Hanna Arendt Biography

Hannah Arendt was born into a family of secular Jewish Germans in the city of Linden (now part of Hanover), and grew up in KÐ"¶nigsberg and Berlin.

At the University of Marburg, she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger, with whom she embarked on a long, stormy and romantic relationship for which she was later criticized because of Heidegger's support for the Nazi party while he was rector of Freiburg University.

In the wake of one of their breakups, Arendt moved to Heidelberg, where she wrote her dissertation on the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine, under the existentialist philosopher-psychologist Karl Jaspers.

She married GÐ"јnther Stern, later known as GÐ"јnther Anders, in 1929 in Berlin (they divorced in 1937).

The dissertation was published the same year, but Arendt was prevented from habilitating, a prerequisite for teaching in German universities, because she was Jewish. She worked for some time researching anti-Semitism before being interrogated by the Gestapo, and thereupon fled Germany for Paris. Here she met and befriended the literary critic and Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin, her first husband's cousin. While in France, Arendt worked to support and aid Jewish refugees. She was imprisoned in Camp Gurs but was able to escape after a couple of weeks.

However, with the German military occupation of northern France during World War II, and the deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps, even by the Vichy collaborator regime in the unoccupied south, Arendt was forced to flee France. In 1940, she married the German poet and Marxist philosopher Heinrich BlÐ"јcher, by then a former Communist Party member.

In 1941, Arendt escaped with her husband and her mother to the United States with the assistance of the American diplomat Hiram Bingham IV, who illegally issued visas to her and around 2500 other Jewish refugees. She then became active in the German-Jewish community in New York. In 1941-1945, she wrote a column for the German-language Jewish newspaper, Der Aufbau. From 1944, she directed research for the Commission of European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction and traveled frequently to Germany in this capacity. [1]

After World War II she returned to Germany and worked for Youth Aliyah. Later she resumed relations with Heidegger, and testified on his behalf in a German denazification hearing. She