Schriften des Hannah-Arendt-Instituts für Totalitarismusforschung – serie

Text in German. Hannah Arendt designs her political philosophy against the background of a totalitarian society in which both independent thinking and the common space of reference for political action have been systematically disintegrated. This centers around the existential basic conditions of spontaneity, natality and plurality. The power of judgment is developed as a decidedly political ability, because whoever judges must learn to think and weigh independently, but must also remain oriented towards the public, take other points of view and views into account in order to understand the world and actively shape it.

The book takes a look behind the National Socialist propaganda backdrop and develops a different image of the Hitler Youth on the basis of instruction sheets, archive documents and descriptions by contemporary witnesses: violence and vandalism, corruption and theft, sexuality, individualism and stubbornness. It was therefore a precarious, chaotic and often overwhelmed mass organization that was not only steered and controlled "from above", but functioned differently on site and whose young members sometimes even escaped the control of the state.