Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was born to a prominent, politically active Jewish merchant family in the Prussian city of Hanover and raised mostly in Königsberg (now Russian Kaliningrad). She studied philosophy at the University of Marburg (where she studied under Martin Heidegger and met Günther Stern, whom she later married), the University of Freiburg, and the University of Heidelberg (where she completed her PhD in 1929 with a dissertation on St. Augustine’s concept of love). Later that year, she moved to Berlin and married Stern, who wrote for a left-wing paper and soon fled to Paris. But Arendt decided to stay in Berlin and become active in Jewish politics; she worked for the Zionist Federation of Germany until the Gestapo briefly imprisoned her for anti-state propaganda. Realizing that she, too, was threatened, she fled Germany without papers, joined Stern in Paris, and began working at a Zionist group to help Jews resettle in Israel. In 1936, Stern again fled, this time to the United States, and left Arendt behind—they soon divorced, and Arendt remarried the poet and philosopher Heinrich Blücher. In 1940, the Nazis began interning Jews in France, and Arendt and Blücher were not spared; they were detained in separate camps in the south of France, but they escaped, reunited, and obtained papers to move to New York, where they went on to live the rest of their lives. Arendt rose to international fame in the 1950s with The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and The Human Condition (1958); she wrote for magazines and newspapers as well as in book format, and taught at various universities throughout the United States until her death of a heart attack at age 69. She remains one of the 20th century’s most prominent political theorists, one of the most important women in the history of philosophy, and likely the most influential scholar of totalitarianism the world has ever seen.