The works of philosopher Hannah Arendt are currently experiencing a renaissance. Her standard work The Origins of Totalitarianism returned to bestseller lists in the U.S. when Donald Trump was elected President of the United States. Other shifts and erosions in the Western world are also reminiscent of events that Hannah Arendt witnessed, examined, and commented on in her work.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt observed the decline of the Weimar Republic. After the National Socialists came to power, she had to flee to the United States because she was a Jew. Her works shed light on the causes of fascism and totalitarian violence, as well as the consequences of people being forced into migration, the decline of civilizational values, and the boundaries between truth and lies in politics. The German Historical Museum in Berlin is dedicating an exhibition to her. Entitled Hannah Arendt und das 20. Jahrhundert (Hannah Arendt and the 20th Century), it will run through October 18, 2020.

Two Volumes Published, Fifteen More to Follow

“In the United States, Hannah Arendt’s work has been part of the standard repertoire of the humanities for years,” says Barbara Hahn, an adjunct professor at Freie Universität Berlin and a professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee (USA). “Hannah Arendt is currently being rediscovered in Germany. The problem is that so far there has been no critical edition of her works published.” Professor Hahn wants to change that. In cooperation with an international research team, she initiated work on the first complete critical edition of the works of Hannah Arendt, in order to facilitate a more precise reception across national borders.

In addition to Barbara Hahn, the main editors are Anne Eusterschulte (Philosophy, Freie Universität Berlin), Eva Geulen (Director, Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung, Berlin), Hermann Kappelhoff (Film and Media Studies, Freie Universität Berlin), Patchen Markell (Political Theory, Cornell University, New York), Annette Vowinckel (History, Leibniz Centre for Contemporary History, Potsdam), and Thomas Wild (Literature, Bard College, New York).

Two volumes have been published so far, and 15 more will follow. In addition to the print edition, an online edition is being planned that will be freely accessible to interested readers. Christian Pischel, the project coordinator at Freie Universität, says, “In our edition, you can see in layers how Hannah Arendt thought, what literature she referred to, and how her texts were created.” Pischel finds it particularly important that the edition will be published in two languages: German and English – because Hannah Arendt wrote and thought in both languages.

“Many texts are available in both languages but differ in content. We want to make that clear and enable a critical engagement with her works,” says Christian Pischel. It will soon be possible to look at the textual developments interactively and better understand the process of their creation. Hannah Arendt’s moving biography is the basis for her bilingual language experience. The deprivation of rights and persecution of Jews in Germany during the Nazi era and Hannah Arendt’s own arrest by the Gestapo secret state police in July 1933 motivated her, an intellectual who was born in 1906, to emigrate from Germany. First, she went to Paris via Karlsbad and Geneva. Finally, in 1941 she fled to New York, where she made a new home.

After she was expatriated from the National Socialist regime in 1937, she was stateless until she was granted U.S. citizenship in 1951. After that, she saw herself as an American and was committed to the United States Constitution. Hannah Arendt worked as a publicist and a university lecturer and published important contributions to political philosophy. Nevertheless, she rejected using the term “philosopher” to refer to herself and described her own work as “political theory.”

In 1961, Arendt was a court observer in the proceedings against Adolf Eichmann

Christian Pischel says it is very important that Hannah Arendt, in spite of her experiences with violence, never gave up her continental European thinking, not even after fleeing to the United States. “She was an intellectual who moved back and forth between Germany and the United States and who viewed and understood the world in both languages throughout her life.” She addressed both German and American audiences equally. She was constantly switching between the two languages. After the war, she visited Germany and contacted her mentors again, including Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger.

Hannah Arendt's teacher from her early days in Marburg, the philosopher Heidegger, was rector of the University of Freiburg in 1933. As a member of the Nazi Party, he was involved in the Nazi regime. In her intellectual work, Hannah Arendt also wanted to understand the reasons for such behavior. She drew a great deal of attention when she wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil. In 1961, she was a court observer in the legal proceedings brought against Adolf Eichmann in the District Court of Jerusalem. This text, which was published in several different editions, will be available in a critical edition in 2023.

For Arendt, the world can only be understood in different languages

There are currently two volumes of the complete critical edition available: The Modern Challenge to Tradition: Fragmente eines Buchs and Sechs Essays. Die verborgene Tradition. The third volume Rahel Varnhagen is due to be published in the fall. It features Hannah Arendt’s work on the great letter writer of German Romanticism. Funding from the Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung für Wissenschaft und Kultur enabled the start of the edition work. It was also generously supported by Vanderbilt University, and later Freie Universität Berlin joined the group. At the beginning of 2020, the project was added to the German Research Foundation’s long-term budget, thus securing funding for editing additional volumes for the time being.

“Hannah Arendt assumed that it is not possible to understand the world from the perspective of one language. You always have to try to look at the world in multiple languages. That is a very important concept,” says Barbara Hahn. Another volume to be released next year is called The Life of the Mind. It will be published in English only, as an exception. Barbara Hahn explains, “Hannah Arendt died in December 1975, before she could finish this book. Otherwise she would probably have written a German version, too.”

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This text originally appeared in German on June 21, 2020, in the Tagesspiegel newspaper supplement published by Freie Universität.