Born Johanna Arendt to a Jewish family in Hanover, Prussia (today Germany) and was raised in Königsberg. Though her family was secular, she received religious guidance and attended a Reform synagogue. Growing up, she independently learned philosophy and ancient Greek and read all Goethe scriptures. At 15, after leading a boycott on a teacher, she got expelled from school and moved by herself to Berlin, where she took audited courses at the University of Berlin. At 18, she began her formal higher education at The University of Marburg, studying German literature, theology, and philosophy. She developed a romantic relationship with her 35 years old professor, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, with whom she was involved for the rest of her life, even though he supported the Nazi Party. In 1925, when she was only 19 years old, Arendt wrote The Shadows, her first autobiographical piece, in which she explored her insecurities regarding her Jewishness and femininity. In the following year, she transferred to the University of Heidelberg, completing her thesis on the concept of love in the writings of Saint Augustine in 1929. In that same year, she began a relationship with philosopher Günther Stern, and the couple married within a few months. They moved from one place to another, trying to find Stern an academic position while writing and publishing together numerous articles. In 1931, after returning to Berlin, Arendt began working as a newspaper writer while researching the writer and socialite Rahel Varnhagen. She became more involved in politics, studying political theories, especially intrigued by Jewish politics, which inspired her to write The Enlightenment and the Jewish Question. Following Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in Germany in 1933, Arendt, as a Jew, suffered discrimination and was prevented from making a living. Her husband was prosecuted for being a Communist, fled to France. She stayed in Berlin and became an activist. After she got arrested for researching and gathering evidence of anti-Semitic propaganda at the Prussian State Library, she also left the county, first to Switzerland and then to reunite with her husband in Paris. She decided to commit herself to “the Jewish cause” and worked for several Jewish refugee organizations. In 1936, at the age of 30, Arendt and her husband divorced, and soon after, she met and married poet Heinrich Blücher. In 1940, they escaped Nazi-occupied France and immigrated to the US. Settling in NYC, Arendt began publishing a weekly column at a Jewish-German newspaper, in which she wrote about refugees, anti-Semitism, and different aspects of Zionism. After the war, she worked as an editor at Schocken Books and as a research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations. In 1951, at 45, Arendt published her first significant work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, in which she argued that Fascism and Communism share historical and intellectual origins. In her next book, The Human Condition, she examined the vita active (active life), defending the classical social ideals of work, citizenship, and political involvement, and opposing the obsession with basic welfare. In 1963, Arendt published her most recognized, controversial, and criticized work – Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, based on a series of essays that she wrote when covering the trial of the Nazi, Adolf Eichmann in Israel in 1961. In the book, Arendt argued that Eichmann, who was responsible for the transportation of many Jews to concentration camps during the holocaust, is not a monster nor a sadist, but an ambitious bureaucrat that his actions derived from his devotion and dedication to the Nazi movement. He was, in her words, “terrifyingly normal.” She was grappling with the question, ‘Can one do evil without being evil?’ Her critics did not accept her thesis that one could have a key role in the Nazi genocide yet have no evil motives. In all of her writings, Arendt challenged traditional conceptions, provoking new ways of thinking, even if debatable. She wrote not as a historian or philosopher but as a theorist that relied on facts to examine human political tendencies when given freedom and power. During the 1960s and the 1970s, Arendt held teaching positions in various institutes, including the University of Chicago, the New School for Social Research, the University of California, Berkeley, and Princeton. Throughout her life, she published more than 20 books and hundreds of articles and essays. She died of a heart attack in 1975, at the age of 69. Read more...