Hannah Arendt

German-American philosopher , political thinker and writer. She died in New York, NY on December 4, 1975 of an apparent heart attack. Described as one of the 20th century's most brilliant and original political thinkers, she wrote analyses of totalitarianism and democracy, social problems, revolution, political image-making, and, ultimately, the human mind. Fleeing to Paris when Hitler began his rise to power in 1933, she became a social worker for Youth Aliyah, a relief agency that found homes in Palestine for orphaned and homeless children of Europe. She and her second husband emigrated to the United States in 1941 and was naturalized in 1950. She incorporated her observations of Hitler and the Nazis in her first major US publication, "The Origins of Totalitarianism." As she grew older, her focus shifted toward the analysis of thought--thinking, willing and judging. Her work, incomplete at the time of her death, was published posthumously as "The Life of the Mind" She earned her BA in 1924 at Koenigsberg University and earned her Ph.D in philosophy in 1928, at age 22, studying under Karl Jaspers at the University of Heidelberg. She wrote in German and in English, publishing her first, "Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin" in 1929 and "Sechs Essays" in 1948, translating Kafka's diaries in 1949. Among her well-known books are "The Human Condition, in 1958, "Between Past and Future" 1961, and "Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" in 1963. Arendt was the recipient of many awards, including a 1954 award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1954 and an Emerson-Thoreau Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1969, as well as several honorary degrees. She married Gunther Stern in 1929; in 1940, she married Heinrich Bluecher, a philosophy professor who died in 1970. Link to Wikipedia biography