ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt was born and raised in Konigsberg, a provincial German town in East Prussia which had become well-known through two of its most famous citizens, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant and the pioneer of western Jewish Enlightenment Moses Mendelssohn. Her life can be divided into three major phases. The first encompasses the years of her childhood, her student years in Germany, and her first political work against the rise of Nazism. The second phase of her life, beginning with her forced departure from Germany after Hitler’s rise to power, were years of persecution and intense struggle for survival, first physically in France and later financially in New York. In the third phase of her life, from 1951 to her sudden death in 1975, Arendt rose to the stature of a major twentieth-century thinker, whose honesty in the concern for the nature and causes of twentieth-century crises gained her both fame and fierce’ disapproval.
