Grit Straßenberger | The Thinker: Hannah Arendt and her century

Hannah Arendt is the leading thinker of the 20th century. Both her writings and her life reflect the profound upheavals of that era: the rise and fall of totalitarian regimes, experiences of flight and alienation, but also hopeful new beginnings shaped her entire way of thinking. Yet Arendt did not merely wish to report and bear witness; she sought to understand. Like no other, she succeeded in comprehending – and living through – the radical upheavals, existential experiences of loss and unexpected opportunities of the dramatic 20th century.

Grit Straßenberger presents a new, vivid portrait of this extraordinary thinker: through a strong focus on the memories and stories recounted by friends, colleagues and students about Arendt, we get to know the person behind the unique philosopher. Although she was deeply suspicious of the role of the intellectual, she became an intellectual of world renown. Her thinking was unsettling and headstrong; she rubbed people up the wrong way everywhere she went, yet she was anything but a loner: the list of Arendt’s acquaintances reads like a ‘Who’s Who’ of 20th-century Western intellectual history. Arendt lived her extraordinary life as a ‘virtuoso of friendship’, for whom interpersonal connections were indispensable to her thinking – and who can still be our friend in spirit today.

Grit Straßenberger is Professor of Political Theory and History of Ideas at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. She publishes on topics such as democracy, republicanism, authority and populism, and has been writing on Hannah Arendt’s political thought for many years. She is co-editor of the Critical Complete Edition of Hannah Arendt’s works, as well as a member of the academic advisory board of the Bonn Academy for Research and Teaching in Practical Politics and the Bonn Centre for Reconciliation Research.

The book will be available for purchase at the event.

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