Ken Krimstein: The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt

The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth – Ken Krimstein – Bloomsbury – 240 pages – Hardcover – 9781635571882 – $28.00 – September 25, 2018 – ebook versions also available at lower prices.

What a completely cool and unexpected pleasure it was to discover this amazing book! Yes, I had seen Ken Krimstein’s cartoons in the New Yorker, and I have even read a bit of Hannah Arendt’s powerful writing over the years, but neither Ken’s humorous work, nor my limited knowledge of Arendt’s life prepared me for the serial delight of this graphic novel biography of one of the twentieth century’s most important thinkers.

Hannah Arendt is one of those intellectual figures whose reputation obscures her actual story. Her books were highly influential and widely read in the mid and late twentieth century, though I suspect in present times, now are consumed mostly by college students and scholars, as serious political philosophy does not have a broad readership anymore (if it ever did). We know of her mainly through her many famous books, including The Human Condition, On Totalitarianism, and Eichmann in Jerusalem, among her many, many others.

Arendt’s writing on the nature and form of authoritarianism, couched in her direct experience with Hitler’s Germany, and the rise of Stalin after the war, certainly has become increasingly resonant today, for obvious reasons. And with the increase in modern day anti-Semitism, it is difficult to not draw comparisons between the 1930s world she inhabited and our current troubled experiences.

So it is timely to think about Hannah Arendt’s work, and especially to learn how that work was shaped by her extraordinary life and mind. As revealed in this wonderful biography, Hannah Arendt’s story is heroic and rich. The details about her life continually surprise and delight us. The men and women she knew are some of the greatest thinkers and artists of the century, and it is remarkable just how many now-famous people appear in her life. She knew and associated with so many,from philosophers like Heidegger and Jaspers, to political theorists like Walter Benjamin, writers like Mary McCarthy and geniuses like Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud, and her own writing and thinking have influenced generations of thinkers and writers.

The escapes Krimstein documents so heart wrenchingly in this book were all determinative to the development of her thinking and writing, and shaped her individualistic, powerful thinking about what it means to be an engaged citizen in a modern world in constant strife. Reading this book was inspiring, and I give full credit to Ken Krimstein for bringing Hannah Arendt to life for me in a way I doubt a prose biography could have done.

Ken Krimstein’s cartoons have been published in the New Yorker, Barron’s, The Harvard Business Review, Prospect Magazine, Punch, The National Lampoon, the Wall Street Journal, Narrative Magazine and many others magazines. His writing has been published in The New York Observer’s “New Yorker’s Diary” and a number of humor websites, including McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Yankee Pot Roast, and Mr. Beller’s Neighborhood.

Ken is also a teacher at De Paul University and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. You can read more about him, his work, and The Three Escapes at his website here, where you can also see sample pages from the book.

It was a pleasure for me to meet Ken, and I think you will enjoy our conversation just as much as I did.

“Ken Krimstein’s deeply moving graphic memoir about the life and thoughts of philosopher Hannah Arendt is not only about Hannah Arendt. It’s also, through her words, about how to live in the world, the meaning of freedom, the perils of totalitarianism, and our power as human beings to think about things and not just act blindly. Krimstein explains Arendt’s ideas with clarity, wit, and enormous erudition, and they still resonate.” –  Roz Chast

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