We Are Free to Change the World von Lyndsey Stonebridge
Hannah Arendt's Lessons in Love and Disobedience

Kategorie: Bücher
Seiten / Format: 368 S
Erscheinungsjahr: 2024
Verlag: Penguin Random HouseHogarth
Sprache: Englisch
ISBN: 9780593229736

An absorbing new biography . . . [Stonebridge] imagines her way into Arendt s life, in places literally retracing her subject s footsteps, sensing the climate and smelling the (typically smoke-filled) air in an effort of understanding.The Economist<br><br>In this extraordinary book, Lyndsey Stonebridge details the life and thought of Hannah Arendt in ways that speak to our troublesome times. Beautifully written, this is biography at its best.Eddie S. Glaude Jr., author ofBegin Again<br><br>An invigorating and fresh invitation into the world of Hannah Arendt s life/work connection. Stonebridge s accessible and thoughtful writing allows the reader to glide into a complex engagement with ease and joy.Sarah Schulman, author ofLet the Record Show<br><br>Exhilarating, brilliant, and utterly original . . . An iconic twentieth-century figure brought to life in all her facets.Philippe Sands, author ofEast West Street<br><br>Lyndsey Stonebridge walks the world in Hannah Arendt s footsteps, reaching back a hand to bring us along. One feels Arendt is still with us, still commenting on events, still cross, ironic, or ebullient, still brilliant, but also always a person. . . . A brilliant and wonderful book.Bonnie Honig, author ofPublic Things<br><br>In this brilliantly imagined and compulsively readable book, Lyndsey Stonebridge reveals how Hannah Arendt s life and thought across the twentieth century matter to our own time.  This is a breathtaking triumph.Samuel Moyn, author ofHumane<br><br>The book about Hannah Arendt I ve always wanted to read, that only Lyndsey Stonebridge could write . . . Witty, moving, and inspiring, at once fiercely angry and a work of deep moral wisdom.Sarah Churchwell, author ofBehold, America<br><br>Expertly analyzed and beautifully written, Stonebridge on Arendt is a rare gem, combining painstaking, complex history and stark contemporary resonance with sparks of hope that we really are free to change the world.Baroness Shami Chakrabarti, former director of Liberty and author ofOn Liberty<br><br>Both a warmly engaging intellectual biography and a tract for the times, this is a needful reminder of what political thinking looks like when it is humane, literate, and radical all at once.Rowan Williams, former Archbishop of Canterbury<br><br>Bold and exhilarating . . . sparkles with ideas and plumbs new depths in the great Hannah Arendt s thinking. Stonebridge brilliantly brings our own troubled times face to face with Arendt s to wake us into urgency and a greater appreciation of an iconic woman.Lisa Appignanesi, author ofMad, Bad and SadandEveryday Madness<br><br>A splendid, ever-so-timely consideration of Arendt and her thoughts on how nations sink into tyranny.Kirkus Reviews (starred review)CHAPTER ONE<br><br><br>Where Do We Begin?<br><br><br>It belongs to totalitarian thinking to conceive of a final conflict at all. There is no finality in history the story told by it is a story with many beginnings but no ends.<br>The Ex-Communists<br><br><br>On a cold and drizzly March day in 1962, Hannah Arendt lay in a hospital bed in New York, gazing thoughtfully up at the ceiling. The day before a truck had slammed into the taxi she was riding in through Central Park, smashing up her face and teeth and breaking nine of her ribs. She did not know how the truck had come to hit the taxi or how her body had got so broken because, as had become her habit of late, she had been using the ride for some precious reading time. One moment there had been words echoing in herhead, the next, darkness.<br><br>When she regained consciousness she checked that she could still move and then, with considerably more attention, tested her memory; very carefully decade by decade, poetry, Greek and German and English, then telephone numbers, she recalled in a letter to Mary McCarthy. Everything all right. In that same moment, she realized she had to make a decision: she could die or choose to stay in the world. She was fifty-five years old. Death did not particularly frighten her, but I also thought that life was quite beautiful and that I d rather take it (BF 126 27). As she squinted at the hospital ceiling through her undamaged eye, she recognized a familiar feeling: elation.<br><br>It had been a long time since Hannah Arendt had been so still, her hands free of either luggage or books, her mind free to roam. Events had moved so fast over the past year; at moments it had seemed as though her entire life was being replayed before her. Each time she d caught her breath something else had happened and she had sped on again.<br><br>A year earlier, she had gone to Jerusalem to cover the trial of the senior Nazi Adolf Eichmann forThe New Yorker. Eichmann was responsible for organizing the transportation of Jews from across Europe to their deaths in concentration camps in the east. He had escaped through one of the Nazi ratlines five years after the war ended, having hidden low in the countryside farming chickens. In May 1960, Israel s secret service agency, Mossad, caught up with him in Argentina, drugged and then bundled him onto a commercial flight and brought him back to Israel to face trial. Abduction was a deliberately dramatic gesture fugitive Nazis and international opinion were supposed to take note but not an unreasonable option.<br><br>Hannah Arendt also wanted to catch up with Adolf Eichmann, which was why she had swiftly written toThe New Yorker seditor, William Shawn, offering to cover the trial for the magazine. By this point, she was a well-known intellectual in the United States. Delighted, Shawn gave her as many words as she needed and an open deadline. The five articles that would eventually be published as the bookEichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, appeared a year after her accident in the spring of 1963.<br><br>The journey to Jerusalem was personal. Adolf Eichmann s lifetime was also Hannah Arendt s lifetime. The career Nazi and the Jewish political theorist were born barely seven months apart. Their lives were already twisted around one another s before her famous book bound their names together forever. He had spent his life in the service of a monstrous regime that had murdered millions and decimated Europe s politics and morality. She had spent hers working to defy, escape, and destroy that same regime using the only weapon she knew she could rely on: her mind. Hannah Arendt did not just want to see Adolf Eichmann in the flesh; she was searching for a missing piece of her own history. I would never be able to forgive myself if I didn t go and look at this walking disasterA timely guide on how to live and think through the challenges of our century drawn from the life and thought of political theorist Hannah Arendt, one of the twentieth century's foremost opponents of totalitarianism<br><br>We arefreeto change the world and to start something new in it. Hannah Arendt<br><br>The violent unease of today's world would have been familiar to Hannah Arendt. Tyranny, occupation, disenchantment, post-truth politics, conspiracy theories, racism, mass migration: She lived through them all.<br><br>Born in the first decade of the last century, she escaped fascist Europe to make a new life for herself in America, where she became one of its most influential and controversial public intellectuals. She wrote about power and terror, exile and love, and above all, about freedom. Questioning thinking was her first defense against tyranny. She advocated a politics of action and plurality, courage and, when necessary, disobedience.<br><br>We Are Free to Change the Worldis a book about the Arendt we need for the twenty-first century. It tells us how and why Arendt came to think the way she did, and how to think when our own politics goes off the rails. Both a guide to Arendt's life and work, and its dialogue with our troubled present,We Are Free to Change the Worldis an urgent call for us to think, as Hannah Arendt did unflinchingly, lovingly, and defiantly through our own unpredictable times.3USLyndsey Stonebridgeis a professor of humanities and human rights at the University of Birmingham (UK) and a Fellow of the British Academy. Her previous books includePlaceless People: Writing, Rights, and Refugees,winner of the Modernist Studies Association Book Prize and a ChoiceOutstanding Academic Title;The Judicial Imagination: Writing After Nuremberg,which won the British Academy Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for English Literature; and the essay collectionWriting and Righting: Literature in the Age of Human Rights. She is a regular media commentator and broadcaster. She lives in London and France.

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