Hannah Arendt was born in Germany in 1906 to politically progressive, secular Jewish parents. She studied at the University of Marburg under the renowned philosopher Martin Heidegger, with whom she had a four-year affair, and received her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Heidelberg in 1929, under the supervision of philosopher Karl Jaspers.

After a brief imprisonment by the Gestapo for researching antisemitism at a public library in 1933, the year Adolf Hitler came to power, she escaped Germany, fleeing with her mother overnight through the mountains into Czechoslovakia. Arendt settled in Geneva and then Paris, where she worked for Jewish organizations and forged close friendships with other exiled intellectuals. When Germany invaded France in 1940, she was detained as an enemy alien by the French government and held in an internment camp for five weeks before escaping and making her way to New York City.

In New York, Arendt initially supported herself by writing for German and Jewish émigré publications, before being recruited to help lead the new Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, where she compiled lists of Jewish cultural assets in Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe to facilitate post-war recovery. By 1950, she was devoting herself full-time to writing, and her first English-language book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, was published in 1951.