A sharp look, short hair, a voice that makes you shudder and shiver.
That's how I imagined Hannah Arendt, the German theorist, about whom an assistant professor at the Belgrade Faculty of Political Sciences spoke devotedly in 2012.
She quoted passages from the book. Sources of totalitarianism - about regimes that Arendt argued were characterized by mass movements, arrests, secret police, terror, concentration camps, and a party apparatus and power in the hands of a single personality.
She wrote about officials who followed orders and "just did their job" as "the banality of evil," which is why she was some accused to normalize and justify the perpetrators of horrific acts against humanity.
Arendt died on December 4, 1975, in the United States of America (USA), where she had moved at the height of World War II.
In the half century since her death, the world has changed drastically - among other things, the Soviet Union collapsed, Germany was unified, the US gained competition from China in the struggle of world superpowers, and conflicts erupted in the Balkans, the Middle East, and Africa.
But Hannah Arendt's quotes remain relevant.
"The ideal subjects of totalitarian rule are not convinced Nazis or convinced Communists, but people who did not distinguish between fact and fiction and between truth and lies." Arendt claimed.
The followers of these regimes, she believed, were "neutral, politically disinterested people who never joined a party and rarely voted."
During the 1930s, people became susceptible to fake news due to "a feeling of complete non-belonging to the world, one of the most radical and hopeless human experiences," she wrote.
During months of anti-government protests in Serbia, I again encountered excerpts from the books of this German woman of Jewish origin, even on social media.
Anti-government demonstrations The student-led protests began after the collapse of the Novi Sad Railway Station canopy in November 2024, when 16 people were killed and one girl was seriously injured.
"I need to read Hannah Arendt, I don't remember anything," a friend told me recently.
What is so timeless about the readings and thoughts of this political theorist, whose warm outlook is completely different from my ideas?
In times of crisis, people once again realize that they have no control over many aspects of life, and that others decide how much freedom they will be given and whether they will live in peace, points out Adriana Zaharijević from the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory.
"There is a renewed need to understand and prevent events like those to which a young German woman of Jewish origin bore silent witness, subsequently giving them names," he tells the BBC in Serbian.
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Hannah Arendt's life story begins in the German city of Hanover in 1906.
She grew up in a Jewish family, and even in her teenage years she was interested in philosophy, which she later studied.
She taught them from the philosopher Martin Heidegger, with whom she was briefly in a relationship.
But the rise of the Nazis, the coming to power of Adolf Hitler in 1933, and the persecution of Jews forced her to leave the country and flee with her mother to Paris.
Six years later, World War II began, and most of Europe's Jews ended up in concentration camps.
When the Nazi invasion of France took place in 1940, Arendt fled to the United States, where she would describe what it was like to be disenfranchised in her writings, "We Refugees."
The origins of totalitarianism published in 1951, where she explains them using the examples of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union under the boot of Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.
Dragan Stefanović has often returned to that book in the past few years, and whenever Hannah Arendt is mentioned, a scene always comes to mind. in which she gives an interview and smokes.
Her works are updated every time there is a collapse of democracy and a crisis, and in modern history there are many such examples, he tells BBC Serbian.
"The world political scene has once again become polarized and populism is gaining momentum - just look at world leaders and everything will be clear to you," says the 42-year-old engineer, a fan of Hannah Arendt.
The domestic political scene, he believes, is an even better example.
"You have social division, the concentration of power in the hands of one man, a bureaucratic apparatus that ignores people's real demands for justice, and a rule based on fear," he claims.
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When Donald Trump first won the 2016 US presidential election, book sales Sources of totalitarianism se doubled.
People turned to books by writers from the 1940s and 1950s, which wrote about how to resist such systems.
Among them were the works of Hannah Arendt, whose thoughts were quoted on social media and on banners at anti-Trump rallies, written by American professor Paul Mason.
However, he Shows that she should not be idealized, because Arendt analyzed natural tendencies toward evil, trying "to answer the questions 'What went wrong and how people should live,' rather than 'What is happening and why,'" he explains.
Trump, in her view, would not be a totalitarian ruler, but he exhibits "elements" of totalitarianism, He said Roger Berkowitz, a former student of Hannah Arendt and founder of the Center for Politics and Humanity at Bard College in New York.
Sources of totalitarianism have received praise in the academic community, but the book Eichmann in Jerusalem and after more than half a century it causes debate and controversy.
Adolf Ahmajn je was a lieutenant colonel of the SS units, Nazi paramilitary organizations that oversaw the killing of people in the camps.
The court was told that he was instrumental in organizing the death camps in which millions died.
Arendt reported from his trial in a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961 for the American New Yorker, and she turned the notes and records into a book two years later.
Then they will coin the concept the banality of evil which is why many will claim that she justified evil.
Arendt believed until the trial that the genocide against the Jews was the embodiment of radical evil, but she would change her position during the trial, philosopher Zaharijević points out.
She points out that Arendt wrote that Eichmann did not show anything demonic during the trial, not even anything particularly perverse and evil.
"This inexplicably powerful guy expressed himself in clichés and commonplaces, believing that he was following the orders given to him and acting in accordance with his duty, regardless of the consequences of such actions," Zaharijević explains the views of Hannah Arendt.
"This phenomenon is deeply rooted in modern bureaucracies, and totalitarian states turn people into cogs in the administrative machine, dehumanizing them," Arendt spoke.
Eichmann was convicted, and In 1962, and executed.
Arendt was also criticized because of attitudes about the African American civil rights movements of the 1950s, calling her racist.
She criticized attempts to desegregate local public schools by sending American police officers to protect black students who were ordered to attend previously all-white schools, in the essay "Reflections on Little Rock".
She wrote that the inhabitants of Africa "behave as part of nature and did not create the human world."
Watch a video about Auschwitz, a symbol of the Holocaust
Nevena Pirić, a 23-year-old mathematics student, has always been interested in World War II and The Holocaust, "wondering how someone could commit such acts."
Looking for answers, she came across this book Eichmann in Jerusalem.
"I didn't even understand some parts at first, but it made me wonder."
"I returned to her when the war broke out in Gaza, although we went through a lot in the Balkans too," she tells the BBC in Serbian.
The war in the Gaza Strip began with an attack by Palestinian extremist groups, led by Hamas, on Israel on October 7, 2023, when 1.200 people were killed and 251 were taken hostage.
A brutal Israeli retaliation followed, during which some 70.000 people in Gaza were killed, according to Hamas's Health Ministry.
Newest truce in Gaza came into effect in October 2025.
Did you finally get an answer, I ask her.
"Somewhat, but I still don't understand how someone could just blindly follow someone else's orders," he adds.
There are many people who are little Eichmanns, Zaharijević points out.
"Mali because their actions did not have such major consequences."
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Hannah Arendt's works are universal and what she writes about is applicable always and everywhere, says Dragan Stefanović.
"She taught me that the absence of critical-analytical thinking, questioning everything we do, as well as blind obedience combined with the administrative apparatus and bureaucracy can cause evil," she adds.
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