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WORK TITLE: The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.kenkrimstein.com/
CITY: Evanston
STATE: IL
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
kkrimste@depaul.edu MSA (Northwestern University- Medill School of Journalism)?? Public Relations and Advertising Phone: (312) 362-8914 ???14 E. Jackson Blvd., Room 1254???
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 2009079209
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n2009079209
HEADING: Krimstein, Ken
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670 __ |a Jewtoons, 2010: |b ECIP t.p. (Ken Krimstein) data view (American cartoonist and author; has published cartoons in The New Yorker, Punch, The National Lampoon, and The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists; his writing has also appeared on McSweeney’s, and The Morning News)
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PERSONAL
Born in Chicago, IL.
EDUCATION:Grinnell College, B.A.; Northwestern University, Medill School of Journalism, M.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer, cartoonist, humorist, educator, and advertising creative director. De Paul University, Chicago, IL, lecturer, 2011—; School of the Art Institute of Chicago, instructor. Ogilvy & Mather, copywriter, 1985-88; McCann Erickson, associate creative director and vice president, 1988-93; Biederman, Kelly, Krimstein, creative director, 1993-2007; A Fish with Legs, creative director, 2009—.
MEMBER:National Cartoonist Society.
WRITINGS
Contributor of cartoons to magazines such as the New Yorker, Harvard Business Review, Barron’s, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune, Craftsmanship, Punch, and National Lampoon. Contributor of essays to magazines such as McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Yankee Pot Roast, and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.
SIDELIGHTS
Ken Krimstein is a writer, cartoonist, and humorist. He has contributed cartoons to major magazines and newspapers, including the New Yorker, Barron’s, Harvard Business Review, National Lampoon, and the Wall Street Journal. He contributes humor writing to websites such as McSweeney’s Internet Tendency and Yankee Pot Roast, as well as criticism and graphic journalism. He is an educator who teaches at De Paul University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In addition to his art, humor writing, and academic work, Krimstein has long worked in advertising and serves as a creative director at an advertising agency.
Kvetch as Kvetch Can: Jewish Cartoons is Krimstein’s collections of Jewish-themed drawings and cartoons. “Topics include food, identity, family, holidays, culture and guilt, which about covers the gamut,” commented Janet Silver Ghent, writing in the Jewish News of Northern California.
The cover of the book, for example, shows a butcher’s diagram of a pig. Whereas some might interpret the illustration as showing where the choicest cuts of pork are located, the Jewish reader would likely see it as Krimstein has labeled it, with every cut of meat declared “Not Kosher.” In another, a husband and wife are interred side by side in their graves. The husband’s gravestone declares him a “Loving Husband, Father, Grandfather.” The wife’s stone, however, berates the husband, saying “Morrie, why’d you have to pick such a drafty spot?” In yet another, the parents of a newborn are told, “Congratulations, it’s a corporate litigation attorney at a very nice firm.”
“You don’t have to be Jewish to grasp the humor in Kvetch as Kvetch Can, but it helps,” Ghent remarked.
Krimstein is also the author and artist of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth, a graphic novel biography of the noted philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt. She was a gifted intellectual, a genius-level thinker whose writings on subjects such as totalitarianism, revolution, and the nature of freedom have had effects on the field of political theory that are still felt today. She frequently wrote about the distinctive nature of politics and the political life.
The story in Krimstein’s graphic novel is structured into three general sections that correspond to Arendt’s “escapes,” one as a young girl and two as an adult. As a youngster, Arendt endured oppression and genuine danger as a Jew in Germany. She became a political activist and worked against the Nazis. She escaped from the fate that awaited millions of other Jews when, on her way to a concentration camp, she managed to get away and flee to France as the Nazis continued to rise in power. Later, she made her way to New York and worked as a journalist and editor at a publishing house. In the United States, she secured her reputation as a political philosopher.
Krimstein also covers other important aspects of Arendt’s personal and professional life. As a scholar and intellectual, she associated with some of the most prominent thinkers of the twentieth century, such as Walter Benjamin. She was in a long-term relationship with philosopher Martin Heidegger. Among her more controversial works is a book on the trial of prominent Nazi Adolf Eichmann, one of the major architects of the Holocaust. She asserted that Eichmann was a bureaucrat who followed orders as he should have, instead of a anti-Semitic ideologue. Arendt is also known for originating the concept of the “banality of evil,” pursing the question of whether someone could commit evil without actually being evil.
While finding the biography “footnote-heavy,” a Publishers Weekly reviewer noted of Krimstein that “his love for his subject is undeniable.” Krimstein’s “timely reimagining revives [Arendt’s] distinctive existential spirit,” noted a Kirkus Reviews contributor. The critic called The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt a “compelling performance with great pacing that makes abstruse political theory both intelligible and memorable.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, July 1, 2018, Gordon Flagg, review of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth.
Jewish News of Northern California, March 18, 2011, Janet Silver Ghent, “From This You Make a Living: Cartoonist Riffs on Foot, Family, and the Art of Kvetching,” profile of Ken Krimstein.
Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 2018, review of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt.
Publishers Weekly, May 21, 2018, review of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, p. 58.
ONLINE
Esthetic Lens, http://www.estheticlens.com/ (October 29, 2017), “Five Questions: Ken Krimstein.”
Ken Krimstein website, http://www.kenkrimstein.com (October 24, 2018).
Punctuate, https://blogs.colum.edu/punctuate/ (September 18, 2018), “Punctuate in Conversation with Ken Krimstein, Author and Illustrator of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth.”
Ken Krimstein's cartoons have been published in the New Yorker, Barron's, The Harvard Business Review, Prospect Magazine, Punch, The National Lampoon, the Wall Street Journal, Narrative Magazine, and three of S. Gross’s cartoon anthologies
His humor writing has been in The New York Observer’s “New Yorker’s Diary” and humor websites, including McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Yankee Pot Roast, and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.
His series of graphic reporting appeared in The Chicago Tribune's "Printer's Row" literary magazine.
A book of his Jewish-themed cartoons, "Kvetch as Kvetch Can," has been published by Random House/ Clarkson Potter.
In addition to teaching at De Paul University and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, he is also an advertising creative director.
An article about his work in Craftsmanship magazine.
His interview on the "A Case For Pencils" blog.
Editor October 29, 2017 5 Questions
5 Questions: Ken Krimstein
© Ken Krimstein
Editors note: When we originally posted this interview on October 1, the title of Ken’s upcoming book was still under wraps. We’re happy to update the piece, complete with the title. The subject is fascinating, and we’re eager to review the book when it’s released.
Hannah_Arendt
Hannah Arendt
1. What’s been keeping you up at night?
Quite literally trying to finish my graphic novel “The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth,” — coming out next year from Bloomsbury — in time for its rapidly approaching deadline.
2. What’s the coolest thing you’ve seen or heard lately?
I am getting to know the wonders of CD’s again, for various reasons, and I unknowingly put on Volume 2 of the Beatles “Anthology,” – the sequential tracks of John Lennon finding his way to the finish of “Strawberry Fields” is a wonder of the world, and then, to follow it with an outtake of Paul’s “Penny Lane,” and then, I was lucky enough to be on a tour bus (The Magical Mystery Tour, of course) driving around Liverpool last summer and actually visited both physical places…
3. What’s the most exciting thing you’re working on right now?
See question 1
4. If you could add anyone, alive or dead to your team, who would it be?
Walter Benjamin
5. When the movie of your life is made, what will it be called?
Ken Krimstein: Artist, Writer, Right-Fielder.
Ken_Krimstein
Ken Krimstein
Ken Krimstein is a writer, cartoonist, and teacher. His cartoons have appeared in The New Yorker, The American Bystander, Barrons, Punch, Narrative, and more. His first book, “Kvetch as Kvetch Can — Jewish Cartoons,” was published by Clarkson Potter in 2010. He is hard at work finishing his second, a graphic novel to be published by Bloomsbury in 2018. He also has written criticism, humor, and graphic journalism for The Chicago Tribune, The New York Observer, and others. He is full-time faculty in The College of Communication at DePaul University, and resides in Evanston, IL after many many years in the 10025 zip code.
You can find some of his work here.
Following is a German interview with Hannah Arendt. The sexism is overt, so be forewarned.
INTERVIEWS
Punctuate in Conversation with Ken Krimstein, Author and Illustrator of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth
September 18, 2018
Ken Krimstein has published cartoons in the New Yorker, Punch, the Wall Street Journal, and more. He has written for New York Observer’s “New Yorker’s Diary” and has published pieces on websites including McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Yankee Pot Roast, and Mr Beller’s Neighborhood. He is the author of Kvetch as Kvetch Can and teaches at De Paul University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He lives in Evanston, Illinois.
In a lively email exchange, Ken Krimstein communicated with Punctuate Managing Editor Ian Morris recently about his new book The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth, a graphic memoir of Hannah Arendt and the philosophy and history of her age.
Punctuate; Fans of your New Yorker cartoons will likely be surprised that The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt is a graphic history of twentieth-century European philosophy. What inspired you to undertake this project?
Krimstein: In addition to loving what we in the cartooning business refer to as “gag” cartoons, single panel “jokes,” with or without words (think Charles Addams, S. Gross, George Booth), I’ve always loved longer form comics. Sure, it started with Superman and Batman when I was a kid, but I also inherited from my great uncle many comics in a series entitled Classics Illustrated. You can imagine what they were—definitely not comics about men in tights. Comics of Moby Dick to The History of World War I. I loved them all. As I got older, I discovered the wonders of R. Crumb, and of course Maus, Persepolis, and on and on. In addition, I’ve always been a huge fan of both biographies and of philosophy.
One question has always intrigued me—how does a person’s life affect their art or thinking?
Now, add Hannah Arendt to the equation. She was always on my radar. I think I first tried reading The Origins of Totalitarianism when I was in middle school. And her later idea of “the banality of evil” seemed fresh and unexpected and important. I wanted to wrestle with it.
While working on my weekly New Yorker submissions, my agent said a publisher was interested in seeing “anything,” from me, whatever I wanted to do. I thought, “Aha! I’ll do that long-form comic treatment of the enigmatic Hannah Arendt.” And when I actually opened the biographies, I found at every turn the events of her life were completely compelling. Her character and her thinking always impacted me in a powerful way— I felt like I knew her. I couldn’t not do it.
Punctuate: You describe Arendt as “arguably the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century.” Did you see it as a personal mission to call more attention to her life and her work?
Krimstein: I really believe her thinking is profound. Now, understand, I am not a licensed professional philosopher, though some of my best friends . . .
In any case, as I dug deep into her work I saw how she took ideas in Continental Philosophy— phenomenology, existentialism, the inspired mélange of thinking that poured out of her great friend Walter Benjamin—and gave them a totally unique interpretation. In the place of living “unto death,” which was fairly widespread, she saw much of life’s meaning as arising “from birth—births.” She celebrated the creative force. What’s more, she questioned the contemplative life of the philosopher, and energized, if you will, the thinking I’d read from the likes of Sartre (and even Camus), and made it all very present, action oriented. These bold turns did completely new things with thinking. So much of what she lived and thought has been understood in headlines, often headlines people don’t really understand (truth be told, I’m not sure I understand all their nuances either, but what I get is powerful). I wanted to get beyond the headlines and follow her thinking wherever it led. And it led to some very thrilling places.
So, yes, in my opinion, she needs to be read and discussed and learned. A lot.
Punctuate: Arendt was preoccupied by the possibility of a truth, “one universal answer to understanding,” and yet the book is subtitled “A Tyranny of Truth.” Can you describe how this quest evolved and how it informed her philosophical writings throughout her career?
Krimstein: In trying to tell her story and give it dramatic drive, I had to show how she evolved and how the events she lived through “grew” her thinking. As I see it, and tell it, she focused her incredible intellect and talent on the classical pursuit of understanding, even total understanding. But as she endured crisis after crisis—her father dying of syphilis when she was a precocious child, having a emotionally searing “affair” with her much older (and married) philosophy professor (Heidegger), escaping the encroaching Nazis from Germany and then from France, finally having to face the horrors of the Holocaust, her thinking led her to a virulent truth-telling, because she learned that from lies came horror. And, I surmise, from the notion of “one single all-encompassing Truth,” she came to value a myriad of “truths,” a facing of reality that cannot be avoided.
Punctuate: Did you have a preconceived notion of Martin Heidegger when you started writing the book? What did you learn about him that surprised you as you learned more about him?
Krimstein: I really didn’t know that much about him. Really. I’ve said that I approached the book as a “typical NPR listener.” So when I found out about the affair and the Nazi sympathies, not to mention his work in “Being and Time,” I learned about him in many ways for the first time. Of course, I’d heard his name. I’d heard people in the Philosophy Department speak of him as “very important.” I knew there was “controversy.” But I wasn’t sure of the details. What surprised me about him? Everything? He used to ski to class. He lived in a hut in the woods. He was a serial womanizer, and his wife endured it. His wife was even more outspokenly anti-Semitic than he was. In his early, pre-1933 days, he attracted droves of the smartest Jewish philosophers—from Levinas to Marcuse to Leo Strauss and on and on.
Punctuate: A significant fact about Arendt is that she knew everybody who was anybody. The list of her acquaintances in Berlin is mind-boggling: Marc Chagall, Edward Munch, Irving Berlin, Kurt Weill and Berthold Brecht, Albert Einstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich, even Fatty Arbuckle. That must have been fun, working with that cast of cameo characters. Is this a favorite moment in history for you?
Krimstein: “Scenes” fascinate me. What was it about Montmartre in the early twentieth century, Liverpool in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Paris cafes during the rise of the Enlightenment? Weimar culture is so, so important to modern art, the modern world. Theater, writing, collage, science, painting, film (an especial passion of mine, yes, I confess, Lang is a hero of mine). But when I discovered that the great Billy Wilder (another hero) frequented the same cafe as Hannah, the Romanisches, well it just kept getting better and better. And then, her scene moves to Paris, then to Marseilles, then, in many ways, to Greenwich Village and Hollywood. I always loved the book City of Nets, which described the bizarre artistic refugee community in Hollywood during the war.
Punctuate: During the phony war between the Allies’ declaration of war and the German invasion, Arendt was more attuned to the dangers that lay ahead than many of her compatriots. What role did their complacency play in the shaping of Arendt’s post-war thinking?
Krimstein: Arendt did not like easy answers. She didn’t like when people averted their eyes from the full measure of what was going on, and replaced it with “wishing and hoping,” with an innocent belief that things would just work out. Her innate toughness of thought would not let her gloss over the madness swirling around her. She was definitely, in my opinion, the kind of person who ran into fires.
Punctuate: The book really is a page-turner. Can you explain the complexities faced by Jews and other victims of the Nazis who sought to escape through Spain or other neutral countries?
Krimstein: The complexities refugees faced then are not too dissimilar from what refugees face today. Visas on visas on permissions for transport, a nightmare of bureaucracy, that on one hand has you believe if you fill in everything “correctly” you’ll be able to leave, but which can turn on you, willy-nilly, at any time. I make note of the fact that during World War II, just as the refugee flow was reaching full force, for some reason the United States severely restricted the number of refugees they would accept. And, again like today, many third-party sources rose up. Smugglers. Some honest brokers. Many, less so. I put myself in the position of people facing this; I wondered what I would do. Hey, I’m a good, law-abiding citizen. Who knows how that would have worked out for me? Escaping the Nazis was harrowing. It even forms the dramatic engine that drives Casablanca, one of the most compelling Hollywood movies ever made. (Remember the elusive “letters of transit”?) The plight of the stateless is, for Arendt, one of the most horrible, de-humanizing actions people can do to one another. It’s like banishment.
Punctuate: Page by page, the composition of this book is remarkable. Many of the panels are crowded with historical figures and footnotes, yet there are also moments of erasure, characters like Arendt’s father and Natalie Farkas, a girl she cannot smuggle out of Germany, are there and then disappear. Will tell us a little about your creative process in composing the book? Did your ideas about how it would look change at all as you drew it?
Krimstein: One of the wonderful things about telling a story in words and pictures—whether it’s a New Yorker “gag” style cartoon or a comic or graphic novel is that you have the language of images at hand. I spent many years working in advertising and design— compacting ideas, compressing them to create a situation where the words don’t tell the whole story and the pictures don’t tell the whole story. It’s a situation when only the right combination of verbal and visual information engages—as I sometimes tell my students at DePaul, an equation where 1 + 1 = 3. So, I had storyboarded the arc of the action, but as I put it down, first in pencil, then in pen, when a picture could tell more than words, I allowed that impulse to take flight. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. But, again, for me, that’s the magic of this kind of storytelling. It owes a lot to cinema I suppose. Maybe silent cinema mostly. Although, the early filmmakers who were bridging that liminal space between silent film and talking films really “got it.” Lang. Hitchcock. John Ford. Ernst Lubitsch—as Billy Wilder (him again!), one of his collaborators and perhaps his biggest fan ever, said of Ernst Lubitsch (think Trouble in Paradise—written by Chicago, ex-adman Samson Raphelson), “Lubitsch could do more with a closed door than most directors could do with an open fly.”
Another thing about the look—I used a mixed media form. I just liked the way it felt— pencil, ink, paint. And Hannah, well, she’s always dressed in green. (Incidentally, this came from research; evidently, she did favor wearing green.)
Punctuate: Many of Arendt’s contemporaries emigrated to the United States before and after the war. At this moment in time, when the very notion of immigration is under assault, what is your view of the contributions that generation immigrants made to contemporary American society?
Hmmm. Let’s see. Albert Einstein? Irving Berlin? Vladimir Nabokov? Helena Rubinstein? Enrico Fermi? Nikolai Tesla? Charlie Chaplin? Willem de Koonig? Elie Weisel? Igor Sikorsky? Lee Strassberg? Isaac Stern? Mark Rothko? Emma Goldman? Felix Frankfurter? Elizabeth Kubler-Ross? Dr. Ruth Westheimer? Etc. Etc. Etc.
From this you make a living: Cartoonist riffs on food, family and the art of kvetching
BY JANET SILVER GHENT | MARCH 18, 2011
Ken Krimstein has been scribbling since the first grade, when he discovered he could draw a pretty passable Santa Claus.
With the flick of a purple marker and a bit of sleight of hand, a second jolly old bearded guy metamorphosed into — you guessed it — a rabbinical sage in a dark suit and fedora, toting a menorah instead of a candy cane.
The two figures, mounted on a screen at the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto, stared at each other, their hands gripping overhead straps in a subway.
“I set out to be anything but a doctor. Now I wish I had been a doctor,” Krimstein said, half in jest, during an interview March 6 at the JCC, where he spoke to some 35 people about his new book, “Kvetch as Kvetch Can: Jewish Cartoons.”
“From this you make a living?” he asks himself. Not exactly. Krimstein’s cartoons have graced the pages of the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal and National Lampoon, but he’s also an ad man and a humor writer, or, as he puts it, “a writer who scribbles.” He never went to art school.
Unassuming, wearing dark-rimmed glasses and with the flaps of a light blue shirt escaping from under his crewneck, the 50-something Krimstein does not look like somebody who would get out of the backroom on the “Mad Men” set. In a business in which image is everything, Krimstein puts his energy into the images he creates.
As he tells it, the Chicago-born writer landed in New York at 22 with a history degree from Grinnell College and a master’s from Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism. He began his career at the prestigious Ogilvy & Mather ad agency, winning awards for work on such accounts as Hershey’s, Maxwell House and Avon.
Every Wednesday, he would sneak out to deliver his cartoons to the New Yorker. After about 10 years, he received an acceptance, said Krimstein, who “ran through a lot of pens” and papered his apartment with rejection slips.
Today his day job is still in advertising, producing Internet sales reports and other copy, but he continues to craft humor pieces, articles and cartoons.
Ken Krimstein
You don’t have to be Jewish to grasp the humor in “Kvetch as Kvetch Can,” but it helps. Topics include food, identity, family, holidays, culture and guilt, which about covers the gamut, unless you happen to be Orthodox, which Krimstein is not. “I’m somewhere between ‘Jew-Bu’ and Satmar [Chassid],” he quipped.
Krimstein drew upon his two years in Hong Kong for a cartoon in the book labeled “Christmas in China.” The cartoon has Chinese characters on either side of a pagoda, along with a translation: “Let’s order Jewish.”
In one cartoon, a patient gives birth: The caption: “Congratulations, it’s a corporate litigation attorney at a very nice firm.” In another, the headstone of Janice Goldstein says: “Morrie, why’d you have to pick such a drafty spot??!!!”
A cartoon that kick-started the book shows two pigs in a real estate office. The caption: “Actually, we’d feel a lot safer in a Jewish neighborhood.”
Krimstein does live in a Jewish neighborhood, on New York’s Upper West Side with his three children, ages 10 to 17, his wife, a cat, a hamster “and a few roaches we have not been able to get rid of.”
What does he want to be when he grows up? “I want to be a combination of Steven Spielberg, Mel Brooks and Lenny Bruce.” Interestingly, they’re all Jewish.
“Kvetch as Kvetch Can: Jewish Cartoons” by Ken Krimstein (96 pages, Clarkson Potter, $12.99)
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Janet Silver Ghent
Janet Silver Ghent is a writer and editor living in Palo Alto. She can be reached at ghentwriter@gmail.com.
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Print Marked Items
Krimstein, Ken: THE THREE ESCAPES
OF HANNAH ARENDT
Kirkus Reviews.
(July 1, 2018):
COPYRIGHT 2018 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Krimstein, Ken THE THREE ESCAPES OF HANNAH ARENDT Bloomsbury (Adult Nonfiction) $28.00
9, 25 ISBN: 978-1-63557-188-2
The astounding life of a 20th-century original as told by a skillful cartoonist frolicking in long form.
This creative biography takes considerable liberties in retelling the story of Hannah Arendt (1906-1975), the
German political theorist who fled the Nazis to Paris before settling in the United States and becoming the
first female professor at Princeton. Krimstein (Communications/DePaul Univ.; Kvetch as Kvetch Can:
Jewish Cartoons, 2010), who draws for the New Yorker and the Wall Street Journal, among others,
ventriloquizes the writer's thoughts and conversations, an approach that risks making her into a "Great
Philosophers" finger puppet. However, he bases this narrative bricolage on well-regarded Arendt
biographies and intellectual histories as well as her own writing. Moreover, the book relates the starkest
moments in a tumultuous life without trivializing--e.g., Arendt's arrest and detainment for researching Nazi
propaganda and her time in a French work camp. Krimstein's wry, expressive faces enliven the debates and
lend poignancy to the turmoil that beset Arendt and her circle of intellectual refugee friends, including
Walter Benjamin, who vouchsafed his final manuscript with Arendt just before his death. Krimstein shares
his wonder at the richness of Arendt's networks in countless name-dropping cameos supported by lengthy
but skimmable footnotes. Arendt's coverage of the Adolf Eichmann trials in Jerusalem alienated her from
her community of American Zionist supporters, and her infamous affair with her one-time professor and
Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger, revealed after her death and illustrated here in moments of overt
historical fiction, further damaged the popular reception of her work. This timely reimagining revives her
distinctive existential spirit and dwells on her theory of the "abyss," the rip in the fabric of humanity she
attributed to totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. The irony remains that this book celebrates--even as it
violates--Arendt's arguments for keeping public and private lives separate. Perhaps the cartoons' hasty,
unfinished style acknowledges the unbridgeable distance between the author and the personalities he
imaginatively inhabits.
A compelling performance with great pacing that makes abstruse political theory both intelligible and
memorable.
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"Krimstein, Ken: THE THREE ESCAPES OF HANNAH ARENDT." Kirkus Reviews, 1 July 2018.
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The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A
Tyranny of Truth
Publishers Weekly.
265.21 (May 21, 2018): p58.
COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth
Ken Krimstein. Bloomsbury, $28 (256p) ISBN 978-1-63557-188-2
Krimstein's fascinating if cluttered biographical portrait divides political theorist Hannah Arendts
extraordinary life into a loose triptych. In Germany, she is a curly-haired scribble of a girl (a smudge of
green in a black-and-white landscape) and a precocious scholar among a who's-who of 20th-century
thinkers. Martin Heidegger is her lover and foil. As the Nazis rise, she flees to France and, later, New York.
The footnote-heavy primer suffers by being more intent on recording names, faces, and historical details
than on quality storytelling. Krimstein's use of the first person, adopting Arendts voice, is sporadic and
jarring. Yet his love for his subject is undeniable, as he argues that Arendts struggles as a Jew and a woman
enabled her to transcend the work of traditional truth seekers. His tribute is at its most tender when Arendt
speaks to the ghost of Walter Benjamin, who appears to her as a water stain on her ceiling. When Arendt
says about captured SS officer Adolf Eichmann, "If we turn [him] into a demonic monster, we somehow
absolve him of his crime, and all of us our potential crime," she roils under backlash that evokes today's
woker-than-thou Twitter pile-ons. This is a complicated, moving, uneven story that resonates in just such
times. Agent: Jennifer Lyons, Jennifer Lyons Literary Agency (Sept.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth." Publishers Weekly, 21 May 2018, p. 58.
General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A541012632/ITOF?
u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=e86e83cb. Accessed 29 Sept. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A541012632