ABSTRACT
Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, of German-Jewish parentage in 1906. She was educated in Koenigsberg and later Heidelberg. The publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 established her as a major figure in postwar political theory. Arendt's powerful critique of antiSemitism was directly linked to her participation in Jewish affairs once she came to the United States. The Origins of Totalitarianism ends on a creative ambiguity, one hardly restricted to Arendt. A great deal of argument within political theory after World War Two focused on just such an examination of the causes of extremism and the breakdown of law and democratic order. Arendt's careful outline of how the Wansee Conference decisions to exterminate the Jews to make Europe Judenrein or Jew-Free is chilling and numbing. It is among the best writing she was able to muster. Arendt wrote a work on Jews worthy of a German scholar and a classical Greek humanist.
