Grit Straßenberger | Die Denkerin. Hannah Arendt und ihr Jahrhundert

Reading and Discussion

An Evening Dedicated to Hannah Arendt

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 body of thought. But Arendt did not merely want to report and bear witness; she sought to understand. Like no other, she succeeded in understanding—and living through—the radical ruptures, 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 shared 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 provocative and headstrong; she rubbed people 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 a professor of political theory and the history of ideas at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. She publishes on topics such as democracy, republicanism, authority, and populism, as well as on Hannah Arendt’s political thought, which she has been studying for many years. She is co-editor of the Critical Complete Edition of the Works of Hannah Arendt and a member of the academic advisory board of the Bonn Academy for Research and Teaching in Practical Politics and the Bonn Center for Reconciliation Research.

The book will be available for purchase at the event.

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