Johanna "Hannah" Arendt (; German: ['a:R@nt]; 14 October 1906 - 4 December 1975) was a German-born American political theorist. Her eighteen books and numerous articles, on topics ranging from totalitarianism to epistemology, had a lasting influence on political theory. Arendt is widely considered one of the most important political philosophers of the twentieth century. As a Jew, Arendt chose to leave Nazi Germany in 1933, and lived in Czechoslovakia, Switzerland, and France before escaping to the United States in 1941 via Portugal.

Arendt was born into a secular family of German Jews in Linden (now a part of Hanover), the daughter of Martha (born Cohn) and Paul Arendt. She grew up in Konigsberg (renamed Kaliningrad when it was annexed to the Soviet Union in 1946) and Berlin. Arendt's family was thoroughly assimilated and she later remembered: "With us from Germany, the word 'assimilation' received a 'deep' philosophical meaning. You can hardly realize how serious we were about it."  Arendt came to define her Jewish identity negatively after encountering antisemitism as an adult. She came to greatly identify with Rahel Varnhagen, a nineteenth-century Prussian hostess who desperately wanted to assimilate into German culture, only to be rejected because she was born Jewish. Arendt later said of Varnhagen that she was "my very closest woman friend, unfortunately dead a hundred years now."  After completing her high school studies in 1924, she enrolled at the University of Marburg, where she spent a year studying philosophy with Martin Heidegger. According to Hans Jonas, her only German-Jewish classmate, in her year at the university, Arendt began a long and problematic romantic relationship with Heidegger, for which she was later criticized because of his support for the Nazi Party while he was rector at the University of Freiburg. After a year at Marburg, Arendt spent a semester at Freiburg University, attending the lectures of Edmund Husserl. In 1926 she moved to the University of Heidelberg, where in 1929, she completed her dissertation under the existentialist philosopher-psychologist Karl Jaspers. Her thesis was Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin: Versuch einer philosophischen Interpretation ("On the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine: Attempt at a philosophical interpretation").

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