Arendt, Hannah (1906-75)

[Extract] Personal History: Hannah Arendt was born in Hannover and grew up in an assimilated German-Jewish social democratic household in Königsberg, then East Prussia, today Kalliningrad in Russia. She attended university (1924–8), completing a year at Marburg where her teacher, and briefly her lover, was Martin Heidegger; a semester at Freiburg with Edmund Husserl; and then on to Heidelberg to complete a doctoral dissertation under Karl Jaspers. Arendt had a gift for friendship. She remained close to Jaspers all her life. She even maintained a tense contact with Heidegger after the war, despite his embrace of Nazism. After university, Arendt lived in Berlin and married the leftist philosopher Günter Stern (pen-name Anders) in 1929, fleeing Nazi Germany for France in 1933, divorcing Stern in 1937. She worked in Paris for Jewish relief organizations and became acquainted with the rising French intellectuals of the day (Aron, Sartre), as well as Jewish intellectual émigrés such as Walter Benjamin, whose manuscripts she carried from France and edited (in 1968) after Benjamin's suicide. She met her second husband, the Berliner and communist Heinrich Blücher, in 1936. In 1940, Blücher and Arendt fled Nazi-occupied France for the US, finally arriving in 1941 in New York, the city that would be her home for the rest of her life. She became a US citizen in 1951