Hannah Arendt: A Life in Dark Times

by Anne C. Heller Narrated by Tavia Gilbert

Overview

The acclaimed biographer presents “a perceptive life of the controversial political philosopher” and author of Eichmann in Jerusalem (Kirkus Reviews).

Hannah Arendt 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. Arendt is now best remembered for the storm of controversy that surrounded her 1963 New Yorker series on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, a kidnapped Nazi war criminal.

Arendt's first book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, single-handedly altered the way generations around the world viewed fascism and genocide. Her most famous work, Eichmann in Jerusalem, created fierce debate that continues to this day, exacerbated by the posthumous discovery that she had been the lover of the philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger.

In this comprehensive biography, Anne C. Heller tracks the source of Arendt's contradictions and achievements to her sense of being a “conscious pariah”-one of those rare people 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.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

06/01/2015
Heller’s short life of Hannah Arendt doesn’t offer any new information on the provocative writer or any new perspectives on her writing. Nonetheless, it’s a readable and serviceable introduction Arendt and her work, beginning with an account of the uproar around her most controversial book, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), based on a series of stories published in the New Yorker. Born in central Germany, the only child of prosperous and well-educated parents, Arendt was a “fluent babbler” who by age six was a “tiny phenomenon of abstract thinking,” interested in mathematics and music theory. In 1924, at 18, she entered Marburg University, falling under the sway of philosopher Martin Heidegger and embarking on a passionate three-year affair with him. After fleeing from Berlin to Paris in 1933, she made her way to New York City with her husband, Heinrich Blücher. Soon, she was contributing essays on philosophy and politics to Partisan Review, Commentary, and the Nation. In 1949, Arendt completed her majestic work The Origins of Totalitarianism, which aimed to comprehend the incomprehensible: “the demonic wish to make men superfluous to others and themselves.” Heller leaves readers with a familiar yet well-wrought portrait of Arendt as a rootless woman who nevertheless established strong friendships and influenced a large circle of followers. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM. (Aug.)

Library Journal

07/01/2015
Hannah Arendt (1906–75) became one of the most important American public intellectuals in the period from the end of World War II until her death. How did a German-Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany manage to accomplish this feat? As Heller (Ayn Rand and the World She Made) makes clear in this excellent biography, she did so through the power of her intellect and the force of her unusual personality. Heller explores Arendt's background as a philosophy student in Germany, including her notorious affair with Martin Heidegger. Arendt displayed from an early age an interest in politics, and Heller covers her complex relations with the Zionist movement. After the war, she achieved renown through her influential The Origins of Totalitarianism. Heller gives a solid account of the book's critical reception, although political philosopher Eric Voegelin was not as favorable to the work as she suggests. Arendt's Eichmann in Jerusalem led to great controversy, also thoroughly described by Heller. VERDICT Heller's biography is less detailed that Elizabeth Young-Bruehl's Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World but incorporates new information. Anyone interested in Arendt and, more generally, in European or American intellectual history post-World War II will find this valuable reading.—David Gordon, Bowling Green State Univ., OH

JANUARY 2017 - AudioFile

An intellectual giant and cultural theorist of the 1950s and beyond, Hannah Arendt focused her principal writings on considerations of the conflict between civilization and barbarism as well as anti-Semitism. Narrator Laural Merlington’s somewhat raspy timbre captures the listener’s attention at the outset but wears on the ear a bit in time. This is a concise work for such a complex life, offering a sympathetic perspective of Arendt—who escaped Hitler’s Germany for the United States in 1933—and examining her evolution as a controversial thinker. Despite her timbre, Merlington skillfully weaves an appropriately paced, mature, and thoughtful narration to suit the graceful examination of a life fully lived. W.A.G. © AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine

Kirkus Reviews

2015-05-16
A perceptive life of the controversial political philosopher. Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) became "an icon almost overnight" after the publication of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), a book that former Esquire fiction editor Heller (Ayn Rand and the World She Made, 2009) praises as "the most passionate, complex, moving, and influential account ever written of the clash between civilization and official barbarism in twentieth-century Europe." It also was Arendt's first book in English, the language she learned with some difficulty after arriving in New York in 1941, a refugee from Germany and Vichy France. By the 1950s, Arendt established a reputation as an outspoken political theorist in essays on anti-Semitism, German existentialism, and minority rights that appeared in prestigious publications that included Contemporary Jewish Record, Partisan Review, Commentary, and the Nation. New York intellectuals were smitten by the woman Alfred Kazin called "a blazing Jew." Arendt seemed the perfect writer to report for the New Yorker on the trial, in 1963, of Nazi SS Officer Adolf Eichmann, but her articles, followed by the book Eichmann in Jerusalem: The Banality of Evil, generated outrage. Friends, allies, and colleagues accused her of "moral deafness. Instead of damning Eichmann as the embodiment of evil, she portrayed him as a 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." After her death, when her love affair with philosopher and Nazi party member Martin Heidegger became known, critics accused her of "Jewish ‘self-hatred.' " Heller judiciously places both scandals in the context of Arendt's youth in Germany, where she felt exempt from anti-Semitic remarks directed mostly to Eastern European Jews; her education as a philosopher; her struggles with Zionism and her own Jewish identity; and her prolific writings on violence, truth, and political discourse. An evenhanded, sympathetic biography of a defiant thinker.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940178029510
Publisher:	Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Publication date:	07/26/2022
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

1

Eichmann in Jerusalem
1961–1963
 
“Going along with the rest and wanting to say ‘we’ were quite enough to make the greatest of all crimes possible.”
—Hannah Arendt, interview with Joachim Fest, 1964.
 
 
 
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. “People are resorting to any means to destroy my reputation,” she wrote to her friend Karl Jaspers soon after the book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, appeared in 1963. “They have spent weeks trying to find something in my past that they can hang on me.”
 
The Anti-Defamation League and other Jewish organizations, the editors of influential magazines she had written for, faculty members at colleges where she earned a precarious living as a visiting professor, and friends from every period of her life objected to her characterization of Eichmann, who had been popularly branded “the most evil monster of humanity,” as “terribly and terrifyingly normal.” Many were infuriated by her depiction of Nazi-era European Jewish leaders — some of whom were still alive and highly regarded — as having (“almost without exception”) cooperated with Eichmann in sending ordinary Jews to Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Chelmno. Where only months earlier Arendt had been celebrated as a brilliant, original, and deeply humanistic political thinker, she was now attacked as arrogant, ill-informed, heartless, a dupe of Eichmann, an enemy of Israel, and a “self-hating Jewess.” “What a risky business to tell the truth on a factual level without theoretical and scholarly embroidery,” she wrote to her best friend and steadfast defender Mary McCarthy. But the trouble with her book 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.
 
Hannah Arendt was seated in the press benches when the Eichmann trial opened to a tidal wave of publicity on April 11, 1961, in a makeshift courtroom in west Jerusalem. The State of Israel was only thirteen years old. No Israeli courthouse was big enough to accommodate the spectacle, so a brand-new performance theater called the House of the People was taken over for the proceedings. It seated 750 people, but interest far outpaced capacity. In the opening days, as many as seven hundred reporters from three dozen countries, international politicians and celebrities, jurists, Israeli and European camp survivors, historians, and tourists competed to squeeze into the arena for a glimpse of the notorious Nazi. Arendt was on assignment for the New Yorker, and on many days she brought along her seventeen-year-old first cousin once removed, Edna Brocke, née Fuerst, who had grown up in Israel. Taking notes nearby were former war correspondent Martha Gellhorn, representing the Atlantic Monthly; Elie Wiesel, writing for the Yiddish-language American Jewish Daily Forward; former deputy judge advocate general Lord Russell of Liverpool and Oxford professor Hugh Trevor-Roper, both writing for the London Sun- day Times; along with reporters from the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and the Washington Post. Cables and electrical wires crisscrossed the courtroom floor to transmit the first continuous live television feed and videotaping of a judicial proceeding for an international audience, and transcripts were distributed daily. Later, Arendt’s critics would claim that she attended too few courtroom sessions and depended too heavily on tapes and transcripts, and in fact she was on hand in Jerusalem for a total of only five or six weeks of the five-month trial. But others also came and went, while the world watched on television.
 
The indictment against Eichmann was read by the chief judge on the first day of the trial; it ran to fifteen counts. These enumerated “crimes against the Jewish people” and “against humanity” that had been committed or caused by Eichmann between 1938 and 1945, beginning with his alleged participation in the murderous Kristallnacht pogroms of November 1938 and encompassing the forced transportation and extermination of the majority of Jews then living in Germany, the Axis countries, and the nations occupied by the German army during the war years. The indictment listed the concentration and death camps to which Eichmann “and others” knowingly sent Jews for the purpose of mass murder, the approximate number of Jews sent to the camps, and the dates during which the camps operated. At the end of the reading, Eichmann, asked if he understood the indictment, spoke for the first time. “Yes, certainly,” he said in German. Asked how he pleaded, he answered, “Not guilty in the sense of the indictment.”
 
There were a number of reasons for the almost hysterical interest in the Eichmann trial — the international equivalent of the O. J. Simpson trial in its day. At the end of World War II, hundreds of fugitive Nazi officers were rumored to be hiding in towns and cities around the world, evil phantoms abetted by right-wing governments and networks of fascist fellow travelers. Eichmann and his bosses in the notorious SS, or Schutzstaffel —Heinrich Himmler’s elite  paramilitary corps,  which was directly responsible for carrying out Hitler’s plan to exterminate the entire Jewish population of Europe — had either disappeared, been murdered, or, in the case of Himmler, committed suicide and thus escaped prosecution and sentencing during the historic war crimes trials at Nuremberg in 1945 and 1946. Partly as a result, the destruction of as many as six million Jewish men, women, and children — murder on a scale previously unknown in history — had not been thoroughly adjudicated or even acknowledged at Nuremberg or in the successor tribunals of the late 1940s, which had focused on Germany’s illegal actions against other sovereign states in Europe. With Eichmann now in the seat of judgment in Jerusalem, the full story of the Jewish Holocaust, including, for the first time, the testimony of concentration camp survivors, would finally be heard. Or so the young State of Israel expected.
 
Another reason was that a year earlier, in May 1960, Israeli secret service agents had extracted Eichmann from his hiding place in Argentina, sedated him, kidnapped him, and brought him to Jerusalem in a dramatic, extralegal maneuver that had been cheered, criticized, and generally debated around the world for months before the trial. The compelling attraction for most observers and for Arendt, however, was the mysterious figure of Eichmann, who, for his own protection, sat sealed in a bulletproof glass cage at the foot of the judges’ raised platform for the duration of the trial. Slight, balding, bespectacled, with a runny nose and a compulsive twist of his thin and bitter mouth, he looked more like “a ghost who has a cold on top of that,” as Arendt aptly described him in a letter to Karl Jaspers, than the representative of a self-appointed master race. He had been the head of the Office of Jewish Affairs of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police, as well as a midranking lieutenant colonel in Himmler’s murderous SS, and he was considered the most wanted war criminal alive in the early 1960s. The Israeli and American newspapers of the period characterized him not only as monstrous and “bloodthirsty” but also as Hitler’s fore- most architect of and technician for the implementation of “the Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” a particularly repellent Nazi euphemism for unprecedented genocide. This last characterization of Eichmann turned out not to be entirely credible, as Arendt and others made clear at the time.

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