Hannah Arendt was jailed by the Gestapo for researching antisemitism
In 1933 a young German philosopher was arrested for illegally gathering evidence of antisemitism. Released, Hannah Arendt fled to Paris, escaped internment in France, and reached the United States in 1941. A decade later The Origins of Totalitarianism made her one of the century's most influential political thinkers.
Born Johanna Arendt on 14 October 1906 in Linden, Prussia, she was the only child of secular, left-leaning Jewish parents from Königsberg: Paul, an engineer with a large classics library she devoured, and Martha, a musician who had studied in Paris. Her maternal family had fled antisemitism in Lithuania in 1852 and built the city's largest tea-importing business. The family returned to Königsberg in 1909 because of Paul's failing health, and he died in 1913, when Hannah was seven. Her grandfather Max, a leader of the local Jewish community, took her to the Reform synagogue.
After finishing school in Berlin, she studied at Marburg under Martin Heidegger, and the two became lovers during her student years. She earned her doctorate at Heidelberg in 1929 with a dissertation on love in Saint Augustine, supervised by the existentialist Karl Jaspers.
In Paris she worked for Youth Aliyah, helping young Jews emigrate to British Mandate Palestine. When Germany invaded France, the French authorities detained her as an enemy alien; she escaped and crossed to America, where she worked as a writer and editor and for Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming a citizen in 1950. The Origins of Totalitarianism appeared in 1951, followed by The Human Condition in 1958 and, in 1963, Eichmann in Jerusalem as well as On Revolution. Plenty of American universities hired her to teach, though she refused tenure-track posts.
Her subjects ranged across power, authority, fame, wealth, tradition, direct democracy and evil. Her report on the trial of Adolf Eichmann caused lasting controversy, and her attempt to explain how ordinary people become agents of totalitarian systems produced the phrase the banality of evil. She died suddenly of a heart attack on 4 December 1975, leaving The Life of the Mind unfinished. Journals, schools, prizes, streets and stamps now carry her name.
Source: Hannah Arendt
