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Hannah Arendt's Work

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The majority of Hannah Arendt’s work emerged after she and her husband fled to the United States in 1941 due to the outbreak World War II and having to serve detention in a camp as an, “enemy alien,” because of evidence she had gathered of the regime’s anti-Semitism. It was ten years later that she became a legal citizen of the United States. Arendt wrote for Aufbau, a German language newspaper, and also was a director of research for the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. Hannah Arendt’s work and ideas cannot be put together onto one single spectrum of ideas or argument on one topic. Her thoughts and works cover totalitarianism, the nature of freedom, revolution, and the power of thought and judgment (Hannah Arendt). Her first major piece of work was completed in 1951 and is known as The …show more content…
The work is separated into three sections: Anti-Semitism, Imperialism, and Totalitarianism. The first section discusses why anti-Semitism and those of the Jewish religion held such an essential role is the propaganda of totalitarianism and the Nazis. The second section, Imperialism, depicts when the nation-state began to disintegrate along with new imperial expansion. These two sections derive the third section, Totalitarianism. Arendt discovers that totalitarianism has a focus on constant movement, which makes individual humans, relativity a very small piece in nature. The essence of totalitarianism is in terror. In the beginning of Part III of her work, she states,“ Under conditions of constitutional government and freedom of opinion, totalitarian movements struggling for power can use terror to a limited extent only and share with other parties the necessity of winning adherents and of appearing plausible to a public which is not yet rigorously isolated from all other sources of information. It was recognized early and has frequently been asserted that in totalitarian countries propaganda and terror present two sides of the same coin,”

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