Khanna Arendt

Hannah Arendt (Hannah Arendt; 14 October 1906, Hanover, German Empire — 4 December 1975, New York, USA) was a German-American philosopher of Jewish origin, political theorist, and historian, and the founder of the theory of totalitarianism.

She was born into a Jewish family in Hanover, Germany. She spent her childhood in Königsberg (from the age of 14 she visited Kant’s grave). She received an education in classical philology and theology at the universities of Königsberg, Berlin, Marburg, Freiburg, and Heidelberg, studying under E. Husserl, M. Heidegger, and K. Jaspers. She corresponded with many of them. She defended her doctoral dissertation on the concept of love in Augustine in Heidelberg in 1928 (under the supervision of K. Jaspers). She participated in the anti-fascist movement. Before the Nazis came to power, she fled to France, and then from occupied France in 1940 to New York. In the United States she cooperated with a number of international Jewish organizations. From 1946 to 1949 she was chief editor of Shoken Books. She was the responsible co-editor of the edition of Kafka’s Collected Works (1946 and subsequent years). From 1963 she was a professor at the University of Chicago; from 1967 she was professor of political and social sciences at the New School for Social Research (New York). She taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and at Princeton and Columbia Universities, gradually gaining a reputation as one of the leading political thinkers in the country. Among her fundamental studies are The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951, Russian translation: Moscow, 1995), The Human Condition (1958), and On Revolution (1963). Widely known is Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), which provoked numerous controversies about the nature and meaning of the Holocaust. She was an honorary doctor of many universities and a laureate of social science prizes in Germany, the USA, and Denmark. Doctor of Philosophy (1928), corresponding member of the German Academy for Language and Literature (FRG), full member of the American Academy of Political Science. She was awarded the Lessing Prize (1959), the Emerson-Thoreau Medal (1969), and the Sonning Prize for contributions to European civilization