The way in which Elisabeth Young-Bruehl managed to turn a lived life into a told story in her Hannah Arendt biography, published in 1982, is still unrivaled today. In his Arendt bio, Thomas Meyer wisely doesn’t even try to tell the same life in an even more gripping way. He tells it completely differently. Strictly speaking, “biography” is not the best term for this remarkable book. It is more of a philosophical interpretation of history, a work of passages. This is how Walter Benjamin titled his unfinished magnum opus dedicated to Paris. Benjamin considered Paris “the capital of the 19th century.” Perhaps Hannah Arendt is something like the intellectual protagonist of the 20th century – in any case, she has now found her Benjaminian historian in Thomas Meyer.
Thomas Meyer’s biography Hannah Arendt – Against leaving friends behind – Culture
