Word: young-bruehl
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Dates: during 1982-1982
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NONFICTION: Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl...
HANNAH ARENDT: FOR LOVE OF THE WORLD by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl Yale University; 563 pages...
Rarely has a character been formed so early. In her vast, indulgent biography, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl records a note made by Frau Arendt in 1908, when Hannah was less than two: "Mostly she talks her own language which she enunciates very fluently. Understands everything." By Hannah's adolescence, that could no longer be considered a mother's exaggeration. She was far ahead of her class at Konigsberg, and at Marburg University she began a lifelong affair with philosophy, and a shorter, scarcely less passionate one with a philosopher...
Speaking in her new tongue, she cultivated influential writers: Robert Lowell, Alfred Kazin, Mary McCarthy, Randall Jarrell, W.H. Auden. Writing in a new manner, she searched out The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in 1951. As Young-Bruehl observes, Arendt sustained throughout "500 dense, difficult pages a deep, agonized 'Ach!' before the deeds of infamy she analyzed." The book was an angry, detailed journey over Europe's pitchforked roads to "radical evil": imperialism, racism and antiSemitism...
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