Arendt, Hölderlin, and Their Perception of Schicksal: Hölderlinian Elements in Arendt’s Thinking and the Messianic Notion of Revolution Jana Marlene Madar
If we feel at home in this world, we can see our lives as the development of the “product of nature,” as the unfolding and the realisation of what we already were. —Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess
Today, Hannah Arendt is above all known as a political thinker; what we hear less about is her great interest in and connection to poetry. After her first postwar visit to Berlin in 1950, Arendt writes in a letter to her husband Heinrich Blücher: “But: what still remains are the inhabitants of Berlin. Unchanged, wonderful, humane, full of humor, clever, very clever even. This was for the first time like coming home.”1 In an interview with Günter Gaus in September 1964, Arendt elaborates on this visit, stressing the difference between her German language and that of others. In the same interview, she replies to the question of continuity after she fled Nazi Germany, first to France, then in 1941 to the United States: “Was ist geblieben? Geblieben ist die Muttersprache” (What was it that continued? My mother tongue continued). She adds: “I felt a distance towards French and English. In German I know a great number of poems by heart. They are constantly there—in the back of my mind2—the same can never be achieved for another language.” Language in general (and poetic language in particular) plays a significant role in Arendt’s oeuvre: the importance of German as her mother tongue and its difference to English as her second language, the tensions between these two spheres, linguistically and also psychologically (the limited familiarity with the nuances of a language and the awareness thereof), and its overcoming through self-translating her own works into her first language as a process of working it through—“working through the words, the concepts and metaphors, the arguments, examples and explanations” (Weigel 2012, 72) —and last but not least her claim “to keep my distance” (Arendt 1964). Writing bilingually, “the language of poetry . . . forms the counterpart, thus providing her with the ability to remain at a distance—at a distance from the nation state and from conformism” (Weigel 2012, 64). In her Denktagebuch,3 Arendt discusses the correspondence between thinking and poetry explicitly: 122
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