Hannah arendt biography yahoo news

Lyndsey Stonebridge begins We Are Free to Change the World, her illuminating biography of Hannah Arendt, by reminding us of her subject’s continuing relevance.

Arendt is sometimes thought of as a lofty and abstract thinker. Yet her thinking was highly responsive to the shock of Nazism and the rise of fascism, which left her stateless and acutely vulnerable for many years. After World War II, she discarded any ready-made theories. These included comfortable notions that Nazism and Stalinism were aberrations from the eventual global triumph of Western democracy.

As Stonebridge points out, Arendt wanted political thinking to be urgent and engaged. Thinking about our times could reconcile us to the perplexities of the reality we face and help us address our common predicament. There is a need for “thinking what we are doing” – a need to respond to circumstances in a way that is creative, courageous and receptive to the texture of experience.

Readers fascinated by Arendt’s singular vo

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The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth: a review

The Three Escapes of Hanna Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth, by Ken Krimstein (Bloomsbury), £/$28

Cartoonist Ken Krimstein has written a delightfully informative graphic novel with his recent The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth. The complexity of who Hannah Arendt was (a Jewish woman, criticised by both fellow Jews and fellow women) presents an opportunity to explore how a philosopher matured in her thinking. Krimstein weaves Arendt’s dramatic biography and her ideas together in this charming, often funny, book. Illustrated in muted greys, Krimstein uses a splash of green to highlight the figure of Arendt in each drawing, picturing her with a serious countenance, a mass of curls, and a cigarette perpetually dangling from her fingers.

Arendt was raised in Kant’s beloved Königsberg, and Krimstein playfully draws little (Jo)hanna skipping through the streets, while also troubled by the increasing anti-

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The “actual impulse of astonishment” that sparks all philosophising is “honest bafflement that other people live as they do,” writes Wolfram Eilenberger in his new book, The Visionaries.

It’s a wild ride through ten of the worst years in the 20th century, spanning the period from , the year Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, to and the thick of the second world war. It’s told through the occasionally intersecting lives of four brilliant young women philosophers: Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil (both French), Russian-American Ayn kant, and German-Jewish Hannah Arendt, who spent time exiled in France and New York.

Though very different, they all “experienced themselves as having been placed fundamentally differently in the world from how other people had been”. Eilenberger writes:

All of them were tormented from an early age by the same questions: What could it be that makes me so different? What is it that inom clearly can’t understand and experience like all the others