Arendt was born into a secular family of German Jews in Linden (present-day Hanover), the daughter of Martha (née Cohn) and Paul Arendt.^[6] She grew up in Königsberg (renamed Kaliningrad and annexed to theSoviet Union in 1946) and Berlin. At the University of Marburg, she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger.

According to Hans Jonas, her only German-Jewish classmate, Arendt embarked on a long and stormy romantic relationship with Heidegger, for which she later was criticized because of Heidegger's support for theNazi Party when he was rector at the University of Freiburg.

In the wake of one of their breakups, Arendt moved to Heidelberg, where she wrote her dissertation under the existentialist philosopher-psychologist Karl Jaspers on the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine. In 1929, in Berlin, she married Günther Stern, later known as Günther Anders. (They divorced in 1937.) The dissertation was published in 1929. Arendt was prevented from "habilitating"—a prerequisite for teaching in German universities—because she was Jewish. She researched anti-Semitism for some time before being arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapoin 1933.^[7]

Paris[edit]

In 1933, Arendt fled Germany for Paris, where she befriended the Marxist literary critic and philosopher, Walter Benjamin, her first husband's cousin. While in France, she worked to support and aid Jewish refugees. In 1937, she was stripped of her German citizenship. In 1940, she married the German poet and Marxist philosopher Heinrich Blücher, a former member of the Communist Party of Germany. Later that year, after the German military occupation of northern France, the Vichy regime began deportation of foreign Jews to concentration camps in the unoccupied south of France, and she was interned inCamp Gurs as an "enemy alien".