Hanna Arendt was born in 1906 in Hannover, Germany. She spent her childhood years in Königsberg, where her parents managed a department store. Before the Nazis came to power in 1933, Hanna was an avid reader and writer. As a teenager she ran away from home, traveled around Europe for two years, and returned to Königsberg to become a journalist
Read more
When she refused to give up her communist beliefs, her father threatened to disown her if she did not enter into a marriage with the son of the Nazi mayor. She moved to Paris in 1937, where she joined the exiled German Communist Party and acquired French citizenship after the war. After World War II she wrote On Revolution and The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Her last book was Men in Dark Times: Essays and Dialogues, published posthumously.