Thomas Meyer, Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind

Translated by Shelley Frisch

William Collins. 2026. £26. 560 pages. ISBN 978-0-00-838535-4 

Reviewed by Tony Roberts

 

The German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) is a recognised voice of her dark times and increasingly of our own. Hence her continuing relevance. She wrote primarily on totalitarianism and on Jewish affairs, offering original ideas on power and evil, on democracy and statelessness, on tradition and responsibility. Admired as a polemicist by many, she has always had her critics.  

To recap on the life: Johanna Arendt was a middle-class Jewish native of Hannover, whose father died when she was young. She was raised in a leftist family tending to the secular but never disowning its Jewishness. Precociously intellectual, she studied at the University of Marburg, where she came under the influence of the ‘passionate thinking’ and person of Martin Heidegger, author of Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927). They had an affair which continued intermittently for four years from 1925. She completed her doctorate in philosophy at Heidelberg, under Karl Jaspers’ supervision, a man whom she greatly admired.  

What turned Arendt from philosophy to political theory was her belief in the greater relevance of the latter to life. As her new biographer Thomas Meyer explains, ‘She noted that since antiquity, philosophy had been conceived of as an abstract generalization subject to the logic of a given philosopher. The realization that experiences could sway thinking was cast aside as philosophers maintained their fidelity to tradition, analyzing the history of thinking in lieu of history itself.’ As Meyer neatly expresses it, ‘what she herself aimed to accomplish [was] to lead philosophy away from its preoccupation with itself and toward the political sphere, which, in the final analysis, is the human sphere.’  

In the 1930s and 1940s Arendt’s writing tended to focus on aspects of the Jewish Question (the ongoing debate about the status, rights and treatment of Jews) and on Zionism. Jewish assumptions of their assimilation into German society had been found to be false. Arendt became involved in resistance to fascism, working for the German Zionist Organization. Her activities led to her arrest. Forced to leave Germany, she settled in France where she worked for Youth Aliyah, preparing refugee Jewish children for immigration to Palestine.  

After the fall of France and a period of internment she knew she must leave the country. With her second husband, Heinrich Blücher, a working-class autodidact philosopher, she travelled to America in 1941. The relationship between the two seems to have been based on an atypical kind of loyalty. Her biographer refers to them as an ‘odd couple’, given their ‘social differences, their mixed marriage, their varying political views’.  

In America she learned the language, found employment as an editor at Schocken Books and continued her involvement with Jewish affairs: ‘From 1944 to 1952-53, Arendt was a staff member, then the managing director of the Jewish Cultural Reconstruction.’ She wrote for Aufbau (Reconstruction), a German language weekly. In New York critics like Alfred Kazin and Randall Jarrell found her charismatic: deeply learned in a European way and mesmerising in conversation (Their wives, on the other hand, often found her dismissive). 

Arendt’s writings on political theory and other subjects were bold and original. Naturalized in 1951, she lived largely by writing freelance essays and occasional employment through a number of visiting professorships. Her books included The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), Men in Dark Times (1968) and the incomplete The Life of the Mind. At her death, Arendt’s reputation as an uncompromising thinker was assured. 

In 1982 her former student, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl wrote a substantial, critically admired biography, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. In a cautionary note she observed: ‘A biography abundant in novelistic descriptions of places, people, and periods would not be appropriate for someone like Hannah Arendt. What must be shown are the historical bases for her generalizations, the particular experiences that launched her thought, the friendships and loves that nourished her, and — if possible —her thinking manner or thinking style.’  

This new biography by Thomas Meyer seems to have taken Young-Bruehl’s caution on board (although it limits the attention to her ‘nourishing’ friendships). What is new is its diligent pursuit of other sources of information on the life and work. The book benefits from comprehensive study in a number of countries’ archives. It brings to light many details which add depth to the portrait of Arendt and especially those connected with her involvement in Jewish affairs. It is also arranged usefully into subsections dealing with key moments, books, relationships and events in the life. What emerges is a fuller picture of the Jewish Arendt, rather than the German or American one. 

In his introduction the author spells out his primary concerns: ‘The present biography focuses on two phases of Arendt’s life: her years in Paris after escaping from Germany, and the years she spent in the United States up to the publication of her first major work, The Origins of Totalitarianism.’ He stresses the Paris years (1933-1940), since Arendt spoke little publicly of her activities and yet we learn from Meyer more about her selfless commitment to Jewish organizations, which in turn counters some of the hostile accusations that damaged her reputation by her perceived criticism of Jews in Eichmann in Jerusalem in 1963.

Meyer is very good on Arendt’s forthright character [We can witness it in action in ‘Hannah Arendt (1964) - What Remains? (Full Interview w/ Günter Gaus) on YouTube.] Deflecting questions like those concerning feminism, she would always assert her independence of thought and action (‘To put it very simply, I have always done what I like to do’). He also addresses significant aspects of her life in some detail, one being her sense of her Jewishness. She wrote on one occasion, ‘Politically, I will always speak only in the name of the Jews whenever circumstances force me to give my nationality…I never felt myself … to be a German.’ She treasured the German language, however, as her birthright. 

In the new book Arendt’s relationships with Heidegger and with Jaspers are well explored. Indebted to both, she maintained their friendship throughout her life, though her relationship with Heidegger was sorely tried by his unrepentant turn to National Socialism. It resulted in a rift between the two from 1933 to 1950. However, she could never dismiss the genius of his early radical intrusion into philosophical tradition, his attempt to make ‘another beginning for thinking’. There is an insightful comment by Leopoldine Weizmann about Heidegger in a letter of December 1947 to Herbert Marcuse, quoted by Meyer: ‘The problem of Heidegger? His case is a powerful example of how a great philosophical achievement alone falls far short of what is needed to orient oneself in the world and how little it ensures the self-sufficiency of the individual.’  

Meyer acknowledges the role in Arendt’s thinking of other German friends like Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin and her first husband, Günther Stern. After her activist Paris years, her continued involvement with Jewish affairs in America is a major theme. Her time at Schocken books and the editorial projects she contemplated there (including work on a German text of Kafka’s Diaries) is another focus. And The Origins of Totalitarianism is explored in detail. This has been pithily described as the ‘chilling analysis of the conditions that led to the Nazi and Soviet totalitarian regimes … a warning from history about the fragility of freedom, exploring how propaganda, scapegoats, terror and political isolation all aided the slide towards total domination’ (Penguin Books).  

Meyer is also informative on Arendt’s growing understanding and use of the media. As he notes, she ‘had a reputation as a brilliant, quick-witted, and skillful speaker on a variety of topics’ and was considered very quotable. Only Theodor W. Adorno could match her in the postwar world of German broadcasting. Significantly, ‘In Germany, Arendt invariably spoke as a Jew, and after 1945 always as an outsider.’ She cherished her outsider status as she did her native language.

Where I think Meyer’s biography also scores is in its frank appraisal of Arendt’s excesses (as well as her strengths). This is important since, as the author writes, ‘For some, everything she wrote seemed meaningful and significant, while others found her writings false, superficial, skewed, untenable.’ While admiring her work he acknowledges, ‘From the outset, Arendt could be harshly judgmental of others’ ideas; she did not just chip away at those ideas, but hacked them down.’

 Another criticism he levels concerns her method in On Revolution (1963): ‘Arendt’s quest for insight led her to create associations, draw inspiration, and try out ideas she had broached in her correspondence, yet even more often she simply made unsubstantiated claims, a practice that did not appear to unsettle her contemporaries, but has disconcerted later interpreters of her writings. Readers can never be quite sure of how much substance lies behind her statements, which tend to be highly dogmatic and disallow any contrary view.’

 Her notoriety in some quarters stems not simply from the distrust of critics in her polemics or the accuracy of her statements (such as those on Russia, which alienated Isaiah Berlin). It comes specifically from the publication of Eichmann in Jerusalem, first as a series of essays for the New Yorker and then in book form. Eichmann had acted as the director of the Judenreferat (Jewish affairs unit) and was responsible for the transportation of millions to the death camps. Kidnapped in Argentina in May 1960 by Mossad, he was tried and hanged the following year. Arendt had attended the trial and her resulting book was labelled by one critic as a ‘masterpiece without a soul’. Many took exception to her tone — she considered it ‘ironic’ — which spared neither perpetrators nor victims.

 Readers, particularly in the Jewish community, saw the book as a slur on the Jewish Councils for highlighting their compliance with Nazi orders (which included listing Jews for slave labour and deportation to the concentration camps). Also, the book’s subtitle ‘the banality of evil’ seemed to imply a diminishing of Eichmann’s guilt, a suggestion that he was no monster. Clearly Arendt, who knew that her book would give offence to fellow Jews, meant neither of these things exactly in the way they were taken (though underestimating the pressures on those Council members). Despite the ferocity of the response to Arendt’s book, in Germany at least, it had little effect on her sales or reputation. In New York it was not forgotten. 

Eighty pages from the end of this intellectual biography, Thomas Meyer concedes the enigma of Hannah Arendt: ‘There is not even a hint of consensus in the hundreds of thousands of interpretations of her writings as to whether Arendt is categorized as a philosopher, a political theorist, a historian, a sociologist, or something else entirely. 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? Only multiple attributions could come close to capturing her essence.’ Yet by the end of the biography —as with the Young-Bruehl — we know that we are to admire Arendt’s originality as a prescient observer of European affairs. The daily reports of wars and of the advance of right-wing politics continue to force our attention on her warning that the price of freedom is vigilance. 

Those readers like myself who are most interested in Arendt’s American period and her relations with its intellectuals—the critics, novelists and poets she entranced— may find her New York time is covered patchily in Meyer’s book. Should the reader be interested in her ‘genius for friendship’ in America, there is the earlier biography by Young-Bruehl to go to, as well as a marvellous collection of the correspondence between Arendt and Mary McCarthy, Between Friends, 1949-75, edited by McCarthy’s biographer, Carol Brightman. For others, this excellent biography may well be enough.