On Love and Tyranny

A timely, dramatic biography that explores how Hannah Arendt's personal experience shaped her indispensable work on totalitarianism, refugees and the nature of love and evil

Hannah Arendt lived through the darkest of times; she made it her life's work to illuminate them. Interrogated in Hitler's Germany and held at an internment camp in occupied France, she bore direct witness to some of the most catastrophic events of 20th-century history. In her indispensable writings, Arendt approached with undaunted intellect the intractable human problems she observed: exile, totalitarianism, the nature of responsibility and the moral problem of evil.

In this immersive new biography, Ann Heberlein tracks the development of Arendt's work in relation to her dramatic life. Ranging over Arendt's formative affair with Nazi sympathiser Martin Heidegger and her complex love for her husband Heinrich Blücher, her repeated flights from fascist authorities and her journey from statelessness to American citizenship, On Love and Tyranny brings into sharp focus a life and philosophy formed by personal and political turbulence.