In the Archive with Hannah Arendt
“The question is: Is there a form of thinking that is not tyrannical?”[1]
— Hannah Arendt
When Hannah Arendt arrived at the German Literature Archive in Marbach Germany in June 1975 to organize Karl Jasper’s papers, she stood up in the cafeteria and began reciting Friedrich Schiller by heart. She was fond of “Das Mädchen aus der Fremde”, but this is pure speculation. As Arendt said to Günter Gaus in her last interview, she carried German poems around in her hinterkopf. I’d wager she knew more than one. [2]
The German Literature Archive is an expansive brutalist building designed by Jörg and Elisabeth Kiefner, set next to the Friedrich Schiller Museum. Built in the early 1970s, it houses papers from some of the world’s most famous writers: Friedrich Schiller, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Erich Kästner, Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Hannah Arendt. While most of Arendt’s papers are at The Library of Congress in Washington, DC, the archive in Marbach holds her Denktagebuch, or thinking journals, alongside her correspondence with Heidegger, Jaspers, Hilde Domin, and Hermann Broch among others. I went to visit her journals.
Hannah Arendt kept her thinking journals between 1950 and 1971.[3] The twenty-eight notebooks are 5x8, mottled reddish-brown. Arendt favored The Champion Line Wiremaster, ruled, 45 sheets, 15 or 20 cents apiece. She ordered the journals with roman numerals on the covers, and numbered the inner left and right hand corners respectively. She writes in blue and black ink and edits with pencil.
A page from Hannah Arendt’s thinking journals held at the German Literature Archive, Marbach. Journal XXI, May 1955.
Arendt’s journals arrived to me in two bursting blue folders, out of order, pulled from a museum exhibition. Unlike the two heavy volumes published by Piper as the Denktagebuch in 2002, which appears as two thick black tomes, I was struck by how thin and colorful Arendt’s journals were. Worn corners, coffee rings on covers, journal XXVI looks waterlogged. They appear as intimate artifacts of daily existence. Somehow naming them Denktagebuch had crystallized the journals in my imagination as a single, consistent work spread out over time. Much to my surprise they were not one work, but many.[4]
In “Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility” Walter Benjamin talks about aura. Aura is the element eliminated from the original when we encounter a reproduction. The plurality of copies that appear readily available lose their unique quality which can only be retained in the original. Arendt writes about this phenomenon in her essay “Culture and Politics.” Though, she worries more about the socialization of texts than aura:
It is not the entertainment industry that is a sign of what we call ‘mass culture,’ and what should more precisely be called the deteriorization of culture. And it is not that this deterioriazation begins when everyone can buy the dialogues of Plato for pocket change. Rather, it begins when these products are changed to such an extent as to facilitate their mass retailing — a mass retailing that would otherwise be impossible. [5]
Mass retailing requires loss, and reproduction forces a kind of conformity that loses uniqueness. And while there is much to be said for the experience of aura itself, opening those blue folders, I was struck by how the form of Arendt’s journals changed my experience of the text. The thinking journals appeared to me as an entirely new work.
How we experience a text depends on form and content. Seeing originals changes the experience of reading and gives one a sense of context, a sense of tone, a sense of how a text might have been written. Which is not to claim that one can ever know the thoughts or feelings of another, but it is to say that there is something gained from the tactile experience of handling original papers. This experience expands our imagination of the text, and so to our capacity for engaging with it. In this way, I was struck most by how essential space is to reading Arendt’s journals, and how much this sense of space and time is lost in the reproduction of the text.
Space and time are essential to how Arendt is using her thinking journals. Benjamin discusses how even the most perfect reproduction still lacks one element, “its presence in time and space.” And certainly Arendt’s journals bear this historical quality of time and space as well, but in Arendt’s journals time and space appear across the page as a form of thinking itself. The relationship between Theoria (Theory) and Poiesis (Making), that Arendt talks about in The Human Condition is visible in the ordering of the entries. Arendt is wrestling with concepts spatially, putting thoughts into conversation with one another.
In The Life of the Mind, Arendt asks: Where are we when we think? Her answer is spatial and temporal. We are caught in a gap space, between the forces of past and future which press upon us. We absent ourselves from the realm of appearances in order to retreat into a space of solitude where thinking is possible. Where we can re-present our experiences in the world to ourselves in private, in our imagination, and engage with them in self-reflective thinking. And for Arendt there is a space between the process of thinking that unfolds in the mind and the way our thoughts appear in the world. Arendt’s thinking journals appear as a medium, carrying thoughts into a physical space where she can engage and re-engage them. It’s not surprising in this sense that many of the entries are poems, aphorisms, sayings, and passages from texts that she finds illuminating.
Arendt writes in German, English, French, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. (Perhaps a reason why the thinking journals have not appeared in English.) It would be a shame to lose their linguistic richness, where language is as much a material to her thinking as the content of the passages themselves. The multilingual journals are a testament to Arendt’s life: The philosophical tradition she emerged out of, learning Greek at an early age, her attachment to her mother tongue German, and her lived experiences as a refugee learning French and English to survive. Arendt did not live in one language, she lived in many.
Arendt also asks how thinking appears in The Life of the Mind. Thinking appears in her journals in the spacing of the entries, in the way we see a thought carried out in the single stroke of a pen, in the way she stacks letters, and contrasts quotes to create new meaning. There’s something of a Brechtian and Benjaminian spirit alive on the page. The way the passages are placed on the page indicates that she is writing them out intentionally and thinking about them in conversation. A Nietzsche quote in German sits above a Pascal quote in French. They are talking with each other. On one page, Arendt places Wordsworth on top of Hölderlin on top of Melville:
A page from Hannah Arendt’s thinking journals held at the German Literature Archive, Marbach. Journal VIII, February 1952.
…Imagination, which, in truth, / Is but another name for absolute power / And clearest insight, amplitude of mind, / And Reason in her most exalted mood. William Wordsworth, The Prelude, XIV
Denn der hat viel gewonnen, der das Leben verstehen kann ohne zu trauern. (Hölderlin, Philosophical Aphorisms.)
’Tis dream to think that Reason can govern the reasoning creature, man. Melville.
Here, each passage deals with thinking and reason. Seen this way the languages play with one another, sounds and words echoing, like gewonnen (having won) and govern. Arendt is illustrating constellated thinking, which refuses rational or reductive forms of logic in favor of relationality. These passages are about mourning, imagination, and the dream of Reason. Each reflects a different angle of Arendt’s work on thinking, which uplifts the power of imagination over Reason. The lines from Wordsworth’s Prelude elevate imagination as the internal power of the mind, enabling creation, allowing us to begin again. For Hölderlin, mourning becomes a form of poetic contemplation, a way of thinking which is interruptive and unexpected. This echoes Melville’s lament that the dream of Reason could possibly govern man. When we read these passages together, to think that Reason might win out over the chaos of life is melancholy, and almost laughable.
Arendt is a relational thinker, bringing together ideas through cutting, binding, taping. She was known to write with a large pair of silver scissors and roll of scotch tape on her desk. These instruments of cut-and-paste give one the impression of collage, or montage. She is creating an image as much as a text, typing up bits of poems and taping them into her journals, along with newspaper clippings, and quotations. Handwritten notes are tucked between pages. The colors in the original journals enhance the tactile experience of reading them. A sense of rhythm is created through color: A dash of red pencil, a blot of blue ink, the thickness and shade of black. A sense of how her hand moves. The force of the pen or pencil is visible in the grain of writing which is lost on the screen or printed page.
This sense of space that Arendt is playing with is emphasized by the tempo of the journals. Arendt is not keeping a daily journal, often there is only one entry per month. Arendt’s great axiom from The Human Condition, to stop and think what we are doing, appears in the journals this way. There is no sense of urgency in her handwriting; there is a great sense of space. There is pause giving room for each entry to breathe. Often she leaves the bottom of a page blank to begin a new thought at the top of the next page. She breaks up entries with long hash marks that resemble equal signs, upward slashes, and she indicates breath with one dash or two. There are no sprinting thoughts. Many entries are full sentences with indented paragraphs written out as notes for books or essays she is working on.
The relationship between space and time in thinking is most apparent in the way Arendt writes out poems. Almost every poem is given its own page. The first poem that Arendt copies out from Emily Dickinson is draped down the lines. Arendt sets letters down as she’s writing them. The final line in “Up life’s hill”: Homelessness for Home stands out and echoes as you encounter it. (She copied it in 1950, the same year she first returned to Germany after the war.) Arendt has a bit of Dickinson’s penchant for painting with the hand, stretching out und for example, layering und on und, creating an undulating wave, like Dickinson’s The Sea, The Sea, The Sea. At moments, Arendt’s und becomes a line in itself; a great connector of inter-esse.
The difference between the printed Denktagebuch and Arendt’s thinking journals illustrates the difference between knowing and understanding. The typed-up words, ordered, numbered, lose all texture, and become crystallized artifacts. Printed words appear on the page as carriers of semantic meaning to be deciphered through reading. We are confronted with a fixed image that has been made from an original, and in this way we are confronted with frozen words. But to see the words on the page, in the stroke of her hand, to see the ink spread out, is to begin to understand the process of thinking itself. The clean ordered numbered pages of the Denktagebuch stand in stark contrast with Arendt’s handwriting, with the cuts of poetry typed up and taped in, with the juxtaposition of ink and pencil, which turn words into images to be encountered, not simply read. Similar to Benjamin’s Passagenwerk, which documents the passage of time through text and image, Arendt’s Thinking Journals document the dialogic nature of thinking interior to the life of the mind.
Arendt began keeping her thinking journals in 1950 when she returned from visiting Germany for the first time after the war, and she stopped keeping them when her husband Heinrich Blücher died in 1971. The first entry in the last thinking journal dated 1971 reads:
1971, Ohne Heinrich. Frei — wie ein Blatt im Wind.
(1971, Without Heinrich. Free — like a leaf in the wind.)
The last two pages are travel itineraries dated 1972 and 1973 and appear to be added later.
In 1971 Arendt switched to keeping day-planners until her death in 1975. The small black Diary and Memo books are less organized, more utilitarian. Grocery lists, reminders, appointments, phone numbers, travel itineraries. They reveal a different side of thinking, a kind of routinization: haircuts, manicures, lists for entertaining, opera tickets, shopping, travel expenses. A way of keeping track of daily life. The pleasurable, the irritating, the necessary.
Around 1971 is also when Arendt begins writing The Life of the Mind. Moving from her thinking journals to what was to be her three-part masterpiece on thinking, willing, and judging. From her earliest days in Marburg studying thinking with Heidegger, Arendt was interested in the life of the mind, about the process of thinking itself, and driven by a need to understand. Her thinking journals illustrate her process of thinking materially, making visible part of that 2-in-1 dialogue she carried on with herself and others in silence.
The Hannah Arendt Papers at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. https://bit.ly/2n9SUOO
Samantha Hill is the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, Visiting Assistant Professor of Political Studies at Bard College, and Associate Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research.
[1]Hannah Arendt, Thinking Journal II, December 1950. The German entry reads: Die Frage ist: Gibt es ein Denken, das nicht tyrannisch ist?
[2]Ulrich von Bulow related this story to me. Elisabeth Young-Bruehl talks about the four grueling weeks Arendt spent sorting through Jasper’s papers in For the Love of the World.
[3]Hannah Arendt’s estate is spread across at least four different locations — The majority of her papers are held at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC, select correspondence and the thinking journal are held a the German Literature Archive in Marbach, Germany; her personal library is housed at Bard College’s Stevenson Library, in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; and it is rumored that a private collector holds a number of papers in New York City.
[4]Looking at the thinking journals, it’s difficult to imagine how much work went into publishing those two thick Piper bands. The journals themselves were typed up by Arendt’s assistant Lotte Kohler, and published from her notes and transcriptions, which are also held at the German Literature Archive in Marbach.
[5]Hannah Arendt, “Culture and Politics”, Thinking Without a Banister. Digital Edition, Page 414.