She was shrewd, quick-witted, clever - and is still considered one of the greatest German-speaking philosophers.
Hannah Arendt never referred to herself as such.
The Literaturhaus München pays tribute to this strong woman with the exhibition “The Public Venture.
Hannah Arendt and the 20th Century ”.
It is best to first sit down in the dark niche on the right in the exhibition room. Look and listen. The famous interview that Günter Gaus conducted with Hannah Arendt in his 1964 program “Zur Person” is shown here in a loop. If you see it, you will immediately be taken with this quick-witted, clever, shrewd woman in 2021. She was a great thinker, but one who could feel the heart's blood flowing through her brain with every thought.
Like Thomas Mann, to whom the Literaturhaus dedicated an exhibition last year, Arendt, who is the subject of the new show, was a public intellectual, one who used her prominence to influence political discourse. With theses that are often controversial. It is fortunate that curator Monika Boll has decided not to focus on political theories, but on the person Hannah Arendt. With all their enthusiasm for provocation and their courage to publish thoughts that could bring other people to the barricade or hurt. Arendt firmly decided that it was important to endure the opinions of others.
Best known is the German Jew Hannah Arendt, who escaped from Nazi Germany to the USA in 1941, probably worldwide for her article on the Jerusalem trial of the mass murderer Adolf Eichmann. Your judgment that this "buffoon" Eichmann symbolizes the "banality of evil" has become a standing term. What is less well known is that Arendt's report from Jerusalem appeared in the “New Yorker” at the time. A glossy magazine, the pages overflowing with advertisements. Issues from back then are in a showcase, and they are leafed through on film on a screen. Half fascinated, half frightened you stand in front of it and notice that the text stretched over 72 pages, every few lines it was interrupted by advertising for jewelry, perfume, cars. "I make Magic with Martinis",promises a handsome male model with a Colgate smile on a double page. The banality of evil hidden between the banalities of life.
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As a young woman, Hannah Arendt became politicized by the rise of National Socialism.
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From Hannah Arendt's politicization through increasing anti-Semitism in the thirties to her commitment to saving Jewish cultural assets in the forties to her deep connection with the country of her exile, the show traces the eventful life of the philosopher, which was closely connected with the eventful European one and American history.
A white stripe is painted on the floor in the middle of the room.
It visually divides the exhibition as the Holocaust divided the 20th century.
A turning point that changed everything.
Hannah Arendt dealt with the "banality of evil"
How perfidious the National Socialists degraded their victims in the camps to anonymous slaughter cattle, how they destroyed all individuality - the origin of this radical evil was what drove Hannah Arendt for a lifetime. Screens also hang over the painted white stripe. They show the model of Crematorium II Auschwitz-Birkenau by Mieczyslaw Stobierski, which is in the German Historical Museum in Berlin, and another can be seen in the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem. Detlef Weitz and Stefan Hurtig carefully captured the model from Berlin for the exhibition in Munich. From a bird's eye view, the people queuing for their own death actually seem like an anonymous crowd. But then the camera approaches the individual men, women,Children, each and every one individually shaped by the artist. The people become visible again. It cannot heal, nor can it comfort. But give a little hope, a little bit that we can learn from history. Maybe.
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In trying to overcome the abyss of exile and homelessness, Hannah Arendt's friends were most important.
She was a loyal companion.
And loved to take pictures of people who were close to her heart.
In 1961 she bought a Minox in Munich, actually a typical spy camera, and has carried it with her "tenderly" ever since.
To capture them all in pictures: from Martin Heidegger to Karl Jaspers to Anne Weil.
Great thinkers with whom she laughed enthusiastically, discussed, and argued violently.
The cigarette always in hand.
Thinking and smoking belonged together for Arendt.
Here, too, one would have liked to sit by, coughing.
Looked and listened.
In foggy air, but full of clear thoughts.
Until April 24, 2022 in the Literaturhaus Munich; daily 11 am-6pm; accompanying book: "Hannah Arendt and the 20th Century". Piper, 288 pages; 22 euros. You can get the book at the Literaturhaus München and at your local bookseller around the corner here