Author: Hannah Arendt

Arendt fled Germany in 1933 after a brief arrest for researching propaganda against Jews, was interned by the French at Gurs in 1940, escaped, and reached New York in 1941 stateless. The Origins of Totalitarianism argues that the two totalitarian systems were a new kind of state rather than old tyranny scaled up. Covering Eichmann's trial in Jerusalem for the New Yorker she produced the phrase the banality of evil, meaning that the man in the glass booth was a careerist rather than a monster, and she also wrote that Jewish councils had cooperated in the deportations; the second point cost her friendships for the rest of her life. Her affair with Martin Heidegger began when she was his teenage student, he later joined the ruling party in Germany, and she resumed contact with him after the war. She died in 1975.