On Humanity… Landmarks of Jewish History

The political scientist and publicist Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) emigrated to France in 1933 and fled from there to the USA in 1941. She was stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. Until she became a US citizen in 1951, she was “stateless.” From 1949 onward, Arendt traveled regularly to Germany on business. In 1950, she published the essay “The Aftermath of the Nazi Rule: Report from Germany,” in which she described the German population’s indifference and speechlessness.

On September 28, 1959, the Senate awarded Hannah Arendt the Lessing Prize of the City of Hamburg. She was the first woman to receive one of the most prestigious cultural awards in the Federal Republic of Germany. In her commemorative speech, entitled “On Humanity in Dark Times,” Arendt openly criticized the silence of postwar German society and its “tendency to pretend that the years from 1933 to 1945 never existed.”