Hannah Arendt's American Years and New Biography

A new biography, 'Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind' by Thomas Meyer (Penguin Press, translated by Shelley Frisch), seeks to reclaim the philosopher as a German figure, but her American years were transformative. Arriving in New York in May 1941, stateless and broke, Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher settled on the Upper West Side. Within six months she wrote for the German-Jewish weekly Aufbau, later became a senior editor at Schocken, and befriended New York intellectuals like Alfred Kazin, Randall Jarrell, and Mary McCarthy. Her major works, including 'The Origins of Totalitarianism' (1951) and 'The Human Condition' (1958), were written in America, often with friends polishing her English. She covered the Eichmann trial for The New Yorker in 1961, leading to 'Eichmann in Jerusalem' (1963) and the controversial 'banality of evil' phrase. The biography also covers her early life: affair with Martin Heidegger, dissertation under Karl Jaspers, work with Youth Aliyah, and postwar recovery of heirless Jewish property. Meyer's archival diligence is praised, but Elizabeth Young-Bruehl's 1982 biography remains indispensable for emotional depth. The article also discusses Arthur A. Cohen's novel 'An Admirable Woman,' reissued by McNally Editions, which fictionalizes Arendt's life. Arendt died on December 4, 1975, at age 69. The piece ends with her 1973 warning about lying governments depriving people of thought and judgment.