The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt
A Tyranny of Truth
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- 14,99 €
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- 14,99 €
Descrizione dell’editore
'A genre-breaking insight into one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th century' Stylist's Emerald Street
'Incredible' Deborah Levy
A hero of political thought, the largely unsung and often misunderstood Hannah Arendt is perhaps best known for her landmark book, The Origins of Totalitarianism.
Arendt led an extraordinary life. Having endured Nazi persecution firsthand, she fled across Europe, coming to live in a world inhabited by such luminaries as Marc Chagall, Marlene Dietrich, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. She ultimately sacrificed her unique genius for philosophy and her love of a much-compromised man – the philosopher and Nazi-sympathiser Martin Heidegger – for what she called 'love of the world'.
Strikingly illustrated, this compassionate and timely biography illuminates the life of a complex, controversial, deeply flawed yet irrefutably courageous woman whose experiences and writings shine a light on how to live as an individual and a public citizen in troubled times.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Krimstein's fascinating if cluttered biographical portrait divides political theorist Hannah Arendt's extraordinary life into a loose triptych. In Germany, she is a curly-haired scribble of a girl (a smudge of green in a black-and-white landscape) and a precocious scholar among a who's-who of 20th-century thinkers. Martin Heidegger is her lover and foil. As the Nazis rise, she flees to France and, later, New York. The footnote-heavy primer suffers by being more intent on recording names, faces, and historical details than on quality storytelling. Krimstein's use of the first person, adopting Arendt's voice, is sporadic and jarring. Yet his love for his subject is undeniable, as he argues that Arendt's struggles as a Jew and a woman enabled her to transcend the work of traditional truth seekers. His tribute is at its most tender when Arendt speaks to the ghost of Walter Benjamin, who appears to her as a water stain on her ceiling. When Arendt says about captured SS officer Adolf Eichmann, "If we turn into a demonic monster, we somehow absolve him of his crime, and all of us our potential crime," she roils under backlash that evokes today's woker-than-thou Twitter pile-ons. This is a complicated, moving, uneven story that resonates in just such times.)
