We Are Free to Change the World

CHAPTER ONE


Where Do We Begin?


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.
The Ex-Communists


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 her head, the next, darkness.

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.

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.

A year earlier, she had gone to Jerusalem to cover the trial of the senior Nazi Adolf Eichmann for The New Yorker. Eichmann was responsible for organizing the

Lyndsey Stonebridge

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

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 of Begin Again

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 of Let the Record Show

Exhilarating, brilliant, and utterly original . . . An iconic twentieth-century figure brought to life in all her facets. Philippe Sands, author of East West Street

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 of Public Things

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 of Humane

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 of Behold, America

Expertly analyzed and beautifully written, Stonebridge on Arendt is a rare gem, combining painstaking, complex history and stark contemporary resonance with sparks of hope