Mind the gaps: a far-from comprehensive life of Hannah Arendt
From our UK edition
In 1975 – the year of her own death – Hannah Arendt published a heartfelt memorial essay about W.H. Auden in the New Yorker. It ranks, I think, as one of the finest tributes ever paid to the poet, that ‘expert in the infinite varieties of unrequited love’: a moving, tender harvest of 15 years’ warm friendship. The loveless Auden even wanted to marry Arendt after the death of the writer--philosopher’s second husband, Heinrich Blücher. Now turn to Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind: a much-acclaimed German ‘biography’ of the Jewish exile from Königsberg who, from her apartment at 370 Riverside Drive in New York, became one of the most influential, and sturdily independent, political and social thinkers of the postwar decades. Auden appears just once, in passing.
