Hannah Arendt

Political Theorist. Born in Hanover, Germany, to Paul and Martha Arendt. She grew up in Konigsberg and Berlin. She studied philosophy at the University of Marburg. Hannah moved to Heidelberg, where she wrote her dissertation under the existentialist philosopher-psychologist Karl Jaspers on the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine. In 1929, in Berlin, she married Günther Stern, later known as Günther Anders. They would divorce in 1937. The dissertation was published in 1929. Hannah was prevented from teaching in German universities, because she was Jewish. She researched anti-Semitism for some time before being arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1933. In 1933 Hannah fled Germany and went to Paris, while in France, she worked to support and aid Jewish refugees. She was stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. In 1940, she married the German poet and Marxist philosopher Heinrich Blücher, a former member of the Communist Party of Germany. Later that year, after the German military occupation of northern France, the Vichy regime began deportation of foreign Jews to concentration camps in the unoccupied south of France, and she was interned in Camp Gurs as an "enemy alien". Hannah would escape in 1941 and flee with her husband and mother to the United States. Upon arriving in New York, Hannah became active in the German-Jewish community. From 1941 to 1945, she wrote a column for the German-language Jewish newspaper. After World War II, she returned to Germany and worked for Youth Aliyah, a Zionist organization, which saved thousands of children from the Holocaust. Hannah became a naturalized citizen of the United States in 1950. In 1959, she was named the first female lecturer at Princeton. She also taught at the University of Chicago from 1963 to 1967. Her first major book was titled The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, other books authored by her were The Human Condition in 1958 and Men in Dark Times. In 2014, the French philosopher Michel Onfray devoted a series of lectures broadcast on the national French radio station France Culture to an analysis of the work of Hannah. She died in New York City at the age of 69.