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Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 to a secular Jewish family in Hannover, Germany. At an early age she moved with her family to the Baltic city of Königsberg in East Prussia (then part of Germany), where she spent her childhood and youth. A precocious student, she left home at age 16 to study classics and Christian theology as a special student at the University of Berlin. Two years later, she began studies in philosophy at the University of Marburg. There she became a student of Martin Heidegger, who was then on his way to becoming one of the most important and influential Continental philosophers of the twentieth century. Arendt's philosophical apprenticeship with Heidegger in the mid-1920s marked an epoch in her intellectual life (and his); it was accompanied by an intense but short-lived romantic affair between them. (Heidegger was 17 years her senior, and married; he had not yet begun his now-notorious involvement with the Nazi party.) In 1926 she broke off their affair and left Marburg to study at Heidelberg with Heidegger's friend Karl Jaspers, who was then the leading exponent of "existentialism" in Germany.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230501676_12

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