In the Archive with Hannah Arendt Samantha Hill
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.2 I’d wager she knew more than one. 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, D.C., 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 5 by 8 inches, 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 with blue and black ink and edits with pencil. Arendt’s journals were delivered 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 the 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 his 1936 essay “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 In the Archive with Hannah Arendt
Samantha Hill
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