Born in Hanover, Hannah Arendt flees Germany as a Jew in 1933. She spends time in France working with Jewish refugee children before traveling to the United States in 1941 and becoming a U.S. citizen in 1951, where she works as a research director, editor, and professor. In 1961, Arendt proposes coverage of the Eichmann trial to The New Yorker, and they accept. She travels to Jerusalem to cover the trial for its duration and is present for Eichmann’s execution.

Eichmann in Jerusalem created a controversial backlash that Arendt herself could not have predicted. A lot of the initial criticism focused its venom on the use of “banality” in her subtitle: “A Report on the Banality of Evil,” a word Arendt later states she would not have used had she known the uproar it would cause. Arendt’s point that Eichmann’s particular brand of evil is not special or unique shakes readers to their core. If Eichmann and other members of the Nazi Party are not uniquely evil, then the converse is true: that they are ordinary, or, as Arendt describes them, “terrifyingly normal” (276).