ARENDT, HANNAH

born Oct. 14, 1906, Hannover, Ger. died Dec. 4, 1975, New York, N.Y., U.S. German-born American political scientist and philosopher known for her critical writing on Jewish affairs and her study of totalitarianism. Arendt grew up in her native Hannover, Germany, and in Knigsberg, Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). She attended the universities of Marburg, Freiburg, and Heidelberg (from which she received her Ph.D. in 1928). When the Nazis came to power in Germany in 1933, she fled to Paris, where she was a social worker and in 1940 married Heinrich Bluecher, a philosophy professor. She again became a fugitive from the Nazis the following year. In New York City she served as research director of the Conference on Jewish Relations (194446), chief editor of Schocken Books (194648), and executive director (194952) of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc., which sought to salvage Jewish writings dispersed by the Nazis. She became a U.S. citizen in 1951. In her monumental Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), Arendt related the development of totalitarianism to 19th-century anti-Semitism and imperialism and saw its growth as the outcome of the disintegration of the traditional nation-state. Totalitarian regimes, she argued, because of their pursuit of raw political power and neglect of material or utilitarian considerations, had revolutionized the social structure and made contemporary politics nearly unpredictable. That work established her as a major political thinker. She served on the faculty of the University of Chicago (196367) and thereafter at the New School for Social Research, New York City. In the controversial book Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), based on her reportage of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, Arendt portrayed that Nazi war criminal as simply an ambitious bureaucrat whose routine extermination of Jews epitomized the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil that had spread across Europe at the time. Among Arendt's other works are The Human Condition (1958), Between Past and Future (1961), On Revolution (1963), Men in Dark Times (1968), On Violence (1970), and Crises of the Republic (1972). Her unfinished manuscript on The Life of the Mind was edited by her friend and correspondent Mary McCarthy and published in 1978. Additional reading Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World (1982), is a biography. Analyses of her work include Margaret Canovan, Hannah Arendt: A Reinterpretation of Her Political Thought (1992); Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra K. Hinchman (eds.), Hannah Arendt: Critical Essays (1994); Bonnie Honig (ed.), Feminist Interpretations of Hannah Arendt (1995); Richard J. Bernstein, Hannah Arendt and the Jewish Question (1996); and Larry May and Jerome Kohn (eds.), Hannah Arendt: Twenty Years Later (1996).