marriage, the Arendts lived in Berlin, where they were supporters of the socialist journal . At the time of Hannah's birth, Paul Arendt was employed by an electrical engineering firm in Linden, and they lived in a frame house on the market square (Marktplatz). The Arendt family moved back to Königsberg in 1909, because of Paul's deteriorating health. Hannah's father suffered from a prolonged illness with syphilis and had to be institutionalized in the Königsberg psychiatric hospital in 1911. For years afterward, Hannah had to have annual WR tests for congenital syphilis. He died on 30 October 1913, when Hannah was seven, leaving her mother to raise her. They lived at Hannah's grandfather's house at Tiergartenstraße 6, a leafy residential street adjacent to the Königsberg Tiergarten, in the predominantly Jewish neighborhood of Hufen. Although Hannah's parents were non-religious, they were happy to allow Max Arendt to take Hannah to the Reform synagogue. She also received religious instruction from the rabbi, Hermann Vogelstein, who would come to her school for that purpose. At the time the young Hannah confided that she wished to marry him when she grew up. Her family moved in circles that included many intellectuals and professionals. It was a social circle of high standards and ideals. As she recalled it:


title: Hannah Arendt

text: My early intellectual formation occurred in an atmosphere where nobody paid much attention to moral questions; we were brought up under the assumption: , moral conduct is a matter of course.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: This time was a particularly favorable period for the Jewish community in Königsberg, an important center of the "Haskalah" (enlightenment). Arendt's family was thoroughly assimilated ("Germanized") and she later remembered: "With us from Germany, the word 'assimilation' received a 'deep' philosophical meaning. You can hardly realize how serious we were about it." Despite these conditions, the Jewish population lacked full citizenship rights, and although antisemitism was not overt, it was not absent. Arendt came to define her Jewish identity negatively after encountering overt antisemitism as an adult. She came to greatly identify with Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833), the Prussian socialite who desperately wanted to assimilate into German culture, only to be rejected because she was born Jewish. Arendt later said of Varnhagen that she was "my very closest woman friend, unfortunately dead a hundred years now." Varnhagen would later become the subject of a biography by Hannah.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: In the last two years of the First World War, Hannah's mother organized social democratic discussion groups and became a follower of Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) as socialist uprisings broke out across Germany. Luxemburg's writings would later influence Hannah's political thinking. In 1920, Martha Cohn married Martin Beerwald (1869–1941), an ironmonger and widower of four years, and they moved to his home, two blocks away, at Busoldstrasse 6, providing Hannah with improved social and financial security. Hannah was 14 at the time and acquired two older stepsisters, Clara (1901–1932) and Eva (1902–1988).


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Hannah Arendt's mother, who considered herself progressive, sought to raise her daughter along strict Goethean lines, which amongst other things, involved the reading of the complete works of Goethe, often summed up in the phrase from "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship" (1796) as – (And just what is your duty? The demands of the day). Goethe, at the time, was considered the essential mentor of (education), the conscious formation of mind, body and spirit. The key elements were considered to be self-discipline, constructive channeling of passion, renunciation and responsibility for others. Hannah's developmental progress () was carefully documented by her mother in a book, which she titled (Our Child) and measured her against the benchmark of what was then considered ("normal development").


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Arendt attended kindergarten from 1910 where her precocity impressed her teachers and enrolled in the Szittnich School, Königsberg (Hufen-Oberlyzeum), on Bahnstraße in August 1913, but her studies there were interrupted by the outbreak of World War I, forcing the family to temporarily flee to Berlin on 23 August 1914, in the face of the advancing Russian army. There they stayed with her mother's younger sister, Margarethe Fürst (1884–1942), and her three children, while Hannah attended a girl's school in Berlin-Charlottenburg. After ten weeks, when Königsberg appeared to be no longer threatened, the Arendts were able to return, where they spent the remaining war years at her grandfather's house. Arendt's precocity continued, learning ancient Greek as a child, writing poetry in her teenage years, and starting both a philosophy club and Greek "Graecae" at her school. She was fiercely independent in her schooling and a voracious reader, absorbing French and German literature and poetry (committing large amounts to heart) and philosophy. By the age of 14, she had read Kierkegaard, Jaspers' and Kant's ("Critique of Pure Reason"). Kant, whose home town was also Königsberg, was an important influence on her thinking, and it was Kant who had written about Königsberg that "such a town is the right place for gaining knowledge concerning men and the world even without travelling".


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Arendt attended the Königin-Luise-Schule for her secondary education, a girls' Gymnasium on Landhofmeisterstraße. Most of her friends, while at school, were gifted children of Jewish professional families, generally older than she and went on to university education. Among them was (1902–1967), who introduced her to his girlfriend, Anne Mendelssohn, who would become a lifelong friend. When Anne moved away, Ernst became Arendt's first romantic relationship. Like Arendt, Anne would go on to become a philosopher, obtaining her doctorate at Hamburg, while Ernst became a philologist.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Arendt's education at the Luise-Schule ended in 1922 when she was expelled at the age of 15 for leading a boycott of a teacher who insulted her. Instead, her mother arranged for her to go to Berlin to be with Social Democrat family friends. In Berlin she lived in a student residence and audited courses of her choosing at the University of Berlin (1922–1923), including classics and Christian theology under Romano Guardini. This enabled her to successfully sit the entrance examination () for the University of Marburg, where Ernst Grumach had studied under Martin Heidegger, who had been appointed a professor there in 1922. For the examination, her mother engaged a private tutor, while her aunt Frieda Arendt, a teacher, also helped her, and Frieda's husband Ernst Aron provided financial assistance for her to attend university.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: In Berlin, Guardini had introduced her to Kierkegaard, and she resolved to make theology her major field. At Marburg (1924–1926) she studied classical languages, German literature, Protestant theology with Rudolf Bultmann and philosophy with Nicolai Hartmann and Heidegger. Arendt arrived at Marburg that fall in the middle of an intellectual revolution led by the young Heidegger, of whom she was in awe, describing him as "the hidden king [who] reigned in the realm of thinking".


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Heidegger had broken away from the intellectual movement started by Edmund Husserl, whose assistant he had been at University of Freiburg before coming to Marburg. This was a period when Heidegger was preparing his lectures on Kant, which he would develop in the second part of his (Being and Time) in 1927 and (1929). Although Heidegger had dedicated the first edition of "Being and Time" to Edmund Husserl, Husserl gave the book a poor review, and in the second edition Heidegger removed that dedication.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: In his classes he and his students struggled with the meaning of "Being" as they worked together through Aristotle's concept of ἀλήθεια (truth) and Plato's "Sophist". Many years later Arendt would describe these classes, how people came to Marburg to hear him, and how, above all he imparted the idea of ("thinking") as activity, which she qualified as "passionate thinking".


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Arendt was restless. To date her studies had not been either emotionally or intellectually satisfying. She was ready for passion, finishing her poem (Consolation, 1923) with the lines:


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Her encounter with Heidegger represented a dramatic departure from the past. He was handsome, a genius, romantic, and taught that thinking and "aliveness" were but one. The 17-year-old Arendt then began a long romantic relationship with the 35-year-old Heidegger, who was married with two young sons. Arendt later faced criticism for this because of Heidegger's support for the Nazi Party after his election as rector at the University of Freiburg in 1933. Nevertheless, he remained one of the most profound influences on her thinking, and he would later relate that she had been the inspiration for his work on passionate thinking in those days. They agreed to keep the details of the relationship a secret, preserving their letters but keeping them unavailable. The relationship was not known until Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography of Arendt appeared in 1982. At the time of publishing, Arendt and Heidegger were deceased and Heidegger's wife, Elfride (1893–1992), was still alive. The affair was not well known until 1995, when Elzbieta Ettinger gained access to the sealed correspondence and published a controversial account that was used by Arendt's detractors to cast doubt on her integrity. That account, which caused a scandal, was subsequently refuted.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: At Marburg, Arendt lived at Lutherstraße 4. Among her friends there was Hans Jonas, her only Jewish classmate. Another fellow student of Heidegger's was Jonas' friend, the Jewish philosopher Gunther Siegmund Stern (1902–1992)son of the noted psychologist Ludwig Wilhelm Sternwho would later become her first husband. Stern had completed his doctoral dissertation with Edmund Husserl at Freiburg, and was now working on his "Habilitation" thesis with Heidegger, but Arendt, involved with Heidegger, took little notice of him at the time.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: In the summer of 1925, while home at Königsberg, Arendt composed her sole autobiographical piece, (The Shadows), a "description of herself" addressed to Heidegger. In this essay, full of anguish and Heideggerian language, she reveals her insecurities relating to her femininity and Jewishness, writing abstractly in the third person. She describes a state of "" (alienation), on the one hand an abrupt loss of youth and innocence, on the other an "" (strangeness), the finding of the remarkable in the banal. In her detailing of the pain of her childhood and longing for protection she shows her vulnerabilities and how her love for Heidegger had released her and once again filled her world with color and mystery. She refers to her relationship with Heidegger as "" ("an unbending devotion to a unique man"). This period of intense introspection was also one of the most productive of her poetic output, such as (Lost in Self-Contemplation).


title: Hannah Arendt

text: After a year at Marburg, Arendt spent a semester at Freiburg, attending the lectures of Husserl. In 1926 she moved to the University of Heidelberg, where in 1929, she completed her dissertation under the other leading figure of the then new and revolutionary "Existenzphilosophie", Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), a friend of Heidegger's. Her thesis was entitled "Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation" (On the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine: Attempt at a philosophical interpretation). She remained a lifelong friend of Jaspers and his wife, Gertrud Mayer (1879–1974), developing a deep intellectual relationship with him. At Heidelberg, her circle of friends included Hans Jonas, who had also moved from Marburg to study Augustine, working on his (1930), and also a group of three young philosophers: Karl Frankenstein, Erich Neumann and . Other friends and students of Jaspers were the linguists and (seen with Hannah, below), with whom she attended lectures by Friedrich Gundolf at Jaspers' suggestion and who kindled in her an interest in German Romanticism. She also became reacquainted, at a lecture, with Kurt Blumenfeld, who introduced her to Jewish politics. At Heidelberg, she lived in the old town () near the castle, at Schlossberg 16. The house was demolished in the 1960s, but the one remaining wall bears a plaque commemorating her time there ("see image").


title: Hannah Arendt

text: On completing her dissertation, Arendt turned to her , initially on German Romanticism, and thereafter an academic teaching career. However 1929 was also the year of the Depression and the end of the golden years () of the Weimar Republic, which was to become increasingly unstable over its remaining four years. Arendt, as a Jew, had little if any chance of obtaining an academic appointment in Germany. Nevertheless, she completed most of the work before she was forced to leave Germany.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: In 1929, Arendt met Günther Stern again, this time in Berlin at a New Year's masked ball, and began a relationship with him. Within a month she had moved in with him in a one-room studio, shared with a dancing school in Berlin-Halensee. Then they moved to Merkurstraße 3, Nowawes, in Potsdam and were married there on 26 September. They had much in common and the marriage was welcomed by both sets of parents. In the summer, Hannah Arendt successfully applied to the for a grant to support her "Habilitation", which was supported by Heidegger and Jaspers among others, and in the meantime, with Günther's help was working on revisions to get her dissertation published.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: After Arendt and Stern were married, they began two years of what Christian Dries refers to as the (years of wandering). They had the ultimately fruitless aim of having Stern accepted for an academic appointment. They lived for a while in Drewitz, a southern neighborhood of Potsdam, before moving to Heidelberg, where they lived with the Jaspers. After Heidelberg, where Stern completed the first draft of his thesis, the two then moved to Frankfurt where Stern hoped to finish his writing. There, Arendt participated in the university's intellectual life, attending lectures by Karl Mannheim and Paul Tillich, among others. The couple collaborated intellectually, writing an article together on Rilke's (1923) and both reviewing Mannheim's (1929). The latter was Arendt's sole contribution in sociology. In both her treatment of Mannheim and Rilke, Arendt found love to be a transcendent principle "Because there is no true transcendence in this ordered world, one also cannot exceed the world, but only succeed to higher ranks". In Rilke she saw a latter day secular Augustine, describing the as the (ultimate form of religious document). Later, she would discover the limitations of transcendent love in explaining the historical events that pushed her into political action. Another theme from Rilke that she would develop was the despair of not being heard. Reflecting on Rilke's opening lines, which she placed as an epigram at the beginning of their essay


title: Hannah Arendt

text: The paradoxical, ambiguous, and desperate situation from which standpoint the "Duino Elegies" may alone be understood has two characteristics: the absence of an echo and the knowledge of futility. The conscious renunciation of the demand to be heard, the despair at not being able to be heard, and finally the need to speak even without an answer–these are the real reasons for the darkness, asperity, and tension of the style in which poetry indicates its own possibilities and its will to form


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Arendt also published an article on Augustine (354–430) in the "Frankfurter Zeitung" to mark the 1500th anniversary of his death. She saw this article as forming a bridge between her treatment of Augustine in her dissertation and her subsequent work on Romanticism. When it became evident Stern would not succeed in obtaining an appointment, the Sterns returned to Berlin in 1931.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: In Berlin, where the couple initially lived in the predominantly Jewish area of (Bavarian Quarter or "Jewish Switzerland") in Schöneberg, Stern obtained a position as a staff-writer for the cultural supplement of the "Berliner Börsen-Courier", edited by Herbert Ihering, with the help of Bertold Brecht. There he started writing using the pen name Günther Anders, i.e. "Günther Other". Arendt assisted Günther with his work, but the shadow of Heidegger hung over their relationship. While Günther was working on his , Arendt had abandoned the original subject of German Romanticism for her thesis in 1930, and turned instead to Rahel Varnhagen and the question of assimilation. Anne Mendelssohn had accidentally acquired a copy of Varnhagen's correspondence and excitedly introduced her to Arendt, donating her collection to her. A little later, Arendt's own work on Romanticism led her to a study of Jewish salons and eventually to those of Varnhagen. In Rahel, she found qualities she felt reflected her own, particularly those of sensibility and vulnerability. Rahel, like Hannah, found her destiny in her Jewishness. Hannah Arendt would come to call Rahel Varnhagen's discovery of living with her destiny as being a "conscious pariah". This was a personal trait that Arendt had recognized in herself, although she did not embrace the term until later.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Back in Berlin, Arendt found herself becoming more involved in politics and started studying political theory, and reading Marx and Trotsky, while developing contacts at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik. Despite the political leanings of her mother and husband she never saw herself as a political leftist, justifying her activism as being through her Jewishness. Her increasing interest in Jewish politics and her examination of assimilation in her study of Varnhagen led her to publish her first article on Judaism, ("The Enlightenment and the Jewish Question", 1932). Blumenfeld had introduced her to the "Jewish question", which would be his lifelong concern. Meanwhile, her views on German Romanticism were evolving. She wrote a review of 's ("The Origin of German Educational Principle", 1930), which dealt with the emergence of (educational elite) in the time of Rahel Varnhagen. At the same time she began to be occupied by Max Weber's description of the status of Jewish people within a state as (pariah people) in his "Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft" (1922), while borrowing Bernard Lazare's term "paria conscient" (conscious pariah) with which she identified. In both these articles she advanced the views of Johann Herder. Another interest of hers at the time was the status of women, resulting in her 1932 review of Alice Rühle-Gerstel's book (Contemporary Women's Issues: A psychological balance sheet). Although not a supporter of the women's movement, the review was sympathetic. At least in terms of the status of women at that time, she was skeptical of the movement's ability to achieve political change. She was also critical of the movement, because it "was" a women's movement, rather than contributing with men to a political movement, abstract rather than striving for concrete goals. In this manner she echoed Rosa Luxemburg. Like Luxemburg, she would later criticize Jewish movements for the same reason. Arendt consistently prioritized political over social questions.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: By 1932, faced with a deteriorating political situation, Arendt was deeply troubled by reports that Heidegger was speaking at National Socialist meetings. She wrote, asking him to deny that he was attracted to National Socialism. Heidegger replied that he did not seek to deny the rumors (which were true), and merely assured her that his feelings for her were unchanged. As a Jew in Nazi Germany, Arendt was prevented from making a living and discriminated against and confided to Anne Mendelssohn that emigration was probably inevitable. Jaspers had tried to persuade her to consider herself as a German first, a position she distanced herself from, pointing out that she was a Jew and that "" (For me, Germany is the mother tongue, philosophy and poetry), rather than her identity. This position puzzled Jaspers, replying "It is strange to me that as a Jew you want to be different from the Germans".


title: Hannah Arendt

text: By 1933, life for the Jewish population in Germany was becoming precarious. Adolf Hitler became (Chancellor) in January, and the Reichstag was burned down () the following month. This led to the suspension of civil liberties, with attacks on the left, and, in particular, members of the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands (German Communist Party: KPD). Stern, who had communist associations, fled to Paris, but Arendt stayed on to become an activist. Knowing her time was limited, she used the apartment at Opitzstraße 6 in Berlin-Steglitz that she had occupied with Stern since 1932 as an underground railway way-station for fugitives. Her rescue operation there is now recognized with a plaque on the wall.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Arendt had already positioned herself as a critic of the rising Nazi Party in 1932 by publishing ""Adam-Müller-Renaissance?"" a critique of the appropriation of the life of Adam Müller to support right wing ideology. The beginnings of anti-Jewish laws and boycott came in the spring of 1933. Confronted with systemic antisemitism, Arendt adopted the "motiv" "If one is attacked as a Jew one must defend oneself as a Jew. Not as a German, not as a world citizen, not as an upholder of the Rights of Man." This was Arendt's introduction of the concept of Jew as Pariah that would occupy her for the rest of her life in her Jewish writings. She took a public position by publishing part of her largely completed biography of Rahel Varnhagen as "" ("Original Assimilation: An Epilogue to the One Hundredth Anniversary of Rahel Varnhagen's Death") in the on 7 March 1933 and a little later also in . In the article she argues that the age of assimilation that began with Varnhagen's generation had come to an end with an official state policy of antisemitism. She opened with the declaration:


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Today in Germany it seems Jewish "assimilation" must declare its bankruptcy. The general social antisemitism and its official legitimation affects in the first instance assimilated Jews, who can no longer protect themselves through baptism or by emphasizing their differences from Eastern Judaism.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: As a Jew, Arendt was anxious to inform the world of what was happening to her people in 1930–1933. She surrounded herself with Zionist activists, including Kurt Blumenfeld, Martin Buber and Salman Schocken, and started to research antisemitism. Arendt had access to the Prussian State Library for her work on Varnhagen. Blumenfeld's Zionistische Vereinigung für Deutschland (Zionist Federation of Germany) persuaded her to use this access to obtain evidence of the extent of antisemitism, for a planned speech to the Zionist Congress in Prague. This research was illegal at the time. Her actions led to her being denounced by a librarian for anti-state propaganda, resulting in the arrest of both Arendt and her mother by the "Gestapo". They served eight days in prison but her notebooks were in code and could not be deciphered, and she was released by a young, sympathetic arresting officer to await trial.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: On release, realizing the danger she was now in, Arendt and her mother fled Germany following the established escape route over the Erzgebirge Mountains by night into Czechoslovakia and on to Prague and then by train to Geneva. In Geneva, she made a conscious decision to commit herself to "the Jewish cause". She obtained work with a friend of her mother's at the League of Nations' Jewish Agency for Palestine, distributing visas and writing speeches.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: From Geneva the Arendts traveled to Paris in the autumn, where she was reunited with Stern, joining a stream of refugees. While Arendt had left Germany without papers, her mother had travel documents and returned to Königsberg and her husband. In Paris, she befriended Stern's cousin, the Marxist literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) and also the Jewish French philosopher Raymond Aron (1905–1983).


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Arendt was now an "émigrée", an exile, stateless, without papers, and had turned her back on the Germany and Germans of the . Her legal status was precarious and she was coping with a foreign language and culture, all of which took its toll on her mentally and physically. In 1934 she started working for the Zionist-funded outreach program Agriculture et Artisanat, giving lectures, and organizing clothing, documents, medications and education for Jewish youth seeking to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine, mainly as agricultural workers. Initially she was employed as a secretary, and then office manager. To improve her skills she studied French, Hebrew and Yiddish. In this way she was able to support herself and her husband. When the organization closed in 1935, her work for Blumenfeld and the Zionists in Germany brought her into contact with the wealthy philanthropist (born Halphen, 1884–1975), wife of Édouard Alphonse James de Rothschild, becoming her assistant. In this position she oversaw the baroness' contributions to Jewish charities through the Paris Consistoire, although she had little time for the family as a whole. The Rothschilds had headed the central "Consistoire" for a century but stood for everything Arendt did not, opposing immigration and any connection with German Jewry.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Later in 1935, Arendt joined Youth Aliyah (Youth immigration), an organization similar to Agriculture et Artisanat that was founded in Berlin on the day Hitler seized power. It was affiliated with Hadassah organization, which later saved many from the nearing Holocaust, and there Arendt eventually became Secretary-General (1935–1939). Her work with Youth Aliyah also involved finding food, clothing, social workers and lawyers, but above all, fund raising. She made her first visit to British Mandate of Palestine in 1935, accompanying one of these groups and meeting with her cousin Ernst Fürst there. With the Nazi annexation of Austria and invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938, Paris was flooded with refugees, and she became the special agent for the rescue of the children from those countries. In 1938, Arendt completed her biography of Rahel Varnhagen, although this was not published until 1957. In April 1939, following the devastating "Kristallnacht" pogrom of November 1938, Martha Beerwald realized her daughter would not return and made the decision to leave her husband and join Arendt in Paris. One stepdaughter had died and the other had moved to England, Martin Beerwald would not leave and she no longer had any close ties to Königsberg.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: In 1936, Arendt met the self-educated Berlin poet and Marxist philosopher Heinrich Blücher (1899–1970) in Paris. Blücher had been a Spartacist and then a founding member of the KPD, but had been expelled due to his work in the (Conciliator faction). Although Arendt had rejoined Stern in 1933, their marriage existed in name only, with their having separated in Berlin. She fulfilled her social obligations and used the name Hannah Stern, but the relationship effectively ended when Stern, perhaps recognizing the danger better than she, emigrated to America with his parents in 1936. In 1937, Arendt was stripped of her German citizenship and she and Stern divorced. She had begun seeing more of Blücher, and eventually they began living together. It was Blücher's long political activism that began to move Arendt's thinking towards political action. Arendt and Blücher married on 16 January 1940, shortly after their divorces were finalized.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: On 5 May 1940, in anticipation of the German invasion of France and the Low Countries that month, the military governor of Paris issued a proclamation ordering all "enemy aliens" between 17 and 55 who had come from Germany (predominantly Jews) to report separately for internment. The women were gathered together in the Vélodrome d'Hiver on 15 May, so Hannah Arendt's mother, being over 55, was allowed to stay in Paris. Arendt described the process of making refugees as "the new type of human being created by contemporary history ... put into concentration camps by their foes and into internment camps by their friends". The men, including Blücher, were sent to Camp Vernet in southern France, close to the Spanish border. Arendt and the other women were sent to Camp Gurs, to the west of Gurs, a week later. The camp had earlier been set up to accommodate refugees from Spain. On 22 June, France capitulated and signed the Compiègne armistice, dividing the country. Gurs was in the southern Vichy controlled section. Arendt describes how, "in the resulting chaos we succeeded in getting hold of liberation papers with which we were able to leave the camp", which she did with about 200 of the 7,000 women held there, about four weeks later. There was no Résistance then, but she managed to walk and hitchhike north to Montauban, near Toulouse where she knew she would find help.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Montauban had become an unofficial capital for former detainees, and Arendt's friend Lotta Sempell Klembort was staying there. Blücher's camp had been evacuated in the wake of the German advance, and he managed to escape from a forced march, making his way to Montauban, where the two of them led a fugitive life. Soon they were joined by Anne Mendelssohn and Arendt's mother. Escape from France was extremely difficult without official papers; their friend Walter Benjamin had taken his own life after being apprehended trying to escape to Spain. One of the best known illegal routes operated out of Marseilles, where Varian Fry, an American journalist, worked to raise funds, forge papers and bribe officials with Hiram Bingham, the American vice-consul there.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Fry and Bingham secured exit papers and American visas for thousands, and with help from Günther Stern, Arendt, her husband, and her mother managed to secure the requisite permits to travel by train in January 1941 through Spain to Lisbon, Portugal, where they rented a flat at Rua da Sociedade Farmacêutica, 6b. They eventually secured passage to New York in May on the Companhia Colonial de Navegação's S/S "Guiné II". A few months later, Fry's operations were shut down and the borders sealed.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Upon arriving in New York City on 22 May 1941 with very little, they received assistance from the Zionist Organization of America and the local German immigrant population, including Paul Tillich and neighbors from Königsberg. They rented rooms at 317 West 95th Street and Martha Arendt joined them there in June. There was an urgent need to acquire English, and it was decided that Hannah Arendt should spend two months with an American family in Winchester, Massachusetts, through Self-Help for Refugees, in July. She found the experience difficult but formulated her early appraisal of American life, (The fundamental contradiction of the country is political freedom coupled with social slavery).


title: Hannah Arendt

text: On returning to New York, Arendt was anxious to resume writing and became active in the German-Jewish community, publishing her first article, "From the Dreyfus Affair to France Today" (in translation from her German) in July 1942. While she was working on this article, she was looking for employment and in November 1941 was hired by the New York German-language Jewish newspaper "" and from 1941 to 1945, she wrote a political column for it, covering anti-semitism, refugees and the need for a Jewish army. She also contributed to the "Menorah Journal", a Jewish-American magazine, and other German "émigré" publications.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Arendt's first full-time salaried job came in 1944, when she became the director of research and executive director for the newly emerging Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, a project of the Conference on Jewish Relations. She was recruited "because of her great interest in the Commission's activities, her previous experience as an administrator, and her connections with Germany". There she compiled lists of Jewish cultural assets in Germany and Nazi occupied Europe, to aid in their recovery after the war. Together with her husband, she lived at 370 Riverside Drive in New York City and at Kingston, New York, where Blücher taught at nearby Bard College for many years.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: In July 1946, Arendt left her position at the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction to become an editor at Schocken Books, which later published some of her works. In 1948, she became engaged with the campaign of Judah Magnes for a solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. She famously opposed the establishment of a Jewish nation state in Palestine and initially also opposed the establishment of a binational Arab-Jewish state. Instead, she advocated for the inclusion of Palestine into a multi-ethnic federation. Only in 1948 in an effort to forestall partition did she support a binational one-state solution. She returned to the Commission in August 1949. In her capacity as executive secretary, she traveled to Europe, where she worked in Germany, Britain and France (December 1949 to March 1950) to negotiate the return of archival material from German institutions, an experience she found frustrating, but providing regular field reports. In January 1952, she became secretary to the Board, although the work of the organization was winding down and she was simultaneously pursuing her own intellectual activities; she retained this position until her death. Arendt's work on cultural restitution provided further material for her study of totalitarianism.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: In the 1950s Arendt wrote "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951), "The Human Condition" (1958) and "On Revolution" (1963). Arendt began corresponding with the American author Mary McCarthy, six years her junior, in 1950 and they soon became lifelong friends. In 1950, Arendt also became a naturalized citizen of the United States. The same year, she started seeing Martin Heidegger again, and had what the American writer Adam Kirsch called a "quasi-romance", lasting for two years, with the man who had previously been her mentor, teacher, and lover. During this time, Arendt defended him against critics who noted his enthusiastic membership in the Nazi Party. She portrayed Heidegger as a naïve man swept up by forces beyond his control, and pointed out that Heidegger's philosophy had nothing to do with National Socialism. In 1961 she traveled to Jerusalem to report about Eichmann's trial for "The New Yorker". This report strongly influenced her popular recognition, and raised much controversy (see below). Her work was recognized by many awards, including the Danish Sonning Prize in 1975 for Contributions to European Civilization.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: A few years later she spoke in New York City on the legitimacy of violence as a political act: "Generally speaking, violence always rises out of impotence. It is the hope of those who have no power to find a substitute for it and this hope, I think, is in vain. Violence can destroy power, but it can never replace it."


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Arendt taught at many institutions of higher learning from 1951 onwards, but, preserving her independence, consistently refused tenure-track positions. Prior to settling down and becoming a university professor at the New School for Social research in NYC, she served as a visiting scholar at the University of Notre Dame; University of California, Berkeley; Princeton University (where she was the first woman to be appointed a full professor in 1959); and Northwestern University. She also taught at the University of Chicago from 1963 to 1967, where she was a member of the Committee on Social Thought; The New School in Manhattan where she taught as a university professor from 1967; Yale University, where she was a fellow; and the Center for Advanced Studies at Wesleyan University (1961–62, 1962–63). She was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1962 and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1964.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: In 1974, Arendt was instrumental in the creation of Structured Liberal Education (SLE) at Stanford University. She wrote a letter to the president of Stanford to persuade the university to enact Stanford history professor Mark Mancall's vision of a residentially-based humanities program. At the time of her death, she was University Professor of Political Philosophy at The New School.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: In addition to her affair with Heidegger, and her two marriages, Arendt had close friendships. Since her death, her correspondence with many of them has been published, revealing much information about her thinking. To her friends she was both loyal and generous, dedicating several of her works to them. (friendship) she described as being one of "" (the active modes of being alive), and, to her, friendship was central both to her life and to the concept of politics. Hans Jonas described her as having a "genius for friendship", and, in her own words, "" (love of friendship).


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Her philosophy-based friendships were male and European, while her later American friendships were more diverse, literary, and political. Although she became an American citizen in 1950, her cultural roots remained European, and her language remained her German "" (mother tongue). She surrounded herself with German-speaking "émigrés", sometimes referred to as "The Tribe". To her, (real people) were "pariahs", not in the sense of outcasts, but in the sense of outsiders, unassimilated, with the virtue of "social nonconformism ... the "sine qua non" of intellectual achievement", a sentiment she shared with Jaspers.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Arendt always had a . In her teens she had formed a lifelong relationship with her , Anne Mendelssohn Weil ("Ännchen"). After her emigration to America, Hilde Fränkel, Paul Tillich's secretary and mistress, filled that role until her death in 1950. After the war, Arendt was able to return to Germany and renew her relationship with Weil, who made several visits to New York, especially after Blücher's death in 1970. Their last meeting was in Tegna, Switzerland in 1975, shortly before Arendt's death. With Fränkel's death, Mary McCarthy became Arendt's closest friend and confidante.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Heinrich Blücher had survived a cerebral aneurysm in 1961 and remained unwell after 1963, sustaining a series of heart attacks. On 31 October 1970 he died of a massive heart attack. A devastated Arendt had previously told Mary McCarthy, "Life without him would be unthinkable". Arendt was also a heavy smoker and was frequently depicted with a cigarette in her hand. She sustained a near fatal heart attack while lecturing in Scotland in May 1974, and although she recovered, she remained in poor health afterwards, and continued to smoke. On the evening of 4 December 1975, shortly after her 69th birthday, she had a further heart attack in her apartment while entertaining friends, and was pronounced dead at the scene. Her ashes were buried alongside those of Blücher at Bard College, in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York in May 1976.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: After Arendt's death the title page of the final part of "The Life of the Mind" ("Judging") was found in her typewriter, which she had just started, consisting of the title and two epigraphs. This has subsequently been reproduced ("see image").


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Arendt wrote works on intellectual history as a political theorist, using events and actions to develop insights into contemporary totalitarian movements and the threat to human freedom presented by scientific abstraction and bourgeois morality. Intellectually, she was an independent thinker, a loner not a "joiner," separating herself from schools of thought or ideology. In addition to her major texts she published anthologies, including "Between Past and Future" (1961), "Men in Dark Times" (1968) and "Crises of the Republic" (1972). She also contributed to many publications, including "The New York Review of Books", "Commonweal", "Dissent" and "The New Yorker". She is perhaps best known for her accounts of Adolf Eichmann and his trial, because of the intense controversy that it generated.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: While Arendt never developed a systematic political theory and her writing does not easily lend itself to categorization, the tradition of thought most closely identified with Arendt is that of civic republicanism, from Aristotle to Tocqueville. Her political concept is centered around active citizenship that emphasizes civic engagement and collective deliberation. She believed that no matter how bad, government could never succeed in extinguishing human freedom, despite holding that modern societies frequently retreat from democratic freedom with its inherent disorder for the relative comfort of administrative bureaucracy. Her political legacy is her strong defence of freedom in the face of an increasingly less than free world. She does not adhere to a single systematic philosophy, but rather spans a range of subjects covering totalitarianism, revolution, the nature of freedom and the faculties of thought and judgment.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: While she is best known for her work on "dark times", the nature of totalitarianism and evil, she imbued this with a spark of hope and confidence in the nature of mankind:


title: Hannah Arendt

text: That even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination might well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given to them.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Arendt's doctoral thesis, ("Love and Saint Augustine"), was published in 1929 and attracted critical interest, although an English translation did not appear until 1996. In this work, she combines approaches of both Heidegger and Jaspers. Arendt's interpretation of love in the work of Augustine deals with three concepts, love as craving or desire ("Amor qua appetitus"), love in the relationship between man ("creatura") and creator ("Creator – Creatura"), and neighborly love ("Dilectio proximi"). Love as craving anticipates the future, while love for the Creator deals with the remembered past. Of the three, "dilectio proximi" or "caritas" is perceived as the most fundamental, to which the first two are oriented, which she treats under "vita socialis" (social life). The second of the Great Commandments (or Golden Rule) "Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself" uniting and transcending the former. Augustine's influence (and Jaspers' views on his work) persisted in Arendt's writings for the rest of her life.


title: Hannah Arendt

text: Some of the leitmotifs of her canon were apparent, introducing the concept of (Natality) as a key condition of human existence and its role in the development of the individual, developing this further in "The Human Condition" (1958). She explained that the construct of natality was implied in her discussion of new beginnings and man's elation to the Creator as "nova creatura". The centrality of the theme of birth and renewal is apparent in the constant reference to Augustinian thought, and specifically the innovative nature of birth, from this, her first work, to her last, "The Life of the Mind".