She was one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century. Her works cover a broad range of topics, but she is best known for those dealing with the nature of wealth , power , and evil , as well as politics, direct democracy , authority , tradition , and totalitarianism.
She is also remembered for the controversy surrounding the trial of Adolf Eichmann , for her attempt to explain how ordinary people become actors in totalitarian systems, which was considered by some an apologia , and for the phrase " the banality of evil. Paul Arendt had contracted syphilis in his youth but was thought to be in remission when Arendt was born. He died when she was seven. Arendt was raised in a politically progressive, secular family, her mother being an ardent Social Democrat.
After completing secondary education in Berlin, Arendt studied at the University of Marburg under Martin Heidegger , with whom she engaged in a romantic affair that began while she was his student. Her dissertation was entitled Love and Saint Augustine , and her supervisor was the existentialist philosopher Karl Jaspers. In , the year Adolf Hitler came to power, Arendt was arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo for performing illegal research into antisemitism.
On release, she fled Germany, living in Czechoslovakia and Switzerland before settling in Paris. She was stripped of her German citizenship in When Germany invaded France that year she was detained by the French as an alien. She escaped and made her way to the United States in via Portugal.
She settled in New York, which remained her principal residence for the rest of her life. She became a writer and editor and worked for the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction , becoming an American citizen in With the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in , her reputation as a thinker and writer was established, and a series of works followed. She taught at many American universities while declining tenure-track appointments. She died suddenly of a heart attack in , at the age of 69, leaving her last work, The Life of the Mind , unfinished.
