Hannah Arendt — born Johanna Arendt — was a historian, philosopher, and one of the most influential political thinkers of the 20th century.

 

She studied at the University of Marburg before getting her doctorate in philosophy at Heidelberg in 1929, the same year she married fellow theorist Günther Stern. In 1933, she was arrested by the Gestapo for her illegal research into antisemitism. In terms of her own experience of antisemitism, she identified with the 19th-century Prussian socialite Rahel Varnhagen, who was also Jewish and wanted to assimilate into German culture, but was rejected.

 

Upon her from prison, Arendt left Germany to Czechoslovaki, Switzerland, and then Paris, where she helped resettle young Jews to Palestine. She was stripped of her German citizenship in 1937, becoming stateless. She divorced Stern, married Heinrich Blücher, and in 1941 fled France to New York. She acquired US citizenship in 1950. The publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism the following year cemented her place as a writer and thinker. Other books that followed included Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (1957), The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), and On Revolution (1963).

 

Arendt is particularly known for coining the phrase "the banality of evil".

 

Sources:

Wikipedia