Hannah Arendt

International Praise:

“The publications on Arendt seem truly countless, and yet Thomas Meyer manages to view her life from a new perspective. Meyer completely changes the viewpoint on Arendt, not looking at her from today’s perspective, but attempting to reconstruct her life using contemporary documents and reports.” —nd. The day online

“Meyer wants to portray Arendt ‘in her time’. And so this first genuine biography, based on primary sources, is not only a stroke of luck and a pleasure to read 40 years after Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s last attempt at an approximation, because of its wealth of material, but also because a new picture of Arendt’s theory can be drawn based on new or previously overlooked documents from her Paris years.” —Time Literature

“At this point, Meyer’s biography is not only historically but also politically important, because it brings together new source findings to prove that Arendt was not only a Zionist, but also an ‘activist’ for the emigration of German Jews to Palestine in the prehistory of the Jewish state.” —Welt am Sonntag

“What makes the book by Munich philosophy professor Thomas Meyer so worth reading are the insights from previously unused sources.” —Southwest Press

“The form, which tends to be formless, nevertheless follows a certain methodological rigor. For, as Walter Benjamin envisioned for his Arcades Project, Meyer primarily lets the documents themselves speak. Drawing on a seemingly endless wealth of knowledge, he comments, traces cross-connections with detective-like genius, and assembles them.” —Süddeutsche Zeitung