HANNAH ARENDT: A LIFE IN DARK TIMES is a concise
biography of the brilliant German Jewish philosopher, and
surprisingly enough, at fewer than 150 pages, it is a
very comprehensive look at Hannah Arendt's life and
philosophical legacy. Hannah Arendt's writings are tinged
with her feeling of rootlessness for having moved so
often in her young life, and not because she was Jewish,
of which she had no idea until she was 6-years-old. Hannah
Arendt read philosophy and became the protégée as well as
the lover of the great Martin Heidegger, which was rather
baffling given the latter's Nazi connections. Hannah and
her mother fled Germany for Paris in 1933 at the onset of
Nazism, then a few years later headed for New York.
Hannah, who had never made a big deal of being Jewish,
nevertheless dedicated the greater part of her life to
the Jewish cause. And in spite of the "Dark Times" in
which she lived, Hannah Arendt's life was comparatively
uneventful until the publication of Eichmann in
Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil , which
created a controversy of epic proportions, in my opinion
partly because the public misunderstood her philosophical
stand on the matter.
HANNAH ARENDT: A LIFE IN DARK TIMES is very well
written, and at times positively riveting; Ms. Heller
also includes copious -- and enlightening -- footnotes
whether about various philosophers or historical events.
However, I found the structure of the book peculiar and in
a way rather distracting: the entire first third of
HANNAH ARENDT: A LIFE IN DARK TIMES is solely dedicated
to the Eichmann debacle. Although fascinating,
I'm tempted to recommend that the reader start with
Chapter 2, unless one is very familiar with the
controversy surrounding Eichmann , which I was
not. I found that beginning nearly at the end of the
philosopher's life was a tad off-putting because I do
not consider it the most important event in Hannah
Arendt's life, but only one part, which should have been
where it belonged chronologically. In spite of this
hurdle, HANNAH ARENDT: A LIFE IN DARK TIMES is an
excellent book, extensively researched, and abundantly
detailed, and easy to follow even for one unfamiliar with
philosophy; it provides an insightful look into Hannah
Arendt's philosophical writings but it is also a
compelling story of Jewish survival.
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 berated by her critics as a
poseur and a fraud. Born in Prussia to assimilated Jewish
parents, she escaped from Hitler’s Germany in 1933 and is
now best remembered for the storm of controversy that arose
after the publication of her 1963 New Yorker series on the
trial of the kidnapped Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann.
Arendt was a woman of many contradictions. She was
brilliant, beautiful when young, and irresistible to gifted
men, even in her chain-smoking, intellectually provocative
middle age. She 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, created 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 C. Heller
tracks the source of Arendt’s apparent contradictions and
her greatest achievements to her sense of being what she
called a “conscious pariah”—one of those few people in every
time and place who doesn’t “lose confidence in ourselves if
society does not approve us” and will not “pay any price” to
gain the acceptance of others.
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