ndt was born October 14, 1906 in the then-independent city of Linden in Lower Saxony (now part of Hanover), Germany, the only child of Paul and Martha (Cohn) Arendt, both of whom were secular Jews and had grown up in Russian-Jewish homes. When Hannah was seven, her father died of paresis (syphilitic insanity), and not much later, battles between Russian and German armies were fought near her home. She was raised in Königsberg (the hometown of her admired precursor Immanuel Kant) and Berlin. In 1920, her mother married Martin Beerwald.
Hannah graduated from high school in 1924, and that fall she began to study theology with Rudolf Bultmann at the University of Marburg. She went on to the University of Heidelberg, where she wrote a dissertation on the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine, under the direction of the existentialist philosopher-psychologist Karl Jaspers. In September 1929, Arendt married Günther Stern, a Jewish philosopher whose pen name was Günther Anders. She also completed her dissertation that year and earned her doctorate, but was prevented from habilitating (and thus from teaching in German universities) in 1933 because she was Jewish. When the National Socialists began to take power, Arendt became a political activist and, beginning in 1933, helped the German Zionist Organization and its leader, Kurt Blumenfeld, to publicize the plight of the victims of Nazism. She was arrested by the Gestapo for doing research on anti-Semitic propaganda, but won the sympathy of a Berlin jailer, was released and escaped to Paris, where she remained for the rest of the decade. Arendt worked with Youth Aliyah and helped rescue Jewish children from the Third Reich and bring them to Palestine.
In Paris, she befriended Raymond Aron and the literary critic and Marxist mystic Walter Benjamin, her first husband's cousin. She also met Heinrich Blücher, a poet and communist with no formal education who had been a member of Rosa Luxemburg's defeated Spartacus League, and a gentile. In 1937, Arendt divorced, and 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 Ne