The Konigsberg Origin

She reported on the Eichmann trial and lost most of her surviving German-Jewish friends. The reportage ran in the New Yorker and became Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963. The phrase it produced — "the banality of evil" — outlived the argument that followed it, and the argument is still going: sixty years on, the field has not finished having it. Eleanor Whitlock's biography sets that quarrel back inside the whole life it came out of.

Johanna Arendt was the only child of secular Jewish parents, born on October 14, 1906, in Linden, near Hanover, and raised in Königsberg. She read philosophy at Marburg under Martin Heidegger, with whom she began a four-year affair at eighteen; at Freiburg under Edmund Husserl; and at Heidelberg under Karl Jaspers, who supervised her 1929 doctoral thesis on the concept of love in Augustine. In 1933, after a brief Gestapo detention for documenting anti-Semitic propaganda, she left Germany. Seven years in Paris followed, working with the Youth Aliyah. In 1940 the Vichy government interned her in the camp at Gurs. She escaped, and reached New York by way of Lisbon in May 1941.

The American decades produced the work. Whitlock follows the long years of journalism for Aufbau and the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction project with Salo Baron, the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951 and The Human Condition in 1958, the 1961 trial and the 1963 controversy that estranged her from most of her surviving German-Jewish friends, and the long second marriage to Heinrich Blücher. On December 4, 1975, at sixty-nine, she died of a heart attack at her Riverside Drive apartment, mid-conversation with friends.

What emerges is a portrait of the most consequential political philosopher of the second half of the twentieth century — and of the argument her Eichmann book opened, which her own field has yet to close.