Hannah Arendt Days 2025

This year marks the 50th anniversary of Hannah Arendt’s death. She died in New York on December 4, 1975. Born in Hanover-Linden on October 14, 1906, the political thinker’s life was shaped by the violent upheavals of the 20th century. As a Jew, she experienced persecution under National Socialism, and as a refugee, statelessness in France and the USA, where she was finally naturalized in 1951. There, she became a world-famous political theorist who passionately intervened in current social debates.

During the 1920s, Hannah Arendt studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger and later vehemently refused to be called a philosopher because the experience of her former teacher and many German intellectuals being voluntarily brought into line with National Socialism had made her skeptical of academic philosophy. After the Second World War, she was one of the harshest critics of Heidegger, although she remained loyal to him in private. The extent of the anti-Semitic tendencies in Heidegger’s thinking, which became clear through the publication of the so-called Black Notebooks, was something she probably could not have foreseen during her lifetime. Throughout her life, Arendt grappled with the importance of political action in freedom and warned against authoritarian and totalitarian developments that endanger pluralistic societies.

Interest in Hannah Arendt’s works and in her person remains high. Arendt has something to tell us: among other things, she dealt with freedom, power and violence, thought, action, judgment, human rights and the threat to democracy posed by anti-Semitism and racism. The legendary interview with Günter Gaus from 1964 reached well over a million clicks digitally. In 2024, readers of a Hanoverian daily newspaper voted Arendt the most important person from the city in the past 75 years.

In Hanover, the state capital has commemorated the internationally renowned political theorist with the HANNAH ARENDT DAYS, which have been held annually since 1998. They are the result of a joint idea by the then Lord Mayor Herbert Schmalstieg and Prof. Dr. Detlef Horsters (Leibniz University of Hanover) and have been continuously developed ever since. Different formats such as discussions, lectures, exhibitions, plays, performances, films and readings shed light on various aspects of the respective annual theme. Numerous prominent politicians, scientists and artists have already been guests.

The concept development and coordination of the HAT is the responsibility of the Mayor’s Office, City of Science and Research Hannover. Lord Mayor Belit Onay advises the current program with his team and various actors from the city society. The focus is on cooperation with schools and the involvement of pupils in the respective annual theme of the science-based political format. With art projects, poetry slums, debate contributions, interviews and social media posts, the pupils accompany the event from their perspective. The series is currently funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and heise online.

Dr. Maike Weißpflug is a political theorist. She studied German language and literature, philosophy and political science at RWTH Aachen University, where she completed her doctorate with a thesis on the significance of literature in Hannah Arendt’s political thought. Most recently, her book “Hannah Arendt. 100 pages” was published by Reclam. She has worked at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin and is currently an expert on participation at the Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management (BASE). She is particularly concerned with the question of how the major ecological issues of the future can be politically rethought and addressed.

Dr. Ulrich Kühn studied theater studies, modern German literature and philosophy in Berlin and Munich and completed his doctorate on the connections between spoken language and music. He is a cultural journalist and has worked as a radio editor in leading positions since 2009. Among other things, he deals with the question of how a society shows itself in its debates and books, its language culture and what it reveals about its feelings and thoughts, its view of the world.