Hannah Arendt

Reflections following the CEMA's remarks: Seventy years ago, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, who fled Nazi Germany, warned us. Her warning was not that lies would prevail, but that people would become too exhausted to care about what is true.
Hannah Arendt didn't study totalitarianism from books. She fled from it.
Born in 1906 in Germany, in a world of ideas and debates, she studied philosophy under some of the greatest minds of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. Then the Nazis came to power.
In 1933, this Jewish intellectual was briefly arrested by the Gestapo. Released after a week, she understood what was coming. She fled Germany illegally, passing through Czechoslovakia and then France. When France fell in 1940, she was interned in a camp. She escaped during the chaos of the French collapse. With emergency visas, forged documents, and desperate courage, she crossed borders as Europe burned. She reached Portugal, and finally New York in 1941.
She survived. But she never forgot what she had seen. Read more...