Anne Frank And Hannah Arendt: A Look At Human Nature

“It's a wonder I haven't abandoned all my ideals, they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.” (Anne Frank) Anne Frank was one of the many children who fell victim to the Holocaust during the World War II. Anne’s story is nothing short of a tragedy; she died at the early age of fifteen from Typhus while being held by the Nazi Regime, in the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. Before dying, Anne and her family went into hiding and lived secretly in her father's office building in the Netherlands. While living in the “Annex,” a secret hiding place, she developed many interests such as reading and writing. Anne is famous because she is one of the best-known victims of the Holocaust, her story has been shared with millions in a publication of her diary, and through her writing’s she introduces many people to the massacre and its horror.

This literary work truly shows how Anne Frank was a martyr of racism and an insightful chronicler of her time period and place. The work also shows the typical adolescence of Anne Frank and her constant arguments with her mother in particular. It also deals with the day to day hiding she and her family went through. The only problem with the book is that the fact that Anne Frank rewrote her diary about two months before she was captured because she wanted her journal to be published after the war and she wanted to peruse a career in journalism. Therefore it is hard to tell what existed in her original copy and how much did she add afterwards.

Many, many people suffered during the Holocaust war. The Jews in particular were in grave danger. The drama ‘Anne Frank’ outlines so many ways that this historical event caused a shift in the mood of the characters and their relationships. Before the Holocaust, Anne Frank was just an ordinary Jewish girl living in Germany. A German leader named Adolf Hitler developed a plan to destroy the Jews and to rule over the specific places where they lived. What Hitler did to these poor Jews, and the sheer terror they endured at the hands of this Nazi leader is purely unfathomable.

People can only imagine the terrors that the Jews and other ethnic groups had to go through during the Holocaust in World War II. With Anne Frank’s diary, people can finally put themselves into the scene and captivate all the feelings and sentiments that Anne Frank has poured onto the pages. Anne Frank, her family, and their friends were known for hiding from the German Nazis in the Secret Annex for two years from 1942-1944. Innocent and naive,

"The Diary of Anne Frank" tells us a story about how her life as a Jew was drastically changing during the Holocaust and the start of World War II (WWII). She was a very intelligent young woman that had hopes and dreams. Anne was a normal teenager trying to find her way in life. All of that changed when the Nuremburg Race Laws were formed. Her father who was a World War I fighter hid his family and friends in a Secret Annex that was blended in with a normal neighborhood. As she lived for months in the Secret Annex, Frank had written her diary, full of her experiences in the Annex. Everything changed though, when she reached the end of her times in the Annex. Hitler's men had found Anne and her family and friends. This memoir adds in to the

Thesis: A key concept to understanding Hannah Arendt’s “Total Domination” is the essence of terror and the importance of concentration camps in maintaining the Nazi totalitarian state.

What do you think your life would have been like if you were in the Holocaust?It may seem like a terrible situation, but one girl ,Anne Frank, seemed to always find the good in people. The last words in her diary were “In spite of everything, I still believe people are really good at heart.” These last famous words of Anne Frank let the world know that know matter what happens ,there is always good in people. Anne’s family faced many problems and fears in the annex. From, the diary, Anne left ,I agree with Anne’ quote. I am siding with Anne because Mr.Frank was selfless, trusting, generous, and willing. Mr.Frank cared and thought for other people. He is described by Anne’s quote even if he did go through some

In her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt uses the life and trial of Adolf Eichmann to explore man's responsibility for evils committed under orders or as a result of the law. Due to the fact that she believed that Eichmann was neither anti-Semitic, nor a psychopath, Arendt was widely criticized for treating Eichmann too sympathetically. Still, her work on the Eichmann trial is among the most respected works on the issue to date.

Discrimination is now becoming a well-known term around the world; many acknowledge it from the time they came across: sexism, racism, ageism, and the type Anne Frank came across, persecution. Anne Frank was a thirteen-year-old Jewish girl who was hiding from the German Army or the Nazi’s, as they are better recognized back then. Her life story consisted of constantly escaping and being in isolation from those who wanted her dead; it was a difficult time to live in. Anne Frank was attacked because of her differences; Adolf Hitler (leader of the Nazi’s) was killing anyone who was not classified as “pure” or part of the “superior race”.

The Diary of Anne Frank is a remarkably moving book about the short life of a young girl and her family. The Holocaust was a horrible time for Jewish people and Anne and her Jewish family’s lives were completely turned upside down as a result. The war resulted in the deaths of countless people, mostly innocent people. Before the invasion on D-day and the end of the war not too long after, the rest of the world didn’t know the real disaster going on over seas. Anne Frank’s once secret diary has introduced the immense suffering and horror that occurred during the Holocaust.

Hannah Arendt controversially discussed how banality, ordinariness and everyday life played an important role in the manifestation of the holocaust in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). In 1961 Arendt reported on Eichmann’s trial in Israel for the New Yorker. Eichmann was a primary organiser of the holocaust and was tried for 15 charges, including crimes against humanity and the Jewish people. Arendt observed that Eichmann himself was not an impressive monster or some Cartesian Evil Genius one would expect to be responsible the murder of millions of people, in fact she described him as completely ordinary. Not only was he physically unimpressive, but he was declared psychologically to be completely normal by six psychologists.

Hannah Arendt’s essay suggests she believes that the motives steered by Adolf Eichmann to commit monstrous acts, where “once banal to all human” ( Arendt, Cp). Eichmann was viewed as a demonic monster for his immoral and corrupted mind. Banal evil shares similarities with Radical evil, such that they can both result in extraordinary evil. Unlike radical evil, banal evil can be committed by ordinary people. Eichmann lacked the ability to reflect and he seemed to think in terms of clichés as his goal was to follow Hitler’s orders to undo God’s creation and complete his job successfully and

Hannah Arendt is a German Jewish philosopher, born in 1906 and died in 1975. She studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger as Professor. Her works deal with the nature of power and political subjects such as democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. She flew away to France in 1933, when Adolf Hitler became Chancellor in Germany. She flew away from Europe to the United States after escaping from the concentration camp of Gurs. She became a Professor in New York city, in which she became an active member of the German Jewish community. In 1963, she was sent to Jerusalem to report on Eichmann’s trial by The New Yorker. Hannah Arendt’s thoughts on Eichmann’s trial were expected to be harsh, considering the philosopher’s roots. However, her

Arendt was very judgmental of Eichmann because she claimed that he was unable to think for himself and had the tendency to obey orders and conform without critical evaluation of his actions. She further asserted that throughout Eichmann’s life he was always trying to define himself and that he ended up joining the S.S. purely out of coincidence, “… it was like being swallowed up by the Party against all expectations and without previous decision”. When it came to the final solution of the Jewish question, Eichmann acted in a kind of “Pontius Pilate” manner . Here, Arendt insists that Eichmann willingly and consciously followed the solution of the elite Civil Service of deporting Jews into concentration camps and then killing them and that it was at this moment that he made the moral choice to remain in these “bloody matters”. Moreover, when the Israeli government provided psychologists to examine Eichmann, they found no trace of mental illness and no evidence of abnormal personality, “… half a dozen psychiatrists had certified him as normal…” .

"The sort of person that Eichmann appeared to be did not square either with the deeds for which he was being tried or with the traditional preconceptions about the kind of person who does evil" (Geddes). Throughout the trial, Arendt is conflicted by what she wants to seen when she analyzes Eichmann, and struggles greatly when she finds he does not embody the crude and inhumane thoughts she associated with the history of the Holocaust. It is this absence of the profound hatred of Jews, along with the normalcy he possesses, that creates the emblematic role of banal evil for Adolf Eichmann.