A topical political issue every year
A memorial plaque at Marktplatz 2 in Linden commemorates the house where Hannah Arendt was born on 14 October 1906. Every year around her birthday, the city of Hanover, together with Leibniz University and the Volkswagen Foundation, organises the "Hannah Arendt Days" in honour of the daughter of a Jewish family from Königsberg. Each time, the focus is on a different current problem with political and social implications. A board of trustees from the fields of science, politics, art, foundations and administration chooses the topic. The Lord Mayor chairs the committee. The target is especially the young audience. A scholarship bearing their name is also awarded. The theme is flight and persecution. So far, people from Belarus, Zimbabwe, Syria or Iraq have been sponsored.
She helped save Jewish children in France
The philosopher, political scientist and writer Hannah Arendt rendered outstanding services to political issues in many ways. She lived for a long time in New York, where she died on 4 December 1975. She studied philosophy in Marburg with Martin Heidegger, in Freiburg with Edmund Husserl and in Heidelberg with Karl Jaspers.
In 1928 she wrote her doctoral thesis on the "concept of love in Augustin". She had to experience totalitarian rule first-hand: she was arrested in Berlin in 1933 for "activity for the Zionist Association for Germany", but was soon released. She fled via Prague to Paris, where she worked as general secretary of the refugee organisation Jugend-Alijah. She rescued Jewish children. After internment in a camp in the Pyrenees, she managed to escape to the USA via Lisbon with her husband Heinrich Blücher in 1941. Later, she followed the trial of Adolf Eichmann on behalf of the magazine "The New Yorker". She took on several guest professorships at American universities and shortly before her death received the Danish "Sonning Prize" for contributions to European culture.
Your name in the city - from the square in front of the state parliament to the chair
In Hanover, the square in front of the Lower Saxony Parliament, a vocational school on Lavesallee and a path near the New Town Hall are named after her. The grammar school in Barsinghausen bears her name. In the Hannover City Library there is a room with a variety of mementos of her. Particularly in it are the photos of her friend Fred Stein. There is a chair with her name at the Helene Lange School. There it is now possible to be examined for the Abitur in philosophy.
