Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times

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by Anne C. Heller

Hannah Arendt, one of the most gifted and provocative voices of her era, was a polarizing cultural theorist—extolled by her peers as a visionary and denounced by others as a fraud. Born in Prussia to assimilated Jewish parents, she escaped from Hitler’s Germany in 1933 and became best known for her critique of the world’s response to the evils of World War II.

A woman of many contradictions, Arendt learned to write in English only at the age of thirty-six, and yet her first book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, single-handedly altered the way generations of Americans and Europeans viewed fascism and genocide. Her most famous—and most divisive—work, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, brought fierce controversy that continues to this day, exacerbated by the posthumous discovery that she had been the lover of the great romantic philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger.

In this fast-paced, comprehensive biography, Anne Heller tracks the source of Arendt’s apparent contradictions and her greatest achievements, from a tumultuous childhood to her arrival as what she called a “conscious pariah”—one of those few people in every time and place who don’t “lose confidence in ourselves if society does not approve us” and will not “pay any price” to win acceptance.

Genres: Biography, Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Politics, Womens, World War II

144 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 18, 2015

Reviews

[robin friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Brief Biography Of Hannah Arendt

This succinct new biography of Hannah Arendt (1906 -- 1975), "A Life in Dark Times" offers an introduction to the life and work of this philosopher and political theorist. The book is intended for non-specialist readers seeking an introduction to Arendt. At slightly more than 100 pages, the book can be read relatively quickly while riding the train or sitting by oneself in a park. The author, Anne Heller, is a former magazine editor who has written a substantially longer biography of another Jewish immigrant woman philosopher and writer known for her strong trait of independence: "Ayn Rand and the World She Made" (2010). Heller's biography of Arendt allows the reader to get the core of this thinker in brief compass. The book is clearly and engagingly written with an eye to the quick and telling detail. It briefly discusses several of Arendt's writings. The book includes adequate documentation in the endnotes but would have benefited from a bibliography and an index.

The book opens effectively in the middle of Arendt's life. It begins with the work that made her notorious. In 1961, Arendt attended part of the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. She wrote a series of essays published in the "New Yorker" and then in 1963 as a book, "Eichmann in Jerusalem" consisting of her reporting of and thoughts on the Eichmann trial. The book created a controversy that still persists, especially for the manner in which Arendt portrayed Eichmann, for the phrase, "the banality of evil", and for Arendt's comments on the role that leaders of various Jewish communities allegedly played during the Holocaust. Heller describes the book, some of its weaknesses, and the controversy. This book is the aspect of Arendt's work that most readers will find familiar, and Heller uses it to cast light on Arendt's life before and after the book. She emphasizes Arendt's independence, stubborn streak, and determination to think for herself.

The book then doubles back to consider Arendt's childhood in Germany and her years as a brilliant, young student. Heller pays a great deal of attention to young Arendt's three-year affair with the philosopher Martin Heidegger and with the personal and philosophical influence Heidegger exerted on Arendt throughout her life. Heller writes: "[t]he influence of Heidegger on Arendt is hard to overestimate. His teaching deepened her love of rich philosophic and poetic language, words fished from the depths of etymology to express ideas for which there are no adequate conventional descriptions. She believed, with him, that authentic truths arise only 'out of an ultimate and absolute precision in the use of words'".

Subsequent chapters of the book describe how Arendt fled Nazi Germany, was interned briefly in a concentration camp, married and divorced her first husband, and met and stayed married to her second, Heinrich Blucher. Arendt became a stateless person and a pariah. In 1941 she and Blucher escaped to the United States. Arendt learned English and began to write. She and Blucher both eventually had academic careers and attained United States citizenship. Heller describes her life and work in the United States using "Eichmann in Jerusalem" as a pivot, with a chapter on the earlier period (1941-- 1961) and a chapter on the latter (1963 -- 1975).

Heller describes Arendt as an outsider who was able to use and learn from her status to write books of philosophical importance. She emphasizes Arendt's ambivalent attitude to Judaism as shown in her early work, written in Germany, and continuing to the end of her life. Arendt never was a religious believer. The questions for her involved her attitude towards the Jewish people and its outsider status which formed part, but not all, of her own position as an outsider. Heller briefly describes some of Arendt's important writings, including "The Origins of Totalitarianism", "The Human Condition", "Men in Dark Times", as well as "Eichmann in Jerusalem".

Heller's book fulfills its intended purpose of introducing Arendt to interested, busy readers. I learned from her overview and from her discussions. The virtues of the book in offering a good succinct overview also are its limitations. The book has value in itself and may encourage interested readers to think further about Hannah Arendt and the questions which were of importance to her. The publisher of this book kindly provided me with a review copy.

Robin Friedman

[Jaylia3 · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Things looked different after she had looked at them”


Short but deeply fascinating, this book about Hannah Arendt covers both her life and the evolution of her thinking in less than 140 pages. It opens with the controversy surrounding her coverage of the 1961 trial of Nazi officer Adolf Eichmann in Israel, and her pithy but divisive “banality of evil” observation, then cycles back to her turn of the century childhood in Prussia, where her highly educated, politically liberal, religiously agnostic family had established itself several generations previously after leaving czarist Russia.

Even as a child it was obvious Arendt possessed a prodigious intellect, but unsurprisingly that did not make her life easy. Her father died when she was seven and she had to flee Nazi Germany as a young woman, resettling first in Paris and later in the United States. Before leaving Germany she studied and had an affair with the Nazi involved philosopher Martin Heidegger, a relationship she had trouble renouncing even as she embraced her Jewish roots more and more avidly.

I was drawn right into this book. It was refreshing to read about someone devoted to the life of the mind rather than the pursuit of fame, political power, or wealth. Even though the book is not long it doesn’t feel slight because it plunges right into the heart of Arendt’s life and intellectual development. I have never read a book so copiously footnoted, all the author’s sources are cited right there in the text, which I appreciate but it did take some initial effort to not be distracted by them.

“Things looked different after she had looked at them . . . Thinking was her passion, and thinking for her was a moral activity.” Philosopher Hans Jonas on Hannah Arendt

[Nancy Kennedy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Philosophy is a huge hole in my education. I'm trying to rectify that! I knew nothing of Hannah Arendt, except the name and the phrase she is so famous for, the "banality of evil." In this book, she is examined as a cultural theorist and what she herself called a "conscious pariah," a person who because of her beliefs loses the approval of society but not of herself.

I appreciate that the author starts her book with the biggest controversy of Ms. Arendt's life, the publication of her book about the trial of one of Hitler's henchmen, Adolf Eichmann, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Penguin Classics). It gave me a feel for Ms. Arendt before Anne Heller backs up and starts a chronological telling of her life.

This is a brief, 144-page book that explains fully the positions Ms. Arendt took in her life. I'm a "just-the-facts, ma'am" kind of person but I was able to stay with the author through her dissection of Ms. Arendt's winding and dense pathways of thought. I appreciated that the author's focus was on her thoughts and stated positions rather than, say, her love life, although that is also touched on. There are also some moments of humor, as when Ms. Heller notes that Ms. Arendt declined to marry the poet W.H. Auden, because "she had known him for only a decade and his housekeeping was notoriously bad."

Through Ms. Arendt's life and this book, the reader gains a lot of knowledge about many of the famous thinkers and philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Leo Strauss, etc. It looks like this book is going to be part of a series titled "Icons," and I look forward to further biographies such as this one.

[Barbara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Arendt, a German-born philosopher was from a family of secular Jewish intellectuals. She is probably most infamous for her book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. This book explains the ideas she put forward in this book about "the banality of evil" which was so abhorrent to many, particularly Jewish people around the world.

Arendt studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger in the 1920's and became his lover. Heidegger was undoubtedly anti-semitic and under the Nazis rose to a high academic position. During WWII Arendt was arrested and spend time in a concentration camp. She managed to escape and eventually arrived in America as a refugee. She earned a living writing essays and preferred to be known as a political theorist. She was a Zionist for a time, and then changed her position to a critic of Israel. In addition to the work on Eichmann, she is well known for writing The Origins of Totalitarianism.

Arendt had a brilliant mind but seemed to fail to connect to people. She was married twice and had many extra-marital relationships. She was a renegade and a thinker. She died in 1975 at the age of 69 in New York.

[Daisy]

About a years ago I tried to read The Origins of Totalitarianism, but I felt the text was too dense for me at that point and was later told the book was not a good place to start with Hannah Arendt, given its difficulty.

This succinct biography is very helpful and informative. I do feel ready to venture into some of her works after finishing this and might start with Eichmann in Jerusalem.

Also, the more I read about Heidegger the lower my opinion on him as a human being gets. Even though I can’t deny his intellectual brilliance.

[John Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anne Heller’s biography of political theorist Hannah Arendt begins, like a traditional epic poem and unlike a conventional biography, in medias res. It reports on the roughly two-year period during which Arendt, then in her 50s, covered a trial of signal importance and published an extensive report. Here’s Heller’s deft opening sentence: “Afterward, when Hannah Arendt published her book-length account of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the fugitive Nazi SS officer who had helped to implement Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution, the tumult the book created deeply shocked her.” Notice how the single word “afterward” implies a particular standpoint in time, to which the text will soon return, by jumping forward from it. (The same method was employed by Gabriel García Márquez in his One Hundred Years of Solitude, which opens with the words “Many years later…”) Broadly, Heller’s entire text works the same way, discussing the Eichmann book and then going back to the proper beginning of Arendt’s life, in 1906.

Heller’s first chapter, which comprises 38 pages of the 136-page advance proof I read, proceeds to recount the trial itself, aspects of Arendt’s coverage and commentary—in which she insisted on the absolute ordinariness of the man in the glass booth, found him more a clown than a monster, and addressed the acquiescence, as she saw it, of many of Europe’s Jews—and the storm of opprobrium that resulted. This method of plunging into the middle of things has the same dramatic effect it has in an epic, or, for that matter, in a good piece of journalism (a field that Heller has worked in): it grabs you. What’s more, the opening chapter establishes many of the themes that arise in the rest of the book, among them:

• Arendt’s willingness to pursue unorthodox, unconventional, rebellious lines of thought;
• The price she sometimes paid for this in terms of work and friendships (in early 1948, her argument for what she called a “binational” Israel cost her work);
• Her determination and persistence in the face of opposition, which was mostly willed but sometimes, it seems, a matter of the heart (late in her life, a cousin questioned her decision once again to visit Martin Heidegger, an anti-Semitic philosopher with whom she had had an affair, and Arendt replied, “There are things stronger than me”);
• The combination of political and philosophical standpoints in Arendt’s understanding of the world (exemplified in her book The Origins of Totalitarianism);
• Her assessment of how Jewish culture affected the so-called Jewish question (for instance, she argued that wealthy Jews such as the Rothschild family had mediated between the community and the broader society and thus delayed the development of an adequate political sensibility);
• Arendt’s view of the moral dimension of thinking (her critique of Eichmann as “thoughtless” prefigured some of the ideas in her posthumous book, The Life of the Mind).

To reduce Arendt herself, or this book, to a few bullet points is almost laughably inadequate in many respects, as will be apparent to anyone already acquainted with Arendt’s life and work. Heidegger, for instance, was not merely a philosopher but a tremendously influential one, nor does it quite suffice to describe him as anti-Semitic, for the simple reason that he fell in love with Arendt, who was (this must be said explicitly, lest anyone fail to grasp it) Jewish. Arendt’s book on totalitarianism was itself provocative and influential. Heller doesn’t attempt a thorough discussion of any of Arendt’s writing—the place for that is elsewhere—but what she does say is telling. And, as one would hope even in a brief survey of a life, Heller provides many glimpses, which often add up to portraits, of important figures in Arendt’s life, such as Heinrich Blücher, her second and final husband—who, incidentally, originated the phrase “the banality of evil”—and Karl Jaspers, a philosopher who taught Arendt and became a lifelong friend.

For anyone with multiple interests, time is precious (which is why I’m not attempting a full review of this book), and concise writing is valuable. Those who want to immerse themselves in Arendt’s life and work already have many avenues to pursue; her affair with Heidegger, for instance, is the subject of an entire book, which is one of Heller’s many sources. Those who want first of all an introduction now have an admirable one.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book appears in the “recommended reading” section at the end of an outstanding 2018 graphic novel about Arendt. The ebook download was only $1.99, which I thought was value for money, even if the book, minus acknowledgments and notes, is only 113 pages. Neither this book or the graphic novel is a substitute for giving the author's writings the study they deserve, but both read quickly, clearly, and enjoyably. They both inform entertainingly about the fascinating facts of the subject's eventful life.

Arendt's most well-known works are The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. The former is no doubt the great work of political thinking that people claim, but I believe that most people here in The Nation's Capital are defeated by its dense seriousness (I certainly was). It ranks up there with Democracy in America and The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York at the top of my list of Books I Suspect DC People Pretend to Have Read But Haven't. Be warned: Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times will NOT help you pretend you have read The O. of T.

Eichmann in Jerusalem, by comparison, is easy going. It's about a single real-world event and generated a lot of responses, both in its initial appearance as a series of articles in The New Yorker and later in book form. I believe it is the most frequently read of her works today. So it didn't surprise me that the chapter on Eichmann was plucked out of the otherwise chronological arrangement of this book and plopped down in the front, as the first chapter. The whole chapter (and the story which it tells) is definitely an attention-grabber. It also contained, for me, the most memorable bit, some authorial (i.e., Heller's) opinion which occurs on Kindle page 18:

...her [Arendt's] reflection on the defendant [Eichmann] became a theory. This happened at least in part because in the interval between the trial and the publication of the book the social psychologist Stanley Milgram perform and publicized the first of his famous “obedience to authority” experiments at Yale, also in reaction to the Eichmann trial, which seemed to prove that randomly selected clean-cut American college students – in other words, just about anyone – would willingly inflict excruciating pain on their fellows if told by an authority figure that doing so was for the greater good. Together, Eichmann in Jerusalem and Milgram's results sent a disturbing message: There is a little Eichmann in all of us. This was explicitly not Arendt's premise, and it stuck. To this day, it remains among the most discouraging of commonly held yet sourceless “scientific” truism.

I'm not sure what Heller is discouraged about here: that Arendt's ideas have been distorted by association with Milgram's experiment, or that people can so easily be persuaded to act cruelly.

A lot of the book is about other things than the above-mentioned books. I enjoy reading about Arendt because I am interested in philosophy but somehow lack the ability to grapple comfortably with abstract concepts. Arendt's life was largely about ideas but she also found herself (sometimes willingly, sometimes not) deep in the fray of the biggest political events and ideas of the 20th century. Reading about her feels like standing in a gateway, with the life of newspaper headlines behind and the life of ideas ahead.

[Noah Goats · Rating 4 out of 5]

This short exploration of Hannah Arendt‘s life and work is a very readable little book. Arendt had an eventful existence right in the heart of the 20th century’s turmoil. This biography covers her affair with Heidegger, escape from Nazi horror, life as a Jewish refugee during the war, and, of course, the writing and reception of her influential books.

The way we think about totalitarian terror and the Nazis has been deeply affected by her writing. She famously coined the term “the banality of evil” in her reporting on the Eichmann trial and her chilling insight into the “normality” of the perpetrators of the holocaust was counterintuitive and highly controversial in its day. After several decades of watching how easily people can be manipulated into committing genocide, it has become clear that her insight is spot on. (The book “Ordinary Men” by Christopher Browning, is an excellent exploration of this same idea but concerning lower level perpetrators of the holocaust.)

[Illiterate · Rating 1 out of 5]

Lightweight and uncritical, but, then, her philosophy isn’t really worth a heavyweight study.

[Steve Greenleaf · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of late I've been thinking a great deal about Hannah Arendt. I recall first reading her work Between Past and Future in the fall of 1974. I was fascinated and baffled. But the fascination overcame my bafflement to prompt me to go on to read all of her major works, and some lesser known works as well. I even sat in on an undergraduate class when I was in law school that was all about her work. Now, all these years later, I find it necessary to think once again about her powerful legacy.

Heller's work is a short biography of Arendt. It does an admirable job of packing in a good deal about Arendt's life as well as providing some insight into her project. The book opens with the extremely controversial reports that she published of the Eichmann trial. In her New Yorker articles and the later book, she labeled Eichmann as "banal" and coined the term "the banality of evil." Some thought that she was in some way excusing Eichmann; she was not, and she concurred with the death penalty imposed upon him. The other great controversy in the book was her contention that Jewish councils in Eastern European ghettos aided the Nazis in organizing and executing the Holocaust. Arendt argued that a firmer, more principled resistance would have been more efficient. Her contention led some in the Jewish community to vilify her. The fact that she, too, was Jewish and that she'd worked in Zionist organizations before the war gave her no shelter. The idea that some Jewish leaders were in any way complicit in the Holocaust was too much for many. Arendt's point is one that must be considered by any person or organization that deals with an evil sovereign authority: to collaborate and thereby hope to ameliorate, or to resist and risk a higher, quicker body count.

But while the Eichmann trial is the most famous instance in her career, I don't' believe it the most important. Her works The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Between Past and Future, On Revolution, and On Violence are all among the outstanding and exemplary works of political thought in the post-war era. Heller's biography is too light on these matters (and thus less of a consideration of her thought). Instead, Heller focuses a good deal on Arendt's relationship with Martin Heidegger, her teacher and for a time her lover. While not inconsequential, I'm not sure that a lot of attention to this relationship pays much in the way of dividends in coming to grips with Arendt's legacy.

Heller's book provides a satisfactory introduction to Arendt's work, but don't be satisfied just to read this short biography. Read Arendt's works and experience a public display of a mind immersed deeply in thought and concern.

[Tom Burdge · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book. Interesting and comprehensive survey of Arendt's life (and to a lesser extent her writings and thought, which were of course part of her life) in an impressively short number of words.

The book starts with the Eichmann controversy, which is a good place to start since it gives a good idea of the kind of person she was. The treatment is fair and nuanced, but perhaps too charitable in some instances where Arendt was clearly in the wrong; the author is happy to let Arendt's close family member talk of Arendt's remarks about Israeli Jews who migrated from Eastern Europe as "snobbery" without comment rather than drive home that this was privately held racism.

Otherwise, the book is very good and i particularly liked the pen-ultimate chapter which focuses the most on Arendt's famous writings.

This would be a 5 star review if it weren't for such a brief mentioning of the Little Rock controversy in barely a paragraph. Like the Eichmann controversy, it's quite a complicated and important discussion point about her life and work so it should hardly be swept under the rug in so few words.

[Adam Shields · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short Thoughts: I picked this up on whim having confused Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. They are in fact different people although they were of the same generation, both were philosophers, both were significantly impacted by WWII. But Weil died during WWII and Arendt lived until the 1970s.

This is a brief biography, but it was good for the quick introduction I was looking for. And it was good for the change of reading pace that I needed. It also reminded me of how impotent the holocaust was and how much I really need to dig into it deeper.

My slightly longer review is on my blog at http://bookwi.se/hannah-arendt/

[Hannah Garden · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was fun to read. Joe brought it home because he knows I like Arendt, and I hadn't really thought closely about her in a while. If I'm being perfectly honest the only reason I chose her for my senior thesis was because of I'LL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND from Barton Fink, but it worked out. I wonder if Barton Fink is still in my top five movies. Arendt is still in my top five philosophers, her work around thought and natality is so foundational for my own beliefs, which I think was the main rewarding aspect of this book, to reconsider those foundations coz they can get buried and you forget them.

[karenbee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd never heard of Hannah Arendt til I saw A Life in Dark Times on sale, but she seemed interesting and I don't know much about philosophy, so I picked it up. Heller's biography of Arendt is short but packed with information about Arendt's life, her relationships (including relationships with other philosophers), and her work. I was intrigued, but it was slow reading because I had to look up some things while I was reading -- which I don't mind one bit -- and I'm glad I read it on the Kindle, because I ended up highlighting about a quarter of the book for various reasons.

I don't feel like I know enough about philosophy or Arendt to judge the content of this bio, but I liked it. Here's a brief review that includes an interview with the author that I enjoyed, in case anyone stumbles over this and would prefer actual substance: https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/boo...

[Hank Pharis · Rating 3 out of 5]

(NOTE: I'm stingy with stars. For me 2 stars means a good book or a B. 3 stars means a very good book or a B+. 4 stars means an outstanding book or an A {only about 5% of the books I read merit 4 stars}. 5 stars means an all time favorite or an A+ {Only one of 400 or 500 books rates this!).

The only thing I knew about Hannah Arendt before I listened to this book was that she was involved with the trial of Adolf Eichmann. Although I found many things I disagreed with about, I found her story very interesting.

Hannah Arendt was a Jewish philosopher in Germany who fled to America before World War 2 began. She is most famous for her coverage and book about the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann and for her books on totalitarianism.

Ironically her writings about Eichmann were loved by “Gentiles” and hated by Jews. Her Jewish kinsman stringently reacted to her conclusion that Eichmann was not some kind of abberant monster but rather a “normal” human being who answered to no one but Adolf Hitler. Anne Heller explains: “The trouble with her books was its theory - namely, that ordinary men and women, driven not by personal hatred or by extreme ideology but merely by middle-class ambitions and an inability to empathize, voluntarily ran the machinery of the Nazi death factories, and that the victims, when pushed, would lie to themselves and comply. The book launched a pitched battle among intellectuals in the United States. It blunted Arendt’s reputation at its height and has cast a shadow on her legend ever since. (2)

Here are some quotes from the book:

Eichmann was considered the most wanted war criminal alive in the early 1960s. … Everyone agreed at the outset that Eichmann was a strangely anemic-appearing exemplar of demonic evil. A high school dropout and a failed traveling “vacuum-oil” salesman … (5)

Eichmann: “I will jump into my grave laughing, because the fact that I have the death of five million Jews on my conscience gives me extraordinary satisfaction,” was published in Life magazine and broadcast around the world before the trial began. (6)

Arendt was fifty-four years old that spring, a short, chain-smoking intellectual celebrity with an impeccable pedigree and an enormous capacity for work. Born and raised in Germany, she was the child of middle-class, assimilated German Jewish parents. She had been exquisitely well educated in German literature, literature, classical Greek, and ancient and modern philosophy by the great thinkers of the Weimar age, including her friend Karl Jaspers and the charismatic Martin Heidegger. She had recognized and escaped the Nazi peril early, fleeing first to Paris in 1933 and later to New York City … spent her leisure hours joyfully cogitating with a “tribe” of distinguished intellectual friends that included Hans Morgenthau, Hans Jonas, Paul Tillich, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Alfred Kazin, Robert Lowell, and Mary McCarthy. She had collected prizes for her books and essays ranging from a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1952 to the prestigious Lessing Prize of the Free City of Hamburg, Germany, in 1959. But she was best known and most deeply respected for her great and difficult work of political history, The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951, in which she had traced the rise of the twentieth century’s two totalitarian monoliths, Nazism and Stalinism, and analyzed the motives of the men who created them and the men who willingly operated their machinery of murder, especially in Germany. (7)

Eichman’s Attorney Robert Servatius argued that Eichmann had “neither ordered nor executed” any killings or committed any other crimes under extant law. Moreover, since Eichmann had played no role in making the laws under Hitler and yet was legally obliged to follow them, he, too, must be considered by the court to be a victim. (12)

Summing up, Eichmann insisted to the court that he was “humanly but not legally” guilty. He was “humanly guilty” because his strictly technical role in transporting Jews to the death camps resulted in human beings having been killed. But that wasn’t his fault. He was legally innocent because, he said, “I had no choice but to carry out the orders I received.” (14)

“I was merely a little cog in the machinery,” Eichmann became famous for saying — a statement that has ever since seemed to cast doubt on the ability of ordinary human beings to remain morally alive in an authoritarian context. Nevertheless, he expressed both surprise and disillusionment when, a few months later, the judges did, in fact, find him guilty of all fifteen counts of the indictment, … he thought that he could get the better of the Jews in Jerusalem. (15)

He lost an appeal to the Israeli Supreme Court and was executed by hanging on
May 31, 1962.

There were three great points of controversy that divided readers of the book, as well as many lesser provocations. For the audience of The New Yorker and the general reader, the most shocking element was Arendt’s persistent, often sarcastic depiction of Eichmann as a joker or a fool, a stammering, sniffling embodiment of “the banality of evil.” “Despite all the efforts of the prosecution,” she wrote in her opening pages, “everybody could see that this man was not a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was a clown.” She pictured him as goofy, vain, “elated” by repetitive clichés, a “joiner,” comically ambitious, and, most notoriously, “thoughtless”— that is, unable to imagine events from anyone else’s point of view. Neither innately cruel nor an ideological villain he was something more disturbing: a person capable of sustained evil action without attendant passion, conviction, concern for others, or remorse. He had no depth, she thought. “Except for an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement, he had no motives at all,” she wrote in an oft-quoted postscript to the book. “And this diligence in itself was in no way criminal,” she added; “he certainly would never have murdered his superior in order to inherit his post. He merely, to put the matter colloquially, never realized what he was doing.” …

If her rhetoric was regrettable … her point was, at the time — the early 1960s — strikingly new and profoundly jarring. That a formerly law-abiding member of the middle class whom not only Arendt and other spectators but also a panel of court-appointed psychiatrists had characterized as “normal”— that is, not a born sociopath or a pervert — could be enlisted to participate in mass “administrative murder,” or genocide, was far more frightening to Arendt and to her non-Jewish readers than all the monsters of the deep. …
She distilled her reflections on the living Eichmann into theory with the subtitle A Report on the Banality of Evil. She came to rue the phrase, … “What did I mean by it?” she later asked. What she didn’t mean, she insisted, was that evil itself is commonplace. She didn’t mean that the Nazi murder machine or its power-driven masterminds, Hitler, Goebbels, and Göring, were ordinary. Still, she had changed her mind about the nature of evil. By the banality of evil, “I meant that evil is not radical . . . that it has no depth,” she told Look magazine .. She continued: ‘Evil is a surface phenomenon.’ … In a lecture a month later, she elaborated with a startling analogy. The “hair-raising superficiality” of evil as displayed by Eichmann suggests that evil is infectious. “It can spread over the whole world like a fungus and lay waste precisely because it is not rooted anywhere,” she declared to an auditorium packed with students and professors at the University of Chicago.
But mostly she intended the phrase to mark Eichmann as a specimen of the new “mass man,” a universal, postindustrial, semi-Marxian type who was characteristically lonely, rootless, socially adrift, economically expendable, and susceptible to both nihilism and authoritarianism. … her reflections the defendant became a theory.” (17)

Just about anyone — would willingly inflict excruciating pain on their fellows if told by an authority figure that doing so was for the greater good. Together, Eichmann in Jerusalem and Milgram’s results sent a disturbing message: There is a little Eichmann in all of us. This was explicitly not Arendt’s premise, but it stuck. To this day, it remains among the most discouraging of commonly held yet sourceless “scientific” truisms. (18)

The book’s second controversy was over her derisive references to the government of Israel, encapsulated in snide remarks about David Ben-Gurion and Gideon Hausner and in an unwelcome comparison of Israel’s religious prohibition against Jewish intermarriage with the Nazi laws banning sexual contact and marriage between Jews and Germans; that Israel did not have a written constitution, she acidly observed, could be explained, in part, by a reluctance to spell out such a racially biased law in a national civic document. Criticism of Israel, then as now, was considered dangerous and disloyal.
Arendt had been a dedicated and hardworking Zionist activist in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1948, however, she had spoken out against Israel’s founding as a strictly Jewish state, warning of institutional injustice, militarism, and dependency on foreign powers as the probable price of excluding Arabs from citizenship in a negotiated binational state. Her Jewish friends were grumpily familiar with her renegade views on Israel. What surprised and galled them and Jewish advocacy groups was Eichmann in Jerusalem’s handling of a more deeply buried and far more sensitive issue: the role of Jews themselves in the implementation of the Final Solution. That she discussed this issue openly and pejoratively … many could not forgive, even to this day. (19)

Arendt concluded that Eichmann did have a conscience, a relatively normal one that operated during most of his life but that went on functioning for only a few weeks after the Final Solution became official Nazi policy in 1942. And why did his conscience stop working after a few weeks? The Nazi “specialist in Jewish affairs” claimed that no one, “no one at all,” had protested the policy or refused to cooperate with it, including local Jewish leaders, whom he had carefully organized into Nazi-approved leadership councils called Judenräte. (20)

In Amsterdam as in Warsaw, in Berlin as in Budapest, Jewish officials could be trusted to compile the lists of persons and of their property, to secure money from the deportees to defray the expenses of their deportation and extermination, to keep track of vacated apartments, to supply police forces to help seize Jews and get them on trains, until, as a last gesture, they handed over the assets of the Jewish community in good order for final confiscation. In the magazine and in the original edition of the book — but not in later editions — she added, quoting damning material from a secondary source: They distributed the Yellow Star badges, and sometimes, as in Warsaw, “the sale of the armbands became a regular business; there were ordinary armbands of cloth and fancy plastic armbands which were washable.” In the Nazi-inspired, but not Nazi-dictated, manifestoes they issued, we still can sense how they enjoyed their new power —“The Central Jewish Council has been granted the right of absolute disposal over all Jewish spiritual and material wealth and over all Jewish manpower”— (20)
One can almost sense how Arendt enjoyed her fury while writing this remarkably uncharitable passage. She concluded: Wherever Jews lived there were recognized Jewish leaders, and this leadership, almost without exception, cooperated in one way or another, for one reason or another, with the Nazis. The whole truth was that if the Jewish people had really been unorganized and leaderless, there would have been chaos and plenty of misery but the total number of victims would hardly have been between four and a half and six million people.
“To a Jew,” she wrote in another famous passage, “this role of the Jewish leaders in the destruction of their own people is undoubtedly the darkest chapter of the whole dark story.” Hardly, remarked her critics, who were many. (21)

To many of her friends, admirers, and allies, Arendt … had simply delivered a brutal insult to the Jewish people. She had openly blamed the educated Jews of Europe for aiding in the overwhelming devastation while seeming to let the awful avatar of evil, Adolf Eichmann, off the hook.
This was not literally so. Arendt, like the panel of judges in Jerusalem, affirmed that Eichmann was guilty of genocide and must be put to death. But her reasoning was so consciously based on universal principles and so little on anger that, paradoxically, it almost missed its mark. (22)

In politics obedience and support are the same,” she wrote), she addressed Eichmann directly: “And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations — as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world — we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. That is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.” (22)

Non-Jews liked the book and Jews hated it. (26)

At age forty, she converted to Christianity. (57). (But continued with numerous "affairs" and husbands.

Beginning in 1944, she published a group of essays in which she first sought the origins of totalitarianism. She rejected the notion that the Nazis exemplify an especially vicious modern form of universal anti-Semitism. The problem was the modern European nation-state, which from its beginnings had excluded from full citizenship all but a specific kind of human being - German, French, Slav. By extension, it had created marginalized minority populations in ever nation. (82)

The Origins of Totalitarianism remains the most passionate, complex, moving, and influential account ever written of the clash between civilization and official barbarism in twentieth-century Europe.
In intellectual circles, the book made Arendt an icon almost overnight. Requests to teach and lecture poured in from Princeton and the University of Chicago, Berkeley, Harvard, and the New School. (93)

Hannah Arendt died of a heart attack on Dec. 4, 1975. (110)

[Michelle · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very good and condensed introduction to the life and works of the gifted cultural, social, and political theorist: "Hannah Arendt: A Life In Dark Times" authored by Anne C. Heller. Hannah Arendt (1905-1975) was both bold and brilliant, introducing new thought in regards to the Holocaust. Widely known for her controversial book of the Nazi war criminal: "Eichmann In Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil" (1961). A self defined "conscious pariah" many of her books and ideas were harshly criticized by Jewish officials and scholars, but raised public awareness worldwide of the Holocaust in a manner that had never before been possible.

Born in Germany and raised by Jewish parents, a beautiful youthful Arendt had a deep dark eyed soulful expression, she attracted the attention of married German philosopher and romantic poet Martin Heidegger (1889-1976). In spite of Heidegger being a Nazi sympathizer, their close intimate bond lasted her lifetime, and was a common thread throughout the book. Arendt was married twice, her first marriage ended in divorce, she never had children.
In 1933, Arendt traveling without papers of any kind, briefly held in a Jewish refugee concentration camp, simply walked away with about 200 other people. Eventually she secured forged French exit papers, her connections bribed officials and border guards, she managed to leave Germany along with more than a thousand Jewish scientists, artists, activists, immigrating to the US, settling in NYC, with her husband and mother. Many borders closed shortly after she left, those remaining Jews from her hometown of Konigsberg were transported to Auschwitz.

In NYC, in the 1940's Arendt was surprised by the welcoming American intellectual culture, and published her essays in English after one year; missing her German poetry, language, customs. Arendt's work was recognized and held in high regard, as she was invited to join the circles of Alfred Kazin, Irving Howe, Lionel Trilling, Paul Goodman, Randall Jarrell, and Saul Bellow. The powerful first hand accounts she had endured during the devastating war earned her respect. Kazin noted "she was a blazing Jew". Still, others wondered about her double sided opinions, there were strong disagreements over the founding of Israel in 1948. Around this time she met another one of her closest friends Mary McCarthy. Arendt became an American citizen in December 1951, her husband Heinrich Blucher in 1952.

Hardworking, she would earn her living teaching at American Universities, eventually accepting her academic philosopher title. After 20 years she would reunite with Heidegger, heaping great scorn on his wife Elfride, blaming her for Heidegger's unhappiness. Heidegger didn't hesitate to use Arendt to promote his own publications and writing. After visiting with her mentor professor Karl Jaspers in Switzerland, Arendt was ready to return to Blucher in the US; summarizing that the German indifference to the truth concerning the Holocaust was the most "striking and frightening" in addition to "the flight from reality."
With thanks and appreciation to Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for the ARC for the purpose of review, and for sponsoring the Goodreads Giveaways.

[Grady Ormsby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times (2015) by Anne C. Heller is a biography of the social philosopher, educator and writer Hannah Arendt. Heller is a magazine editor and journalist. Her account of Arendt’s life begins in medias res with the trial of Adolph Eichmann, a major organizer of the Holocaust, who was in charge of managing the deportation of Jews to extermination camps during World War II. Starting in April, 1961, on assignment by New Yorker Magazine Arendt attended the trial in Jerusalem. Heller began her account of Arendt’s life with the Eichmann trial not because it was the high point of her career, but because it was the center of the greatest controversy.

The result was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Her analysis looked at the question that asks, “Is evil radical or is it ordinary?” Her conclusion was that Eichmann was not aberrant and exceptional, but was ordinary. She wrote that he was "terribly and terrifyingly normal." Ordinary people driven by ambition and a need to belong can do evil things through a lack of empathy and a lack of thinking. They can follow orders and adhere to beliefs without thinking about moral concerns or consequences of their behavior. They are not necessarily motivated by hatred and prejudice as much as an overwhelming need to belong and be included.

Unfortunately much of Arendt’s study and analysis was misunderstood. There was a storm of controversy over the statement in her conclusion that, "the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – is the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” She wasn’t saying that evil is banal but its pervasiveness is.

Arendt was born in Konigsberg, Prussia, in 1906. She was a brilliant student and attended Marberg University where she met Martin Heidegger. She had a tempestuous relationship with him for most of the rest of her life.

The turmoil that was Europe in the first half of the Twentieth Century made Arendt one of the “rootless ones.” She was a refugee first in Berlin and Potsdam, then in Paris where she became a sort of bohemian/intellectual/outlaw. I say outlaw not because she was on the wrong side of the law but because her thinking and pronouncements were so often outside the mainstream. She was referred to as a “conscious pariah.”

She finally achieved a level of security and fame after arriving in New York in 1941 where she gained entry into an inner circle of intellectuals who focused on anti-totalitarianism politics and apostate philosophy.

In 1951 she published The Origins of Totalitarianism a study of fascism and genocide which focused on selfless mass man who was susceptible to totalitarian manipulation and spiritual dissolution of the human personality. She averred that a “decisive break with the great Western tradition of honor, faith and justice had permitted the elements of totalitarian to rise.”

Her social philosophy was built on a foundation that included freedom of thought, the importance of open discussion of rights and responsibilities among free people and the inculcation of new ideas. Politically she emphasized matters of social and material welfare as well as consideration of distribution of existing goods. As an educator she stressed the kinds of thinking, judging and acting that are necessary to be part of a diverse and human race.

In addition to her major texts she published a number of anthologies and contributed to many publications. She was also a minor poet, though largely unpublished.


















































(2015) by Anne C. Heller is a biography of the social philosopher, educator and writer Hannah Arendt. Heller is a magazine editor and journalist. Her account of Arendt’s life begins in medias res with the trial of Adolph Eichmann, a major organizer of the Holocaust, who was in charge of managing the deportation of Jews to extermination camps during World War II. Starting in April, 1961, on assignment by New Yorker Magazine Arendt attended the trial in Jerusalem. Heller began her account of Arendt’s life with the Eichmann trial not because it was the high point of her career, but because it was the center of the greatest controversy.

The result was Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. Her analysis looked at the question that asks, “Is evil radical or is it ordinary?” Her conclusion was that Eichmann was not aberrant and exceptional, but was ordinary. She wrote that he was "terribly and terrifyingly normal." Ordinary people driven by ambition and a need to belong can do evil things through a lack of empathy and a lack of thinking. They can follow orders and adhere to beliefs without thinking about moral concerns or consequences of their behavior. They are not necessarily motivated by hatred and prejudice as much as an overwhelming need to belong and be included.

Unfortunately much of Arendt’s study and analysis was misunderstood. There was a storm of controversy over the statement in her conclusion that, "the lesson that this long course in human wickedness had taught us – is the lesson of the fearsome, word-and-thought-defying banality of evil.” She wasn’t saying that evil is banal but its pervasiveness is.

Arendt was born in Konigsberg, Prussia, in 1906. She was a brilliant student and attended Marberg University where she met Martin Heidegger. She had a tempestuous relationship with him for most of the rest of her life.

The turmoil that was Europe in the first half of the Twentieth Century made Arendt one of the “rootless ones.” She was a refugee first in Berlin and Potsdam, then in Paris where she became a sort of bohemian/intellectual/outlaw. I say outlaw not because she was on the wrong side of the law but because her thinking and pronouncements were so often outside the mainstream. She was referred to as a “conscious pariah.”

She finally achieved a level of security and fame after arriving in New York in 1941 where she gained entry into an inner circle of intellectuals who focused on anti-totalitarianism politics and apostate philosophy.

In 1951 she published The Origins of Totalitarianism a study of fascism and genocide which focused on selfless mass man who was susceptible to totalitarian manipulation and spiritual dissolution of the human personality. She averred that a “decisive break with the great Western tradition of honor, faith and justice had permitted the elements of totalitarian to rise.”

Her social philosophy was built on a foundation that included freedom of thought, the importance of open discussion of rights and responsibilities among free people and the inculcation of new ideas. Politically she emphasized matters of social and material welfare as well as consideration of distribution of existing goods. As an educator she stressed the kinds of thinking, judging and acting that are necessary to be part of a diverse and human race.

In addition to her major texts she published a number of anthologies and contributed to many publications. She was also a minor poet, though largely unpublished.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

My general distrust of Arendt--who somehow both helped the right wing fixate on 'totalitarianism' but also helped make it okay to say Heidegger was really cool--wasn't able to overcome the pleasure in this short, generally reliable biography. Though calling Adorno a 'political theorist' bends the mind almost as much as Arendt's belief that identifying unjust social structures and asking to change them is perhaps worse than enjoying the fruits of unjust social structures.

[Monster · Rating 5 out of 5]

I went into this book hating Hannah Arendt's guts for coining "the banality of evil" in reference to Eichmann. This book puts the whole episode into context in such a way that I don't hate Hannah Arendt's guts anymore and will probably end up reading Eichmann in Jerusalem sooner or later.

[The Jewish Book Council]

Review by Philip K. Jason for the Jewish Book Council.

[Iain · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There are no dangerous thoughts; thinking itself is dangerous."
(Life of the Mind, posthumously 1978 )

Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times by Anne Heller is a succinct biography that is plentiful in details and insights into the life of demure woman of immense intellect and thought who happened to be German and happened to be Jewish and like millions of others had to flee the Nazis and their genocidal killing machine; she never let that define her, for she was Hannah Arendt, and did like being defined by ascribed social identity. Her fierce independence got her into trouble throughout her life but brought to a head after the publication of one of her seminal works, 'Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil' (1963) in which her views where taken controversially as Arendt went against the populist norm of demonizing all Nazi war criminals to viewing Eichman in her opinion a more terrifying way, a man within a abhorrent system just following orders, not thinking just functioning. As she later said in an interview, "A functionary, when he really is nothing more than a functionary, is really a very dangerous gentleman" and later pointing out, "Well, demonization itself can help ... to provide an alibi. You succumb to the Devil incarnate, and as a result you're not guilty yourself." (SWR TV, Das Thema, Nov. 9, 1964). Eichman was a man, who went down a road with hellish consequences, he was guilty and deserved the death sentence he received, Arendt maintained this throughout her work which is a masterpiece of objectivity. Hannah Arendt's other seminal work, 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' (1951) she would trace the roots of the two totalitarian systems of the 20th century in Nazism (Hitler's Germany) and Communism (Stalin's Russia), it would showcase her keen mind for writing about the century's worst regimes and her unflinching approach to dealing with such grim realms of humanity. Her view of the new horror, "The concentration camps, by making death itself anonymous (making it impossible to find out whether a prisoner is dead or alive), robbed death of its meaning as the end of a fulfilled life. In a sense they took away the individual's own death, proving that henceforth nothing belonged to him and he belonged to no one. His death merely set a seal on the fact that he had never existed.
(The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951) The fact that in both regimes but in particularly the horrors of the Holocaust, the apparatus of the killing machine was operated by tens of thousands of people, the vast majority unordinary but pulling the levers of death nonetheless. Arendt noted, "It is, in fact, far easier to act under conditions of tyranny than it is to think." (The Human Condition, 1958)
Furthermore noting, "The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil." (Thinking", The Life of the Mind, posthumously 1978)

Anne Heller, again succinctly, delves into the various social communities that Hannah Arendt moved through at different stages of her life from childhood, to university days, to refugee status in Paris, and later emigration to New York City. She was a magnetic for the intelligentsia everywhere she went and became one of the great teachers of her generation at Yale, Cornell, Harvard, University of Chicago, and the New School in New York City among others. Her lectures were often packed with students, old colleagues, wandering intellectuals, often bursting the capacity of the room. She spoke, they came.

"Political questions are far too serious to be left to the politicians."
(Men In Dark Times, 1968)

[Tammam Aloudat · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have read some of Arendt work but this is the first time I have read about her life and work and the circumstances under which she lived and worked. This is immensely interesting and reveals much about what she meant when she wrote and spoke her main ideas that many know or think they know.

The book starts with the controversy caused by her 1962 book "Eichmann in Jerusalem" which caused her to be accused of animosity to Israel and even being boycotted by many Jewish intellectuals and some of her close friends. The thinker who had to flee Nazi Germany, spend time in exile, live in an internment camp, and be a refugee in two countries because she was a jew had to defend herself against being called a self-hating jew when she called out the banality of evil. The controversy took a long time to die out and Arendt, who kept working and writing, had to tolerate the hostility it created.

This is a revelation to me, as someone who comes from a very different non-European and non-Jewish background, I thought Eichmann in Jerusalem was brilliant when I read it first. I naturally didn't take the offense Arendt's contemporaries took and this book helped me understand the work in its context.

The biography then goes back to the beginnings and tells the story of one of the intellectual monuments of the Twentieth Century. She was amazing because of her mental capacity, her thought, her humanity, and her strength but also because of her weaknesses and her ability to live with them. Those included her defense of Heidegger, the lover of her youth who turned around and joined the Nazis. She hated what he did and defended him and stayed in that love-hate relationship with him until the end of their lives.

Arendt was capable of thinking, this sounds simple but it is not. Many of us force the gears of our mind to grind on, and they make noise, and we think that we are thinking, and we are to some extent, but not fully. She is one of those rarefied people who have the mental capacity to really think, to absorb the world and see the patterns both natural and human, to analyse them and to come out of that process with observations and conclusions that, once read, seem common sensical even if we wouldn't have thought about them a few minutes before. In that, she hasn't only thought for the sake of thinking as is obvious in The Origins of Totalitarianism or On Violence, she thought and written because there are problems of life and death that need to be thought about. In that, I can think of the exact opposite example to show the difference, that is Wittgenstein who thought for the sake of though and for the exploration of logic, and reading his Tractatus is fascinating and entirely useless for us mortal humans. Reading Arendt, on the other hand, is like coming out from the fog into sunlight.

[Michele · Rating 5 out of 5]

Riveting book. During the time before Adolf Hitler came to full power, German society remained polite with an undercurrent of savage hate directed outward, a classic scapegoating, in this case of the Jewish people, that grew and grew until it seemed like destiny. In Arendt's individual story, it becomes apparent that friends that remained safe and silent as the target was sharpened by the Nazis were the ones who engaged in the deepest betrayal. Genocide came by degrees.

Hannah Arendt began university during the darkening time after World War I. She was brilliant, blessed with social standing, and she was a German Jew. At her university, she had an affair with Heidegger, a philosopher of thought and word who also became a developed anti-Semite and eventually a member of the Nazi Party. Arendt knew Heiddegger into his 80s, and continued to visit him off and on even after the end of WW II, even as she became an acclaimed champion of the Jewish people, weaving her philosophies based upon her horrifying proximity to the totalitarian state that enveloped her life.

As an exile in America, she became famous for her observation that evil is made, bit by bit. Her thoughts about the "banality of evil" were initially poorly received after she published a book about observing Adolf Eichmann on trial for Nazi war crimes and mass murder. For Arendt, Eichmann was banal, as well as evil, for he simply portrayed himself as a man who followed orders but who had no power. Arendt believed that enforcers, and victims, in a totalitarian state, both succumb to feelings of being utterly without value. This book is valuable, for in its forceful brevity, it enfolds the reader in Arendt's commitment to her era, and to her fate, as she refused to not act, and therefore chose to value her witnessing, and her flaws, and the need for human defense against totalitarian power. In this book, Arendt comes across not only as a witness, but as a woman who believed in the power of thought as a companion to right action - a philosopher as a knight of applied thought. A philosopher for whom thought was never abstract, but rather moral in itself, a companion to the physical world and the necessity for empathy.

[Morgan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A reasonable and effective introduction to the contours of Arendt's life and thought hampered by its brevity. I understand that the aim was to provide a concise account of her core ideas and themes, but the complexities of Arendt's thought can't really be done justice in such a short space. Were it twice as long it would be able to give a much more nuanced view while remaining relatively compact.

Beyond that, the author is perhaps too favourable to Arendt, and overlooks some of the more troubling aspects of her thought (such as her callous and dismissive attitude to many non-European cultures, or the fact that much of the historical basis of Origins of Totalitarianism is incompatible with later historiography). Moreover, the author avoids the problem of Arendt's antipathy towards the project of 'philosophy' itself, as developed in many of her later works. Arendt's eventual hostility to just about all normative philosophical thought is one of the most interesting, thought-provoking, and difficult aspects of her work. It would have been nice to see more awareness of these issues.

Nevertheless, for a piece of writing barely over 100 pages, this remains an admirable introduction to Arendt for newcomers and, despite already having a reasonably solid knowledge of her work and thought, I both learned new facts, and reminded myself why I find her such a fascinating figure.

[Christine · Rating 5 out of 5]

철학자이자 사회문화 이론가인 Hannah Arendt 에 대한 전기(Biography)이다. 이 책은 Hannah Arendt의 자라온 환경과 특별한 재능을 보이며 대학에서 독일, 그리스 철학에 매진하는 그녀의 청년시절 이야기 부터 그 당시 저명한 교수 였던 Martin Heidegger와의 로맨틱한 관계를 포함하여 주변의 띄어난 지성인들과 교류하는 이야기를 담고 있다.

1939년 히틀러의 독일을 간신히 빠져나와 미국에 정착하는 Hannah Arendt는 자신의 모국어를 버려야 했고 36세에 영어를 배우기 시작해서 8권의 중요 책과 수백개의 에세이를 남기게 된다. 첫 책인 The Origins of Totalitarianism에 대한 반응은 엄청났고, 그녀의 책 Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil은 지금까지도 논란이 계속되는 책이다. Adolf Eichmann은 나찌당의 간부로서 홀로코스트를 조직한 주요 인물이다. 이스라엘에서 행해진 그의 재판을 목격하고 쓴 책으로서 Eichmann의 홀로코스트에서의 역할과 그것를 조직한 인물로서의 그의 성격을 분석하고 있다. 더불어 홀로코스트를 도왔던 지역의 유대인 리더들의 협조에 대해 언급함으로써 유대인 모두의 극심한 분노를 일으키게 한다.

유대인(Jew) 가정에서 태어났지만 유대인으로서 정체성에 대해 고민하면서, 같은 민족 유대인들과는 뚜렷하게 다른 관점으로 유대인의 문제점을 해석하는 Hannah Arendt의 Thinking power는 깊이를 모를 정도로 심오하고 객관성을 잃지 않는다. 세상의 격렬한 비난과 논란에도 흔들리지 않고 자신의 이론에 대한 갖는 확신과 용기는 존경심을 일으키기에 충분하였다. 이책으로 인해 Hannah Arendt는 오랜시간을 함께 의지한 유대인 친구들이 그녀에게 등을 돌리는 아픔을 겪었다. 지금도 유대인에 대한 비판적인 글을 쓰는 같은 민족의 지성인들이 유대인으로 부터 많은 협박과 비난에 시달린다는 이야기를 알고 있었는데, 1963년도 책이 발간되었을 당시는 어땠을지 Hannah Arendt 가 시달렸을 고통을 짐작 생각해 보게했다.

Hannah Arendt가 많은 여성작가의 지표가 되는 이유를 알게되어 기뻣고, 그녀의 삶의 자취는 앞으로의 세대에게 쭉 일컬어질 이야기라고 생각한다. 모두에게 권하는 책이다.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hannah Arendt is pretty much the definition of complicated; I'd read several of her books but knew little about her life (other than philosophy student, pretty assimilated in high German culture, Jewish, WW2, and then subject of a lot of intra-communal hate over her writings about the Eichmann trial). I had no idea she'd dated Heidegger (who was apparently both a player and a nazi himself...), etc.

There's nothing really useful here other than just a more full appreciation of a historical figure (the same time would be better spent actually reading her books), but it was still interesting.

[Marie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The content of this audiobook provides good insight into the life experience of Hannah Arendt. Her perspectives on Nazis, Israel, Hitler and the Jewish existence are well explicated. The book begins with the trial of Eichmann, which demands that the listener jump right in and trust the author. The second and subsequent chapters are then perceived in the light of her writings on Eichmann, and provide a reasoned buffer.

The reader was unsatisfactory, but I managed to slog through. I look forward to doing more work on Arendt, whose observations on totalitarianism and tyranny remain extremely relevant today. Most prescient were her comments about an easily persuadable population..

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

A no-punches pulled biography

Arendt, an enigmatic soul filled with incongruities proved to be a voice of conscience that spoke truth to power, yet seemed to give a pass to Nazis whose express intent was to eliminate her people.

I suppose a high-altitude vantage point helped her see evil as more than a volk-vision fraught with clannish inclinations.

Evil maintains its purchase when good people look the other way. Perhaps that best captures the irony of Hannah Arendt.

[Krista Joy Montgomery · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've heard much about Hannah Arendt and her theories, but have never really read her works. I'm so glad that I read this before starting. It gives an excellent and insightful overview into the important aspects of her life - in a beautifully balanced way.

I now feel inspired and better prepared to start reading Arendt's works.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Where has this been?

This is a critical yet respectful account of a lady who never stopped growing. I loved the reflection of her friend and writer Mary McCarthy that she could actually see Ms. Arendt think.
Don't let the relatively short length fool you. This would be a great book for discussion.