Hannah Arendt

 

The German-American political theorist, historian, and philosopher Hannah Arendt was born Johanna Arendt in a secular and educated Jewish family in Hanover City, Germany on 14 October 1906. She is best known for her works dealing with the nature of wealth, power, and evil. At the University of Marburg Hitler supporter and German philosopher Martin Heidegger taught her and had an affair with her. Arendt Arendt was Jewish. She married Gunther Stern in 1929 but soon began to encounter increasing antisemitism in 1930s Nazi Germany. In 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, Arendt was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for researching antisemitism. On release, during World War II, she fled the Nazi regime, eventually moving to America in 1941.

Arendt established her reputation as a political theorist with the publication of "The Origins of Totalitarianism" in 1951; "The Human Condition" followed in 1958. From 1951 onwards, Arendt taught at many institutions of higher learning, preserving her independence.

Arendt's 1963 work "Eichmann in Jerusalem" a report on the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann became controversial for characterizing Eichmann as "thoughtless" rather than evil. In this work, she famously coined the phrase "the banality of evil"  and explained how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems. Ardendt died on 04 December 1975 at 69 due to a heart attack.