Hannah Arendt

Born: 1906 | Died: 1975

Philosopher and Politician

The political philosopher, Hannah Arendt, was born in Hannover. As an only child of secular Jews, Arendt moved first to Königsberg in eastern Prussia and later to Berlin. In 1924, she entered Marburg University, where she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. She later moved to Heidelberg to study with Karl Jaspers. In 1929, her dissertation (Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin) was published.

In 1926, she became involved in Jewish and Zionist politics and in 1930, she married Gunther Stern, a young Jewish philosopher. In 1933, fearing Nazi persecution, she fled to Paris. She was divorced and remarried to Heinrich Blücher, a German political refugee.

After the outbreak of the war and following detention in a camp as an 'enemy alien', Arendt and Blücher fled to the USA in 1941. Living in New York, Arendt wrote for the German language newspaper Aufbau and directed research for the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction.

In 1944, she began to work on what would become her first major political book, The Origins of Totalitarianism published in 1951, after which she began the first in a sequence of visiting fellowships and professorial positions at American universities. She died on December 4, 1975, as an American citizen.

For more information Click here.