Hannah Arendt (1906–1975)

Hannah Arendt was born ito a German Jewish family in Hanover and grew up in in Königsberg in eastern Prussia. After completing high school, she went to Marburg University to study with Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a brief, intense affair. She also studied at the universities of Heidelburg and Frieburg, and completed her doctoral dissertation under Karl Jaspers, who became a lifelong friend. She married twice: firstly to Günther Stern, later known as Günther Anders, whom she divorced in 1937; and secondly in 1940 to Heinrich Blücher, a poet and philosopher. The rise of the Nazi regime caused her to flee Germany in 1933. She went to Prague, Geneva, and Paris and in 1941 to the USA, settling in New York City. There she became part of an influential circle of writers and intellectuals gathered around the journal Partisan Review. She became the chief editor at Schocken Books from 1946 to 1948, and then held positions at a number of American universities, including Princeton, the University of California at Berkeley, and the University of Chicago. She was most closely associated with the New School for Social Research, where she was a professor of political philosophy until her death. She also was active in Jewish organizations. Prof. Arendt's works achieved worldwide readership and recognition, and established her as one of the seminal political thinkers of the 20th century. She is best known as an analyst of contemporary political ideas and regimes, with her books Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), On Violence (1970) and Crisis of the Republic (1972), among others. She also wrote a biography of the writer and salonnière Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1957). Prof. Arendt's last work, The Life of the Mind, was published posthumously in 1977.