The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt

September 1, 2018

New Yorker cartoonist Krimstein's biography of leading German-born philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906-75) opens with Arendt as a child, demonstrating insatiable curiosity and preternatural smarts ("By the time I'm 14, I've read all of Kant's books. But I still don't have all the answers"), even as she discovers what it means to be a Jew in increasingly hostile 1920s-30s Germany. As a young woman, she wows the era's great artists and thinkers, smartly identified in side panels, and develops her own philosophy ("Throwness," she says drily to a puzzled Albert Einstein). As Krimstein deftly weaves Arendt's life and thought, he captures the excitement of the philosophical enterprise in both word ("THINKING HAS BECOME EROTIC. ELECTRIC, ECSTATIC") and image: fine, wiry black lines with the occasional brush of green effectively echo Arendt's energized thinking and the tensions of a life lived in constant escape, one step ahead of the Nazis. Through it all, Arendt remains witty, even saucy. And Krimstein doesn't shy away from Arendt's complicated love for philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger. VERDICT Both smart and entertaining; highly recommended and not just for graphic novels readers. [See Prepub Alert, 3/26/18; previewed in Jody Osicki's "Graphically Speaking," LJ 6/15/18.]--Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

May 21, 2018
Krimstein’s fascinating if cluttered biographical portrait divides political theorist Hannah Arendt’s 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 Arendt’s voice, is sporadic and jarring. Yet his love for his subject is undeniable, as he argues that Arendt’s 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 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

Starred review from July 1, 2018
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.

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July 1, 2018
The life of a philosopher, centered around ideas expressed in words, might not seem a fit subject for a visually centered, comics-format account. But Krimstein, whose cartoons have appeared in the New Yorker and Punch, makes this graphic biography work. It helps that his subject is Hannah Arendt, who lived a dramatically eventful, courageously unconventional life in addition to being one of the most prominent philosophers of the twentieth century. A secular German Jew obsessed as a youngster with Immanuel Kant, Arendt fell in with a crowd of Berlin's brightest intellectuals and artists, including Einstein, Brecht, and Dietrich. She dodged the Nazis, fleeing first from Germany and then from France?the first two escapes of the title?before emigrating to New York, where she wrote her hugely influential works and courted controversy, not least over her long relationship with Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger. Krimstein makes his account engrossing and even entertaining, thanks to his breezily wispy drawing style and freewheeling layouts as well as the unexpected humor he brings to Arendt's story.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)