1975, ISBN: 9780544456198

Part of James Atlas's Icons series, a biography of one of the leading intellectuals in postwar America, and the author of the controversial "Eichmann in Jerusalem." Hannah Arendt was an e… Mehr…

Part of James Atlas's Icons series, a biography of one of the leading intellectuals in postwar America, and the author of the controversial "Eichmann in Jerusalem." Hannah Arendt was an eminent philosopher, a distinguished professor, and a famous journalist. When she wrote about the trial of the Nazi war criminal Adolph Eichmann she not only recorded history but changed it. Her major works, "The Origin of Totalitarianism" and "The Human Condition," belong among the classics of Western thought. When she died in 1975 at the age of 69, she was revered as one of the major intellectual figures of her day. In Anne Heller's skilled telling, she was also an outsized personality, fearless and indifferent to the opinions of others. As a student in Germany, she had a controversial affair with her professor, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, a supporter of the Nazi party. Barred from teaching because she was Jewish, she fled to France and, later, to New York. She made her way in the world of emigre Jews with force; "Eichmann in Jerusalem," first published in "The New Yorker," invoked a phrase -- "the banality of evil" -- that would forever alter how we view the Holocaust. Heller, the biographer of Ayn Rand, is accustomed to dealing with strong women; her portrait of Arendt engages both her private life -- the philosopher Karl Jaspers was one of her professors, Mary McCarthy was her closest friend -- and her role as a public intellectual in postwar New York. One of her most important books was a collection of biographical essays called Men in Dark Times; Arendt, too, lived through dark times, but managed to bring light. Media ><