Hannah arendt biography yahoo people
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Lyndsey Stonebridge begins We Are Free to Change the World, her illuminating biography of Hannah Arendt, by reminding us of her subject’s continuing relevance.
Arendt is sometimes thought of as a upphöjd and abstract thinker. Yet her thinking was highly responsive to the shock of Nazism and the rise of fascism, which left her stateless and acutely vulnerable for many years. After World War II, she discarded any ready-made theories. These included comfortable notions that Nazism and Stalinism were aberrations from the eventual global triumph of Western democracy.
As Stonebridge points out, Arendt wanted political thinking to be urgent and engaged. Thinking about our times could reconcile us to the perplexities of the reality we face and help us address our common predicament. There is a need for “thinking what we are doing” – a need to respond to circumstances in a way that is creative, courageous and receptive to the texture of experience.
Readers fascinated by Arendt’s enskild vo
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The “actual impulse of astonishment” that sparks all philosophising is “honest bafflement that other people live as they do,” writes Wolfram Eilenberger in his new book, The Visionaries.
It’s a wild ride through ten of the worst years in the 20th century, spanning the period from 1933, the year Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, to 1943 and the thick of the second world war. It’s told through the occasionally intersecting lives of four brilliant young women philosophers: Simone de Beauvoir and Simone Weil (both French), Russian-American Ayn Rand, and German-Jewish Hannah Arendt, who spent time exiled in France and New York.
Though very different, they all “experienced themselves as having been placed fundamentally differently in the world from how other people had been”. Eilenberger writes:
All of them were tormented from an early age by the same questions: What could it be that makes me so different? What is it that I clearly can’t understand and experience like all t
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Hannah Arendt: in praise of thought
Germany's tormented 20th century history is rich in dramatic and terrible themes, as a number of successful films that have hit the screens over the last few years demonstrate: The pianist, for example1 (on the Warsaw ghetto), or Goodbye Lenin and The lives of others (on East Germany and the fall of the Berlin Wall). The producer Margerete von Trotta has already drawn inspiration several times from these deep waters, and has not hesitated to deal with some difficult subjects: witness Two German sisters (Die Bleieme Zeit, 1981), a dramatised version of the life and death (in Stammheim prison, in circumstances which were never completely clarified) of the Red Army Fraction terrorist Gudrun Ensslin; a biopic of Rosa Luxemburg (1986); Rosenstrasse (2003), on a demonstration against the Gestapo in 1943 of German women protesting at the arrests of their Jewish husbands. In her new film, Hannah Arendt (2012 in Germany, 2013 in the USA an