GermanMy Christmas present to myself was a
biography of Hannah Arendt by Alois Prinz. Ms Arendt was mentioned in passing in Lisa Fittko's
Mein Weg Über die Pyrenäen, and I was curious to know a little more about her.
She was born into a wealthy Jewish family in what was then Königsberg in East Prussia, today Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave on the Baltic coast between Poland and Lithuania. Growing up she would have been exposed to Standard German, Yiddish and Polish. She emigrated to France in the 1930s as a political refugee, and then emigrated again to the USA in 1940, eventually becoming a naturalised USA Citizen. In her published journal (Denktagebuch) she wrote in German, English and French, and included some quotes in Greek and Latin.
In Miss Fittko's memoir Ms Arendt is described as being considered a high profile inmate in the French interment camp at Gurs where they were both imprisoned, presumably due to her published articles and her association with the Zionist movement, but Ms Arendt first became famous after the success of her book The Origins of Totalitarianism (
German) in 1951, after which she earned her living a celebrity lecturer, and writer. Her articles on the Eichmann Trial, published in book form as, Eichmann in Jerusalem (
German) in 1963 made her an International news story for a time, as she disagreed with the presentation of Mr Eichmann as a key architect of the Nazi's jewish policies, considering him a minor functionary, a
Hanswurst. More controversially she criticised the jewish leadership in Nazi occupied Europe for failing to offer organised resistance to Nazi policies.
A recent
film on her life centers on the furore around her Eichmann in Jerusalem book & articles.
Her life story has also been presented as a graphic novel,
Die drei leben der Hannah Arendt.
Some radio programmes:
I've not been watching much German TV, but there's a new German mini-series on UK TV that I'm sure to watch at some point,
Ein Krimi aus Passau (UK title: Dark Rivers).
VocabularyI'm still using the free version of Clozemaster.com, which is limited to 30 sentences a day and I've kept up a daily Anki habit. I've limited Anki's daily max reviews to 110, and new words a day to 10.
Limiting Anki to 10 new words a day means I very quickly build up a queue of new words I come across in reading. After reading
Khayyam's description of how he approaches unknown words I've tried writing down unknown words after looking them up, instead of adding them to my Anki new words queue. I think Tungemål mentioned that writing things down is supposed to aid memory.
With French I never tried to learn any vocabulary, but I did write down and look up unknown words a lot. But French and English do have a awful lot of shared vocabulary too.
FrenchI listened to a very good four part
radio documentary on Hannah Arendt, and a radio play set around the Eichmann in Jerusalem fuss (which I can't now find!
).
My French themed Christmas present to myself was another book,
la Bataille by Partick Rambaud. This a novel about the
battle of Essling. This was new ground to me as almost all my knowledge of the Napoleonic wars comes from the novels of
CS Forester and
Bernard Cornwell and as the British military weren't involved in this battle, Messrs Forester and Cornwell did not include it in their heroes adventures.