Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt (born Johanna Arendt, 1906-1975) was a German-American political theorist and philosopher who became one of the most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century. Born in Linden near Hanover to a Jewish family, she was raised by her mother after her father's death when she was seven, in a politically progressive, secular household with her mother being an ardent Social Democrat. Arendt began studying classics and Christian theology at the University of Berlin in 1922-23, then entered Marburg University in 1924 where she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a romantic affair. She obtained her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg in 1929 with her dissertation "Love and Saint Augustine," supervised by existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers. In 1933, she was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism. Upon release, she fled Germany and settled in Paris, where she worked for Youth Aliyah, assisting young Jews to emigrate to Palestine. She married philosophy professor Heinrich Blücher in 1940. After detention as an "enemy alien" during the war, Arendt and Blücher fled to the USA in 1941. Living in New York, she wrote for the German language newspaper Aufbau and directed research for the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction. Her major works include "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951), a groundbreaking study of Nazi and Stalinist regimes; "The Human Condition" (1958), a systematic treatment of the vita activa defending classical ideals of work, citizenship, and political action; and "Eichmann in Jerusalem" (1963), her controversial analysis of Adolf Eichmann's trial where she coined the phrase "the banality of evil." Though often described as a philosopher, Arendt rejected that label, describing herself as a political theorist because her work focused on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth." She became an American citizen in 1950 but remained culturally European. At her death in 1975, she had completed the first two volumes of "The Life of the Mind," examining the fundamental faculties of thinking, willing, and judging.