Drawing on newly discovered archival materials and previously overlooked documents, Thomas Meyer tells the story of an intellectual icon whose character and ideas continue to captivate and challenge us to this day. Tracing anew Hannah Arendt’s journey from Königsberg to Paris, where she fled after being imprisoned in 1933, and finally to New York in 1941, Meyer illuminates her formative years and the development of her radical and brilliant books, as well as her lifelong philosophical debate with Martin Heidegger, whose Nazism was a permanent challenge for her. Meyer’s account centers on two pivotal phases: Arendt’s years in Paris after fleeing Nazi Germany and her time in the United States leading up to the landmark publication of THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM in 1951.