Existing comment:
Hannah Arendt, 1906-1975
Born Linden-Limmer, Hanover, Germany
Hannah Arendt came to the United States via France in 1941 as a refugee from Adolf Hitler's Third Reich. Having earned a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg, she spent the next several years working as a freelance journalist and research director for the Conference on Jewish Relations in New York City. By the late 1940s, Arendt had begun writing a book on the conditions that had fostered the dictatorships of Hitler in Germany and Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union. The result was The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), which established Arendt as a leading political theorist and historian. Following the appearance of a collection of her essays, Between Past and Future, in 1961, an admirer declared her "one of the most brilliant . . . of living political philosophers." In 2013, the award-winning German film Hannah Arendt fascinated audiences in the United States.
Fred Stein, 1944 (printed 1987) |