Lessons from life
“ARISTOTLE WAS BORN, WORKED, and died,” Martin Heidegger famously told a hall full of undergraduates. “Now let us turn to his ideas.” Try the same tack with Hannah Arendt. It’s not just that Arendt’s work grew out of the facts of her life. It’s that the facts of her life read like fiction.
As her friend Mary McCarthy once said, Arendt was “a magnificent stage diva”. Focusing on only one episode in Arendt’s eventful existence, Margarethe von Trotta’s dull 2012 biopic didn’t show the half of it. Time, surely, for the 12-part HBO drama series. Having read Ann Heberlein’s lyrical yet lucid , I suggest Episode One end with the young Arendt declaring, “I can either
