Bettina Stangneth wrote her dissertation on Immanuel Kant and the concept of radical evil. Ever since, she has been researching a theory of the lie, and has written about anti-Semitism in 18th-century and National Socialist philosophy. In 2000, she was awarded first prize by the Philosophical–Political Academy, Cologne, and, in 2011, she received the German Norddeutscher Rundfunk book award for best non-fiction book for Eichmann Before Jerusalem. Stangneth is an independent philosopher, and lives in Hamburg, Germany.