ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, of German-Jewish parentage in 1906. Arendt's views on genocide extended far beyond her Eichmann in Jerusalem volume. Indeed, unconstrained by journalistic narrative, she developed a general theory of totalitarianism, in which the subject of genocide was thoroughly explored. The forms of totalitarianism may vary—Nazi, Fascist, communist—but the content allows for genocidal acts whatever the ideological proclivities of the extremist regimes may proclaim. The Origins of Totalitarianism ends on a creative ambiguity, one hardly restricted to Arendt. The publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 established her as a major figure in postwar political theory. In that work, she attempted to provide a unitary approach to totalitarianism as such, seeing differences between National-Socialism and Communism as of lesser significance than the organizational and cultural linkages that such systems have with each other.
