What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, edited and translated (with Genese Grill) by Samantha Rose Hill (Liveright, 208 pp., $26.99)
Buried deep in Hannah Arendt’s archives in the Library of Congress are two typed and handbound books of verse—short, expressive, and written by Arendt herself. Few know that Arendt, the German Jewish political philosopher responsible for the dense prose of The Human Condition and The Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote poetry. Even fewer knew it during her lifetime—not even her first husband. Still, Arendt made sure to carry these poems with her as she fled Germany in 1933, wended her way over nearly a decade through Prague, Geneva, France, Portugal, and finally made her way to Riverside Drive in Manhattan.
Though these poems were clearly important to her, Arendt never published them. Now Arendt biographer Samantha Rose Hill, a professor at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, has compiled them into a new volume, What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, with notes and front matter by Hill and translated in collaboration with Genese Grill. It’s a slim book, with only 71 poems (a handful of which were found in her letters, not the handbound books), organized in chronological order with the English translations facing the German originals. (Though Arendt mastered English and wrote her most famous works in it, she continued to write poetry in her mother tongue.)
Arendt perhaps judged the poems correctly when she refrained from publishing them, but Hill nonetheless deserves our thanks for this collection, with its helpful notes and unostentatious translations. What Remains reveals that Arendt’s prose couldn’t have existed without her poetry. We find the beginnings of Arendt’s ideas in these lines of verse.
The poems are bound to surprise. They’re lyrical, brief (many, Hill reports, were drafted in five-by-eight notebooks), sometimes repetitive, and full of sentiment. In German, not a few read like folk songs or nursery rhymes, iambic with bouncy end-rhyme. Hill and Grill’s translations rarely preserve these qualities, opting instead for pared-down diction. The catchy German gives way to English verse like this: “Everything fades./ Dawn rises./ Nothingness conquers me—/ It’s just life’s way.”
You might have guessed that this angsty and abstract poem, “Weariness,” was written by a teenager, as indeed it was, around 1923 or 1924, when Arendt was between 16 and 18. The young Arendt’s favorite images include dusk and dawn, light and night, and the seasons. The early poems read like a controlled diary: hemmed in by meter to avoid too much wallowing, cryptic enough that references to the author’s personal life are fully legible only to her. Indeed, several seem to be about affairs too lurid and personal for sharing, including a handful likely addressed to Martin Heidegger—a relationship that didn’t become public knowledge until years after her death.
Planted in the repetition of these themes, however, are the seeds of Arendt’s later work. One poem from about 1924, “The Subway,” reflects her early interest in the relationship between man and technology, an essential question in some of Arendt’s most influential—and hotly contested—writings, such as The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem. In 15 lines unbroken by stanzas, Arendt describes Berlin’s U-Bahn trains: “Narrow and crazed,/ By will of humanity,/ Weaving mechanically/ Rushing past,/ Its designated path,/ Indifferently rocking.” Relentless, choppy, and machine-like, the lines march on, repeating as the U-Bahn repeats its route. In these train cars, coursing powerfully over the track, Arendt already saw something both awesome and awful. Technological achievement may raise us above our merely animal qualities, but it can also magnify our savagery. Decades later, Arendt would write about the Holocaust, the culmination of the human impulse to plan, control, and systematize, ending in horror beyond imagination. The poem concludes with the train “flying toward darkness,” a “beast.”
The first half of the book ends in 1926, when Arendt was 20. After a 16-year hiatus, the poems pick up again in 1942, the year she turned 36. Her poetry has matured. Formal innovations are increasingly frequent. Line- and poem-lengths vary more. The imagery is more wide-ranging, the rhyme less insistent. She writes, in 1946:
I know that the streets are destroyed.
Where are the wagon tracks, miraculously unscathed,
shining forth from ancient ruins?
I know that the houses have fallen.
We entered the world in them, wonderfully sure, that they
were more durable than ourselves.
Between the early poems and this one, World War II had ravaged Europe. Six million Jews had been systematically and industrially murdered. The dark possibilities of the human drive to control and systematize have come to fruition. If this is what the West’s stunning advancements in thought and technology amounted to, Arendt wrote somberly in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “We can no longer hope for an eventual restoration of the old world order with all its traditions.”
In this lament, Arendt is also working out the beginnings of a way forward—what she will term “beginning” itself. Totalitarianism looks to stamp out human spontaneity, rendering people into “ghastly marionettes with human faces” and fungible “bundle[s] of reactions that can always be liquidated and replaced by other bundles of reactions that behave in exactly the same way,” making them participants in their own death march to the concentration camps. But such a political regime can’t last, precisely because people are unpredictable and spontaneous, always capable of doing or saying something novel. In the end, this innate freedom and ability to begin something new will confound a regime that depends on reducing people to machines. Arendt praises this quality in another poem, an encomium written to a friend with a talent for endless conversation: “instead of ending—/ You began again—/ You eternal new beginner.” That she and her countrymen began their lives in houses, towns, and traditions that now seem lost also contains the possibility of a new life sprouting from the ruins.
If our political freedom amounts to spontaneity of action—the ability to surprise and to jam up the gears of totalitarianism—then perhaps spontaneity of thought is a kind of freedom in private, independent of politics. Arendt found that private freedom in her poetry. There, she returned repeatedly to time, God, memory, revolution, and love, working out the questions that became central to her thought. Far from being the only thing remaining, then, What Remains shows us where Hannah Arendt began.
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