Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt was a German-born Jewish philosopher and one of the most important political thinkers of the previous century. She studied theology and philosophy under Heidegger, and wrote her doctoral dissertation with Karl Jaspers. Following the Nazis’ rise to power in 1933 she fled to France, where she was interned as an ‘enemy alien’. In 1941 she managed to escape to America, where she gained citizenship in 1951. She taught at Princeton, Yale and the New School, and wrote highly influential books, including The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958) and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), the controversial report of the trial against Holocaust-organiser Adolf Eichmann.