nd on January 16, 1940 she married Blücher. Less than half a year later, the Wehrmacht invaded France, and the couple was separated and interned in southern France along with other stateless Germans. Arendt was sent to Gurs, from which she escaped and soon joined her husband. 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 2,500 other Jewish refugees.
Arendt became active in the German-Jewish community in New York, writing for the German weekly Aufbau, and for Jewish journals such as Jewish Social Studies. Arendt argued for a Jewish army and, expressed the hope that Arabs and Jews might live together in a postwar Palestinian state. After the Holocaust, the editor and historian Salo W. Baron made her responsible for the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, an effort to locate and redistribute historical Jewish artifacts that had been misplaced during the war. In 1944 she began work on her first major political work, The Origins of Totalitarianism. In 1946, she published What is Existenz Philosophy, and from 1946 to 1951 she worked as an editor at Schocken Books, a German Jewish publishing company that had reestablished itself in New York. In 1951, she attained American citizenship, and The Origins of Totalitarianism was published. The book made Arendt an intellectual celebrity, and she began the first in a sequence of visiting fellowships and professorial positions at American universities.
After World War II Arendt resumed relations with Heidegger, and testified on his behalf in a German denazification hearing. She also resumed communication with Jaspers, and began corresponding with Mary McCarthy. Arendt served as a visiting scholar at the University of California, Berkeley, Princeton University, Columbia University, and Northwestern University. She also served as a professor on The Committee of Social Thought at the University of Chicago, as well as at The New School in New York City, and served as a fellow at Yale University and Wesleyan University. In 1959, she became the first woman appointed to a full professorship at Princeton.
In 1958, she published The Human Condition and Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, a book which she had begun years before in Germany. In 1959, she published Reflections on Little Rock, her controversial consideration of the emergent Black civil rights movement. In 1961, she published Between Past and Future, and traveled to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Nazi Adolf Eichmann for the New Yorker magazine.
In 1963 she published her reflections on the Eichmann trial, first in the New Yorker, and then in book form as Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. In this year, she also published On Revolution. In 1967, having held positions at Berkeley and Chicago, she took up a position at the New School for Social Research in New York. In 1968, she published Men in Dark Times.
In 1970, the year that Blücher died, Arendt gave a seminar on Kant's philosophy of judgment at the New School which was published posthumously as Reflections on Kant's Political Philosophy in 1982. In 1971 she published Thinking and Moral Considerations, and the following year Crisis of the Republic appeared. She then began a projected three-volume work, The Life of the Mind. Volumes 1 and 2 (Thinking and Willing) were published posthumously. She died on December 4, 1975, having only just started work on the third and final volume, Judging. Arendt was buried at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where her husband taught for many years.
The writing of Hannah Arendt covered a wide variety of topics; she never elaborated a systematic political philosophy. She drew inspiration from Heidegger, Aristotle, Augustine, Kant, Nietzsche, and Jaspers, and wrote about themes such as the nature of freedom and authority, totalitarianism, revolution, the faculties of 'thinking' and 'judging,' the history of political thought, and the interpretation of politic