Listen free for 30 days
-
Spoiling One's Story
- The Case of Hannah Arendt
- Narrated by: Matthew Cohn
- Length: 1 hr and 27 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wish list failed.
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Spoiling One's Story
Buy Now for $5.56
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's Summary
Hannah Arendt’s posthumous influence continues to be enormous, even though her best-known claims have been refuted by new evidence.
Since her death, a youthful diary shows Arendt precociously aware of a choice between two possible futures. Either she would choose a natural future unfolding with harmonious openness, or else attain public influence by advancing unsupported claims. In fact, Arendt lived both futures successively. In early essays, she held ex-Nazis responsible for their war crimes, and depicted Martin Heidegger, her former teacher and lover, as a nihilist whose philosophy led directly to his Nazi commitment. Yet later, she portrayed Adolf Eichmann, the official who implemented the Holocaust, as a mindless, “banal" bureaucrat. And she later exonerated and celebrated Heidegger, even using his coinages in arguments that lifted responsibility from bad actors. Arendt left a paper trail of documents for us to decode.
The real story, of a talented woman - simultaneously sustaining a hidden love affair and maintaining the posture of a disinterested public intellectual - is also a story of moral upendings and reversals. It is the back story. It is time for thoughtful listeners to know it.