Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was born on October 14, 1906, in Hanover, Germany, as Johanna Cohn Arendt; she was Jewish and grew up in Königsberg.⁠[1][2][3][4]

In 1922–1923 she took courses in classics and Christian theology at the University of Berlin.⁠[4]

After finishing secondary school in 1924, she entered the University of Marburg to study philosophy with Martin Heidegger, whose influence on her thought proved lasting. She then spent a semester at the University of Freiburg attending lectures by Edmund Husserl.⁠[5]

In spring 1926 she moved to Heidelberg University to study with Karl Jaspers, under whose supervision she completed her doctoral dissertation, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin (The Concept of Love in Augustine), in 1929; it was published that year.⁠[5][4]

In 1933, after Hitler came to power, Arendt was arrested by the Gestapo while working for the German Zionist federation and researching antisemitic propaganda. After her release she fled Germany for Paris.⁠[6][3][5]

For more than a decade afterward, her career in teaching and writing was diverted by the Nazis’ rise to power.⁠[2]

From 1933 to 1939 she worked in Paris for several Jewish refugee organizations, including Youth Aliyah, which rescued Jewish young people and brought them to Palestine. In Paris she came to know Walter Benjamin and Raymond Aron, among others.⁠[5][3][4]

After the Wehrmacht invaded France in 1940, she was interned with other stateless Germans and sent to the detention camp at Gurs in southwestern France, from which she escaped.⁠[3][6]

In May 1941 she reached New York, where she soon became part of a lively intellectual circle. She wrote for publications including the German-language newspaper Aufbau and Jewish Frontier, arguing for a Jewish army, worked for several years as a welfare agent aiding Jews, and served as a journalist for Jewish political and social organizations.⁠[3][5][2]

From 1946 to 1951 she worked as an editor at Schocken Books, a German Jewish publishing house. She also directed research for the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction and served as executive director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, an effort Salo Baron put her in charge of to recover Judaic artifacts after the Holocaust.⁠[4][6][3]

In 1946 she published the essay “What is Existenz Philosophy.”⁠[4]

In 1951 she published The Origins of Totalitarianism, a study of the intellectual and historical roots of Nazi and Stalinist rule; that same year she became a US citizen.⁠[5][6][3]

In 1958 she published The Human Condition, which examined the decline of public life in the modern age. Her biography of Rahel Varnhagen was also published in the late 1950s. In 1959 she published “Reflections on Little Rock.”⁠[5][6][4]

In 1961 she went to Jerusalem to cover, for The New Yorker, the trial of Adolf Eichmann, who had organized the deportation of Jews to concentration camps. The same year she published the essay collection Between Past and Future.⁠[6][5]

In 1963 her reports were published as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. She argued that Eichmann was not a monster but an ordinary, unthinking bureaucrat, and coined the controversial term “banality of evil.”⁠[6][5]

The book set off a fierce controversy in Jewish circles immediately after publication and was often misread as trivializing Nazi crimes or even defending Eichmann, although she considered him deserving of execution. Gershom Scholem strongly disapproved of the book; in a letter to Scholem she wrote that she now held that evil is never “radical” but only “extreme.”⁠[5][6][7]

The same year she published On Revolution, which explored the American tradition of constitutional democracy and political freedom.⁠[5][6]

She never accepted a tenure-track position, but she became the first woman named a full professor at Princeton UniversityPrinceton UniversityPrinceton University is a private university and Ivy League member in Princeton, New Jersey. Chartered on October 22, 1746 as the College of New Jersey, it moved to Princeton in 1756 and adopted its present name in 1896. Undergraduate education leads to A.B. and B.S.E. degrees and emphasizes small-group discussion, independent research and residential college life. Graduate education spans the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences and engineering. As of October 2026, Christopher L. Eisgruber was president. Its 2026–27 operating budget was $3.407 billion, including $342 million for undergraduate aid.Open the full entry and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, the University of Chicago and Wesleyan University. In 1967 she took a position at the New School for Social Research, where she remained a professor of political philosophy until her death.⁠[6][3][4][5]

As a public intellectual she wrote for The New York Review of Books, Commonweal, Dissent and The New Yorker. In 1967 the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung honored her German prose. In 1968 she published Men in Dark Times.⁠[6][3][5]

She published On Violence in 1970, the essay “Thinking and Moral Considerations” in 1971 and the collection Crises of the Republic in 1972.⁠[5][4]

In 1975 the Danish government awarded her the Sonning Prize.⁠[3]

She died at her New York City apartment on December 4, 1975, aged 69, before completing the third volume of The Life of the Mind.⁠[3][1][4][6]

After her death, The Life of the Mind was published in 1978, and Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, drawn from her 1970 seminar, followed in 1982. Later edited collections include Essays in Understanding: 1930–1954 (1994) and The Jewish Writings (2007).⁠[5][4]

The Library of Congress holds the Hannah Arendt Papers, about 25,000 items spanning 1898 to 1977, received as a gift and bequest from Arendt in installments from 1965 to 2000; they include an Adolf Eichmann file and correspondence with Mary McCarthy and Gershom Scholem, among others, and were digitized in 1998–2000 and are now fully available online.⁠[2]

The New School: Official website: https://www.newschool.edu/ (opens in a new window)⁠[8]