Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt, a philosopher, political scientist, and poet, was born on October 14, 1906, in Hanover, Germany. She was the only child of Paul Arendt, an engineer who died when she was seven, and Martha (née Cohn). Arendt studied philosophy at the University of Marburg, where she began a relationship with Martin Heidegger, who had been one of her instructors. According to Arendt scholar and translator Samantha Rose Hill, “[s]everal of [Arendt’s] poems written between 1923 and 1926 were written for or about Martin Heidegger.” Arendt spent one semester at Freiburg University, where she attended Edmund Husserl’s lectures. She obtained her doctorate at the University of Heidelberg, under the tutelage of Karl Jaspers. There, in 1929, she completed her dissertation, titled Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin [Love and Saint Augustine]. 

Arendt fled Germany in 1933 after she was released from a Gestapo jail at Alexanderplatz in Berlin. After living in exile around continental Europe for some months, including a brief stint in Geneva as a recording secretary for the League of Nations, she settled in Paris for six years where she was a social worker, helping to relocate French and German refugees. On May 22, 1941, Arendt arrived at Ellis Island. She did not speak English, but obtained a job as a housekeeper in Winchester, Massachusetts, where she held frequent conversations with her employer, who also supplied her with books in English. Over the next decade in New York, Arendt worked as a journalist and lecturer, as well as a research director for the Conference on Jewish Relations. Later, she served as chief editor for Schocken Books, where she helped publish The Diaries of Franz Kafka, 1914–1923, edited by Max Brod (1949). She was also the executive director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., an organization that sought to recover and redistribute cultural property seized from Jewish citizens by the Nazis. As part of her work on behalf of the organization, Arendt helped to recover one and a half million artifacts that had been stolen by the Nazis. Arendt’s poetry during this postwar period reflects on her sense of loss. In 1951, she became a United States citizen. 

Arendt is the author of numerous books published in both German and English. While in Paris in the 1930s, she completed work on a biography of the German-Jewish thinker Rahel Varnhagen. The book was originally Arendt’s Habilitationsschrift, or her second publication after her dissertation that was to earn her a faculty position at a German university. The work was later published in English translation—first, in London, in 1958 as Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess (East and West Library), then in New York as Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974). She published the book for which she is best known, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt, Brace & Co.), in 1951. Her other works include Crises of the Republic (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972); On Violence (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1970); Men in Dark Times (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968); Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Viking Press, 1963); On Revolution (Viking Press, 1963); and Between Past and Future: Six Exercises in Political Thought (Viking Press, 1961).

Arendt’s unfinished work, The Life of the Mind (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), was recovered by her friend Mary McCarthy and published posthumously. Arendt completed two volumes of the intended three-volume work, which was to examine aspects of vita contemplativa: thinking, willing, and judging. Some notes and background materials from the intended third volume, “Judging,” were published in 1982 as Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy (University of Chicago Press). Responsibility and Judgment (Schocken Books, 2003), another posthumous work, edited by Jerome Kohn, collects essays written by Arendt after 1963.

Arendt taught at the University of Chicago, Columbia University, Cornell University, The New School for Social Research, Northwestern University, Princeton University, and the University of California, Berkeley. She was the only woman at Princeton to be made a full professor when she returned to the institution in 1959 to hold the position of visiting professor of politics. 

Arendt was awarded honorary degrees from Dartmouth College, The New School, the University of Notre Dame, Princeton, Smith College, and Yale University. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952 and, in 1975, was the first woman and first U.S. citizen to receive Denmark’s Sonning Prize for outstanding contributions to European culture. 

Arendt died on December 4, 1975, in her apartment in Manhattan, New York. In 2025, Liveright Publishing released What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, translated and edited by Samantha Rose Hill with Genese Grill.