Arendt spent her childhood and youth in her Jewish parents' home with social democratic attitudes. After school she began studying theology and philosophy at the universities of Marburg, Freiburg im Breisgau and Heidelberg. She was a student of, among others, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers and Edmund Husserl. In 1928 she completed her studies with a doctorate. Phil off. Her dissertation is entitled "Augustin's concept of love". Her doctoral supervisor was Karl Jaspers, with whom she maintained a friendly relationship throughout her life. In 1929 she moved to Berlin. There she married the philosopher Günther Anders in the same year. During this time she worked on German Romanticism. The research was completed in 1933 and she summarized the results under the title "Rahel Varnhagen. Life story of a German Jew from the Romantic period". The book was only published in 1959. It is a successful biography about the wife of the writer Karl August Varhagen von Ense.

Rahel Varnhagen had a great influence on contemporary literary life through her famous salon, in which Adalbert von Chamisso, Heinrich Heine, Wilhelm von Humboldt and the philosopher and theologian Friedrich Ernst David Schleiermacher frequented. The research for this biography introduced Hannah Arendt to the conditions of social adaptation for Jews. She further developed her findings into existential philosophical views. In 1933, the year the National Socialists came to power, Hannah Arendt was briefly arrested by the Gestapo (Secret State Police). She then emigrated to Paris via Switzerland. There she worked as a social worker at Jewish institutions. During this time she joined the "World Zionist Organization" initiative and met the philosophical writer Walter Benjamin, which resulted in a friendly relationship.

In 1935 she traveled to Palestine for the first time. Two years later her marriage ended in divorce. In 1940 she married the philosopher Heinrich Blücher. In the same year, 1940, she moved to the USA. There she worked as a journalist and wrote political articles for the German-Jewish weekly newspaper "Aufbau". From 1944 to 1946 she held the position of research director at the Conference on Jewish Relations. She then worked as an editor at Salman Schocken Verlag for three years. From 1948 to 1952 she was the head of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction Organization, whose mission was to preserve Jewish cultural assets. In the two years 1949 and 1950 she visited Germany for the first time after the end of the war. In 1951 Hannah Arendt became an American citizen.

In the same year her major work "Origins of Totalitarianisme" was published. The treatise was published in Germany in 1955 under the title "Elements and Origins of Total Domination". In her studies of the conditions of totalitarianism in the 19th century, she linked these to the emergence of anti-Semitism and made comparisons between fascism and Stalinism. With this work she made a name for herself as a respected researcher on social and political science topics. In 1953 she accepted an appointment at Brooklyn College in New York. Hannah Arendt became a corresponding member of the German Academy for Language and Poetry in 1958. The following year she was honored by the city of Hamburg with the Lessing Prize. In 1960 her study "Vita activa or active life" was published. In her theory of action presented therein, she names work, production and action as three types of human activity.

In 1961 she reported on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem for the New Yorker magazine. Her articles sparked controversial discussions because of her critical comments on the behavior of the Jewish councils and the portrayal of Adolf Eichmann. Arendt compiled these journalistic contributions into a book entitled "Eichmann in Jerusalem. A report on the banality of evil." The work was published in 1963, as was the title "On the Revolution", which is about the destruction of political rule. In 1963, Hannah Arendt accepted an appointment at the University of Chicago. In 1966 she met the writer Uwe Johnson. The following year she moved to the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1968 she headed the Institute of Arts and Letters as vice president. Two years later her work was edited with the title "Power and Violence". Hannah Arendt joined the board of the American PEN Center in 1973.

Hannah Arendt died on December 4, 1975 in New York.

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Hannah Arendt

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