His archival discoveries change the shape of her story. His biography can be episodic, with his documentary findings sometimes presented without much interpretation. Yet he produces a fresh Arendt: less a lone intelligence surveying the 20th century’s catastrophes from above than a participant in its battered institutions ...
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.
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.
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.
Meyer, the editor of a 12-volume German edition of Arendt’s writings, has commendably restored Arendt to the vanished worlds that made her — Weimar Germany, interwar Paris, Cold War America — rather than the overworked anti-Trumpian, anti-Brexity fantasies into which she has too often been dragooned ... Meyer is particularly strong on the intellectual currents of interwar German philosophy and the stifling landscape of Cold War conformity in America. Yet he too often prints the archive rather than paraphrasing it, and one occasionally wishes for a heavier editorial hand to de-Teutonise the leaden prose.
Thomas Meyer...doesn’t give us much saucy detail. A professor of philosophy at LMU Munich, his main interest here is ideas, not people. Still, his research uncovers some interesting new material.
Philosophy professor Thomas Meyer’s fresh and comprehensive biography was catalyzed by his access to the complete Arendt archives and commanding fluency in her erudite writings. He nests each phase in Arendt’s life and work within a meticulously detailed social, cultural, and political context . . . Arendt’s incisive and courageous work remains urgently relevant, and Meyer’s epic biography profoundly deepens our appreciation for the power of her vision.
While impressive, this exhaustive approach highlights a torrent of extraneous names and comes at the cost of the book’s pacing. Short biographies of various journal editors...add little to our understanding of Arendt as a whole. While her work remains vital and is increasingly relevant today, Meyer’s biography is weighed down by its own overexertion. An ambitious history held back by too much information.
