Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of power and evil, as well as politics, direct democracy, authority, and totalitarianism. She died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, at the age of 69, leaving her last work, The Life of the Mind, unfinished. She taught at many American universities, while declining tenure-track appointments. These included the books The Human Condition in 1958, as well as Eichmann in Jerusalem and On Revolution in 1963. With the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, her reputation as a thinker and writer was established and a series of works followed. She became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, becoming an American citizen in 1950. She settled in New York, which remained her principal residence for the rest of her life. She escaped and made her way to the United States in 1941 via Portugal.

When Germany invaded France that year she was detained by the French as an alien. Divorcing Stern that year, she then married Heinrich Blücher in 1940. She was stripped of her German citizenship in 1937. There she worked for Youth Aliyah, assisting young Jews to emigrate to the British Mandate of Palestine. On release, she fled Germany, living in Czechoslovakia and Switzerland before settling in Paris. In 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, Arendt was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism. Hannah Arendt married Günther Stern in 1929, but soon began to encounter increasing antisemitism in 1930s Nazi Germany. Her dissertation was entitled Love and Saint Augustine and her supervisor was the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers. She obtained her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg in 1929. After completing secondary education in Berlin, Arendt studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a four-year affair. Arendt was raised in a politically progressive, secular family, her mother being an ardent Social Democrat. Paul Arendt had contracted syphilis in his youth, but was thought to be in remission when Arendt was born. When she was three, her family moved to the East Prussian capital of Königsberg for her father's health care. Īrendt was born to a Jewish family in Linden (now a district of Hanover) in 1906. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century. Hannah Arendt ( / ˈ ɛər ə n t, ˈ ɑːr-/, US also / ə ˈ r ɛ n t/, German: ( listen) born Johanna Arendt 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German-born American historian and political philosopher.

Hannah arendt origins