Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt. 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975. , A humanist writer and philosopher whose guiding principle was “To Think What We Are Doing,” Hannah Arendt though boldly about our shared political world. Born in Hanover, Germany in 1906, Arendt studied under Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. Arrested by the Nazis for her work with German Zionists in 1933, she fled to Paris, and then escaped from a detention camp in Gurs in France. She arrived in new York in 1941, a stateless Jewish refugee. Arendt’s major books include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1975) and Eichmann in Jerusalem, (1963) which redefined our understanding of the Holocaust, three of the most influential books of the 20th century. She also published Between Past and Future, Men in Dark Times, Crises of the Republic, and On Revolution. She lived at this address from 1959 to 1975, and is buried in the Bard College Cemetery.