Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind
His archival discoveries change the shape of her story. His biography can be episodic, with his documentary findings sometimes presented without much interpretation. Yet he produces a fresh Arendt: less a lone intelligence surveying the 20th century’s catastrophes from above than a participant in its battered institutions ...
The not so hidden intent of a new German biography, Thomas Meyer’s Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind , is to reclaim her as a German woman, writer, thinker, and publishing and academic phenomenon, not just an American one. Meyer, who teaches philosophy at the University of Munich and is a widely published writer, has assembled an enormous amount of information about Arendt’s family, education, German publishing career, and postwar celebrity. Arendt comes most fully alive, though, when Meyer lets her own extravagant, commanding voice carry the story forward ... Meyer’s archival diligence enlarges the record of Arendt’s life, but the letters and institutional records he draws on yield little of Arendt’s volatile temperament, the intertwining of idea and action; nor does he offer more than minimal physical evocation of Arendt at the different stages of her life.
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The life Mr. Meyer reconstructs reads as a sustained revolt against the power of categories to diminish. He shows her ideas taking shape at desks where classifications opened or foreclosed futures, within organizations charged with apportioning the remnants of an inheritance among the living. Seen against that history, her arguments no longer seem to descend from the altitude of solitary thought. They bear the abrasion of files handled, claims contested and Jewish allegiance translated from words into work.
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