Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany, to a secular Jewish family. She grew up in Königsberg (Immanuel Kant’s city), raised largely by her mother after her father died when she was seven. Brilliant and strong-willed, Arendt studied philosophy at university under some of Germany’s greatest thinkers – including Martin Heidegger at Marburg (with whom she had a youthful love affair) and Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg. She completed a dissertation on St. Augustine’s concept of love. But Arendt’s academic career in Germany was cut short by the rise of the Nazis in 1933. As an outspoken Jew, she could no longer live freely in her home country.

Arendt fled to Paris, where she worked aiding Jewish refugees. There she met literary and Zionist circles, married Heinrich Blücher (her second marriage; her first had been brief). When the Nazis invaded France, Arendt was interned in a camp as an “enemy alien” – but she managed to escape. In 1941, she and Blücher secured passage on one of the last ships out of Europe to America.

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