Hannnah Arendt (1906-1975) was born in Hanover, Germany, in 1906, and received her doctorate in philosophy from the University of Heidelberg. In 1933, she was briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo , after which she fled Germany for Paris, where she worked on behalf of Jewish refugee children . In 1937, she was stripped of her German citizenship, and in 1941 she left France for the United States where she became one of the world's most influential academic and political theorist s. Famed for her observations on totalitarian regimes like Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany, as well as 'the banality of evil', Arendt is also the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem , and The Human Condition .