Although she first wrote about the Holocaust even before it had acquired that name, Hannah Arendt recognized it as the central event of the twentieth century and traced its origins and its effects on levels international and individual. Arendt's contributions--from her remarkable description of totalitarianism, to her insights into the meaning of identity in modern society, to her theories on the nature of evil and of thought-- were formed by the teachings of Martin Heidegger and his colleagues, Edmund Husserl and Karl Jaspers, but were transformed in the cauldron of Nazi persecution.

Hannah Arendt was born in Hanover, Germany, on 14 October 1906. Three years after her birth, her parents, Paul Arendt--an engineer--and Martha Cohn Arendt, returned to their hometown of Königsberg because of Paul Arendt's illness. He died of paresis (syphilitic insanity) in 1913, when Hannah was seven, leaving his wife, Martha, and their daughter in financial straits...