The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth

By Ken Krimstein

Winner of the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography & Memoir
Best Graphic Novels of the Year-Forbes
Jewish Book Award Finalist
Finalist for the Chautauqua Prize

For Persepolis and Logicomix fans, a New Yorker cartoonist's page-turning graphic biography of the fascinating Hannah Arendt, the most prominent philosopher of the twentieth century.

One of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century and a hero of political thought, the largely unsung and often misunderstood Hannah Arendt is best known for her landmark 1951 book on openness in political life, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which, with its powerful and timely lessons for today, has become newly relevant.

She led an extraordinary life. This was a woman who endured Nazi persecution firsthand, survived harrowing "escapes" from country to country in Europe, and befriended such luminaries as Walter Benjamin and Mary McCarthy, in a world inhabited by everyone from Marc Chagall and Marlene Dietrich to Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud. A woman who finally had to give up her unique genius for philosophy, and her love of a very compromised man - the philosopher and Nazi-sympathizer Martin Heidegger - for what she called "love of the world."

Compassionate and enlightening, playful and page-turning, New Yorker cartoonist Ken Krimstein's The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt is a strikingly illustrated portrait of a complex, controversial, deeply flawed, and irrefutably courageous woman whose intelligence and "virulent truth telling" led her to breathtaking insights into the human condition, and whose experience continues to shine a light on how to live as an individual and a public citizen in troubled times.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Sep 25, 2018
• ISBN: 9781635571905

Ken Krimstein

Ken Krimstein has published cartoons in the New Yorker, Punch, the Wall Street Journal, and more. He is the author of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, which won the Bernard J. Brommel Award for Biography and Memoir, and was a finalist for the Jewish Book Award and the Chautauqua Prize, and also of Kvetch as Kvetch Can. He lives and writes and draws in Evanston, Illinois.

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Reviews for The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt

[jessethek-1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Shaggy drawings evoke this global thinker. Fascinating: can’t judge its accuracy. Doesn’t bring the specific magic of comics to its topic.

[villemezbrown · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

OMG, the name dropping! The first half of the book is less a story of Arendt than a list of every famous person she ever met. Talk about defining a woman by the men in her life! During the second half this slows down a little bit, but the author still seems pretty intent on mentioning every famous person of Jewish descent who lived during the twentieth century, shoehorning in Lou Reed and Jerry Lewis among others in footnotes and cameos, and, sure, I'd read that book if he cared to go all in on it, but I thought this was supposed to be about Arendt.So, knowing nothing about Arendt when I picked this book up, I don't feel like I really know much more about her actual philosophy having made it through to the end, not even when another character seemed to mansplain her philosophy and significance right to her face in the final pages. Indeed, throughout, more emphasis seems to be given to her relationship with Martin Heidegger than any of her individual accomplishments, sort of reducing her to girlfriend status in her own bio.

[albertgoldfain · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

By turns presents panel after panel of thinkers thinking and the sudden escapes demanded by wartime Europe. Arendt deserves a large readership, but I'm not sure the graphic novel treatment will provide the impetus.

[bell7_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Hannah Arendt may not be well-known outside of the philosophical world, but she had a huge impact on how we understand the world, including coining a word that we use on a regular basis. This graphic novel blends nonfiction biography and makes it somewhat fictionalized by writing as if Hannah's speaking to the reader and talking about her life. It touches on her controversial relationship with an apparent Nazi sympathizer. The "three escapes" bring an interesting structure to the story, as she endures Nazi persecution and ultimately moves to the United States. She was friends with many well-known people in the philosophical and arts worlds, and footnotes give the reader a brief biography of each of these folks, again as if Hannah herself was writing them and making comments about their Jewish backgrounds or other snippets of information. An author's note at the end details both Arendt's writings and biographies that a reader could use to learn more about her. This biography gives a nuanced look at a complex woman.