Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind
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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Thomas Meyer clearly did some heroic work in the archives. Arendt’s unusually eventful life has been chronicled extensively in the half century since her death, including in the major 1982 biography by her former student Elisabeth Young-Bruehl. Writing about her, while always plentiful, seems to have proliferated in the last decade, as Arendt’s work on power and authoritarianism became relevant again with a new, anxious audience ... This biography is an uncanny mix of stiff and undisciplined; its unwieldy shape seems to derive from Meyer’s insistence on letting his archival discoveries dictate his narrative. Flooded by so much detail about overlooked episodes in Arendt’s life, Meyer’s book reads like a sprawling record of his diligent research. The fascinating and powerful thinker ostensibly at its center nearly gets lost ... Seemingly every record, every scrap of paper, gets its own exegesis. A novella by Ann Birstein, which features a condescending character based on Arendt, receives two pages of minutely detailed plot summary. Elsewhere, Meyer makes the puzzling decision to quote nonessential texts in full ... At the same time, certain consequential life events get awkwardly short shrift, presumably because they have already been covered in previous books. Arendt’s arrest and detention by the Nazis in 1933, for instance, gets a single full paragraph ... any glimmers of insight are mostly swallowed up by the rest of the book, with its ungainliness and endless longueurs.
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