Anne Frank And Hannah Arendt: A Look At Human Nature
650 Words3 Pages
Lauren Czolgosz
Anne Frank and Hannah Arendt: A Look at Human Nature Anne Frank was a young, Jewish girl who lived in Amsterdam during the time of the Holocaust. She and her family were in hiding for over two years before the Nazis found them and brought them to concentration camps, where all members of her family, except for her father, died. However, this courageous, intelligent, and optimistic young girl has not been forgotten in the years following her death. Anne was an avid writer who wrote diary entries about her thoughts, feelings, and experiences, the entries beginning before her family went into hiding, and continuing until the day that she and her family were caught and taken away by the Nazi soldiers. Despite all the pain and suffering that Anne Frank endured, her diary entries prove to us that she had the ability to look past the horrible atrocity going on around her and to still see the beauty in human nature. In an entry just twenty days before her family’s capture, Anne writes, “It’s really a wonder that I haven’t dropped…show more content… My arguments will be based off of ideas from her highly controversial work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, which tells about her interpretation of the life and trial of active Nazi leader Adolph Eichmann, a man greatly involved in the extermination of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. Arendt and Frank share in the notion that human nature is not evil, it is for the most part good. However, Arendt, unlike the young, innocent Anne Frank uses a deeper, more in-depth thought process to come to this conclusion. While Anne Frank’s belief stems from her wholehearted faith in the goodness of humanity and in her God, Hannah Arendt would base her arguments that human nature is not evil off of the Eichmann Trial, and use these