THE THREE ESCAPES OF HANNAH ARENDT

About the show

Her life reads like a crime novel made up of many lives: Königsberg in the 1910s, her student years with Heidegger and Jaspers, Berlin in the 1920s, Paris in the 1930s, escapes and friendships, New York in the 1950s and 1960s. The wars and totalitarian regimes of the 20th century shaped and preoccupied her. Her main political work, The Origins of Totalitarianism, made her famous overnight in 1951. When she reported on the Eichmann trial from Jerusalem in 1961, she recognized the mass murderer as a bureaucratic “buffoon,” sparking controversy. She withstood the criticism. She wanted to get to the bottom of things, even if it forced her to “think where it hurts,” as Hannah Arendt once said. Freedom of thought was her highest good. She called it “thinking without a safety net.” Ken Krimstein is an expert on the subject. The Chicago-based cartoonist and author, who regularly draws for The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal, and the Chicago Tribune, has dedicated a book to the biography of the famous thinker. In hundreds of drawings, his graphic novel The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt sketches an adventurous life. Theresa Thomasberger brings the biography to life as a journey of ideas through the 20th century.