Hannah Arendt

Born to a Jewish family in Linden in 1906, Arendt lost her father at seven and grew up in a secular, politically progressive household. She studied under Martin Heidegger at Marburg - where they began a romantic affair - and earned her doctorate in philosophy at Heidelberg in 1929 under Karl Jaspers. In 1933 the Gestapo briefly imprisoned her for illegal research into antisemitism; she fled to Paris, worked helping young Jews emigrate to Palestine, then escaped a French detention camp when Germany invaded and reached the United States in 1941. The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 established her as a major thinker, followed by The Human Condition in 1958 and Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963, the latter igniting debate over her attempt to explain how ordinary people serve atrocity. She taught at American universities, refused tenure-track posts, and died suddenly of a heart attack in 1975, leaving The Life of the Mind unfinished.