Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was a German and American philosopher and political theorist, one of the most influential of the twentieth century. Born to a Jewish family in Linden, she studied under Martin Heidegger and took her doctorate at Heidelberg in 1929. Briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1933, she fled to Paris, escaped detention in France and reached the United States in 1941. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) established her reputation, followed by The Human Condition (1958) and by On Revolution and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), whose phrase the banality of evil stirred controversy. She died in 1975, leaving The Life of the Mind unfinished.