Men in Dark Times

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These portraits of Karl Jaspers, Waldemar Gurian, Randall Jarrell, Walter Benjamin,Isak Dinesen,Bertolhdt Brecht, Pope John XXIII are remarkable for their human insight, their narrative power and their philosophical understanding. Arendt makes of each portrait a life- story, often a most moving story, and a presentation and critical assessment of the figure 's life- work. In some cases she had a central part in introducing to an English reading audience seminal figures ( Walter Benjamin and Hermann Broch are the outstanding examples) who were far less well known , than they would come to be. She chooses figures whose power of creation is great and unique, and she assesses them in terms of her own set of categories and understandings. One outstanding instance is her evaulation it is really a laudatio a work of praise for the great Pope John XXIII .She speaks of his remarkable simplicity, humanity and courage. His simple great faith "Every day is a good day to be born, and every day is a good day to die" Some of the portraits are of personal acquaintances and friends. And one feels that in writing about them she is somehow doing for them what she in her " The Human Condition" spoke about as the role of the poet the immortalization of the hero and their deeds. She has a wonderful eye, and her description for instance of the awkwardness with material things of Waldemar Gurian catches the essence of the person in a striking way. All in all the portraits of Men in Dark Times shed light on the human character and soul, and are a testimony not only to the greatness of the subjects but to the greatness of the writer herself.

Men in Dark Times is a collection of biographical essays Arendt wrote over a period of 15 years (1955-1968), all of which were published elsewhere, and collected here under this title. She has choosen to collct her portraits of cultural and political figures who worked and were caught up in world affairs in the first half of the twentieth-century, figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Jaspers, Isak Dinesen, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht. The oppening essay, "On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing," focuses on the thought of the eighteenth-century German philosopher, and she uses his thoughts on friendship, on the political and civic aspects of friendship, the ways in which philosophical and political works are formed through civic friendship, to tie all of the personae discussed in the book together. She sees them all as struggling to produce in an era racked by political upheavel. As always, she writes with a highly astute critical eye and a sharp tongue. It is one of her more polemical works, and is sure to make one re-evaulate how we look not only at the lives and works of those she tells us about, but also about ourselves.