A Jewish refugee from Germany, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) analyzed major issues of the 20th century and produced a brilliant and original political philosophy.

Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany, the only child of middle-class Jewish parents of Russian descent. A precocious child whose father died in 1913, she was encouraged by her mother in intellectual and academic pursuits. As a university student in Germany (1924-1929) she studied with the finest and most original scholars of that time: with Rudolf Bultmann in New Testament and Martin Heidegger in philosophy at Marburg, with the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl at Freiburg, and with the existentialist Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg. She remained close friends with Heidegger and Jaspers throughout her life.

After receiving her Ph.D. and marrying Gunther Stern, both in 1929, she worked on a biography of Rahel Varnhagen, a noted 19th-century hostess, which analyzed Varnhagen's relationship to her Jewish heritage...