HANNAH ARENDT

A sweeping exploration of political theorist Hannah Arendt’s life and work.

Arendt (1906-1975) upended the study of philosophy by allowing space for social injustice and contemporary politics to percolate through what was once a field primarily associated with the past. “Was she first and foremost a Jew, a socialist, a conservative, a reactionary, a feminist, a racist, a self-hating Jew, or perhaps also a Zionist and survivor?” asks German scholar Meyer. “Only multiple attributions could come close to capturing her essence.” She studied under Martin Heidegger and recognized that “her personal identity, now facing an utterly altered public sphere, needed to be grasped in a radically different manner; it needed to come to the fore in her practical work itself.” During World War II, she helped relocate children to safety in Palestine and was interned in a camp before emigrating to the United States in 1941. Major postwar publications include The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), which controversially illuminated in the Nazi Eichmann not an innate monstrousness but what she famously called “the banality of evil.” In this biography, Meyer aims to evaluate “previously unknown archival material and other documents that have been overlooked” and treats readers to a dizzying array of details that piece together Arendt’s storied life. Every contact in her network is rigorously fleshed out with a modicum of well-researched background info. While impressive, this exhaustive approach highlights a torrent of extraneous names and comes at the cost of the book’s pacing. Short biographies of various journal editors—or noting how one of Heidegger’s students wrote “an elaborate write-up of the [Arendt] collection [Sechs Essays] on May 15, 1948, in the Whitsuntide edition of the Badische Neueste Nachrichten in Karlsruhe”—add little to our understanding of Arendt as a whole. While her work remains vital and is increasingly relevant today, Meyer’s biography is weighed down by its own overexertion.

An ambitious history held back by too much information.