DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0001 Introduction: Hannah Arendt - Writing with Literature Cosima Mattner Academic Policy Advisor and Independent Writer, based in Berlin, Germany Hannah Arendt’s work defies classification. Informed by the theological traditions of Judaism and Christianity, Arendt moved between philosophical and political thought to study the totalitarian regimes that defined both her biography and twentieth-century history� Her writing transgressed academic disciplines and professional spheres� She was as much a scholar as she was a reporter, essayist, public intellectual and even an influential political activist, especially during her time in French exile from 1933-1941 (Kim 1—33; Meyer 103—207)� Exiled from fascist Europe, Arendt found a new home in America, whose civil society she idealized while dismissing, all too lightly, its racist history� The challenge of reading Arendt’s work consists in unlocking its all-encompassing reach, historical depth, and theoretical ambition by breaking through the seemingly smooth surface of Arendt’s style� The key to Arendt’s complexity that this joint issue plays with is literature. Amidst all the significant change that defined her life and work, the realm of literature remained the most stable social refuge, hub of rhetorical inspiration, playground for political thought� Not only can Arendt’s work be better understood where its literary traces are tracked down, but the joy of reading Arendt becomes apparent by unfolding the layers of literary history she weaved into her writing� Arendt’s love for literature shaped her life and work significantly. She was surrounded by literary writers and thinkers throughout her life� Moreover, she invested substantial energy in editing and publishing literary work that she admired from the beginning of her post-doctoral work on Rahel Varnhagen� Taking Arendt’s literary inclination as its starting point, our joint issue inquires into Arendt’s mode of working with literature� For instance, Arendt’s famous proclamation that “poets are there to be quoted, not to be talked about” 1 suggests a fundamental skepticism about interpretation� Polemically, one could ask: Was Hannah Arendt, to invoke Susan Sontag’s famous slogan, “against interpretation”? Arendt’s prolific writing on literature seems to defy that same stance� Indeed, Arendt’s multifaceted activity as a reviewer, editor, essayist, biographer, and composer of some of the twentieth century’s seminal literary portraits suggests that Arendt very much liked writing about literature� Taking 2 Cosima Mattner DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0001 a closer look, however, one is inclined to think that Arendt wrote with literature rather than “about” it� Whatever Arendt published, her work features manifold quotations, often taken from the canonical Western literary tradition, reaching back to Homer and Plato� The guiding question of this joint issue is how and why Arendt’s work is so intricately bound up with literature� Approaching Arendt’s writing on literature from the disciplinary angles of philosophy and literature, the following contributions address how and why Arendt wrote with literature the way she did� Based on a 2022 German Studies Conference panel concerned with the role of literature in Arendt’s work, the featured articles study a variety of Arendt’s literary portraits and adjacent texts to examine Arendt’s approach to literature and her reasons for doing so� Building on renewed interest in Arendt’s political thought and one of her central literary genres, the portrait, the contributions in this issue attend to its distinctive form and function in detail� The following articles examine a set of recurring characteristics across a selection of Arendt’s portraits which enrich our understanding of Arendt’s work more generally� They illuminate how her exemplary path as a critic of literature feeds into her political and philosophical thought and, conversely, how her political-philosophical perspective shapes her approach to literature� But why the portrait? What work does this genre do for her, why did Arendt return to it repeatedly? In fact, Arendt considered what she was doing differently: In a Denktagebuch entry from April 1970, she reflected on her American readers’ irritation about her “profile of Benjamin” ( Denktagebuch 771)� Arendt notes that she used the genre for “thinking a matter through” - to her American readers’ displeasure� Likewise, in her introduction to Men in Dark Times - her portrait collection of 1968 - Arendt presented the collected essays as “profiles” of personalities whose purpose was to re-illuminate some of the darkness brought over the public sphere of the first half of the twentieth century through totalitarianism� Rather than “theories and concepts,” only people had the power to change what seemed to be an inescapable and all-comprehensive catastrophe ( Men in Dark Times ix)� The political task of criticism was, therefore, to repopulate the world with figures of the past who lived through the dark ages, leaving traces of their lives in literary or political writing, as Rosa Luxemburg, Berthold Brecht, or Walter Benjamin did, to name just a few of the most prominent writers Arendt was fascinated by. Thus, Arendt invested the genre of the “profile” with political potential - exceeding the journalistic term which she actually had been handed first in her correspondence with New Yorker editor William Shawn. She had written, as Shawn observed upon receiving the first draft of her Brecht essay, “a partial portrait rather than a full portrait or a pile of facts or a biography.” According to Shawn, Arendt’s profile pinned down Brecht’s Introduction: Hannah Arendt - Writing with Literature 3 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0001 “essence�” (Shawn n� pag�) But what was that “essence,” how was it connected to the genre, and why would Arendt have been interested in it? With its aesthetic connotation, the term “portrait” accounts for the literary, political and philosophical excess that distinguishes Arendt’s writing from the profile, a more journalistic kind of literary criticism. There is the aspiration to raise the level of the genre from its midbrow associations� In this issue, Friederike Wein, Chris Hoffman, Karen Feldman, and Annie Pfeifer provide some arguments for why portrait might indeed be a valuable genre category� These articles provide insights into the distinctiveness of Arendt’s citational style and the way it creates intricate proximity or critical distance to the personality she discusses� Such play with approximating the depicted subject is a distinctive indicator of portraiture in art history ( Metzler 600)� Through citation, Arendt’s voice affectively merges with or marks detachment from her subject’s voice. Often, Arendt draws on canonical literary authorities to gain literary and critical clout� Depending on how she judges a given personality, Arendt shifts from dramatic proximity (in the case of Rahel Varnhagen, for instance) to more narrative historiography (in Stefan Zweig’s and Brecht’s cases)� Rarely does Arendt stick to the conventional limits of book reviewing, even when composing her work for that purpose� Where Arendt selects eclectically from the work of the person in discussion, prioritizing the author’s political or ethical stance, her interest does not seem to be literary criticism so much as storytelling� She is concerned with literary personae and weaves her texts with colorful threads from a rich literary tradition� Overall, her portraiture thus appears to stand somewhere between criticism, historiography, and literature itself� This “indeterminacy” (a term Florian Klinger elaborates on in his contribution to this issue) of genre in her writing can be considered motor of her work� In “’Show, don’t tell’ als Schreibtechnik bei Hannah Arendt,” Friederike Wein calls for a more nuanced look at the great variation in Arendt’s essayistic writing� Suggesting a distinction between ‘essay’ and ‘portrait,’ Wein argues that with the latter, Arendt attended to figures she considered marginalized by amplifying their voices through a specific citational practice. Examining closely Arendt’s portrait of Rahel Levin Varnhagen, her essay on Nathalie Sarraute, and her editorial afterword on Robert Gilbert, Wein shows how Arendt creates both close proximity and intricate critical distance to her subjects� Guided by a well-meaning, friendly attitude, Wein argues, Arendt’s portraits champion their subjects but also subtly highlight specific qualities as specifically significant by interlacing Arendt’s own perspective with her subjects’ voices� Of a literary rather than scholarly character, Arendt’s portraits indicate how language is a medium of personality in her work, last but not least, giving Arendt’s own 4 Cosima Mattner DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0001 critical persona away: one that pays tribute to others but also subtly communicates her own view and voice� Wein understands Arendt as a reader mindful of form, both in her reading of works like Sarraute’s and in her editorial efforts (of Gilbert in this case)� Her reading of these authors, moreover, is driven by contributing to the “posthumous fame,” as she calls it in her Benjamin essay, of those who, like Benjamin, fell through the net of social recognition ( Men in Dark Times 153ff.). Chris Hoffman takes a closer look at Arendt’s writing on literature as biographical literary criticism in his contribution “Arendt’s Criticism of Life�” He contrasts Arendt’s approach with biographically positivistic and antibiographical trends in criticism in the early to mid-twentieth century� Arendt’s focus on authors’ lives, Hoffman argues, echoes Friedrich Gundolf ’s and other critics’ notion of Gestalt as it complicates ordinary biological or chronological notions of ‘life�’ But Arendt takes their hermeneutic view to an existentially more urgent, political level. Hoffman shows that Arendt’s mode of criticism is more than a coincidence by motivating it through her political theory, drawing mainly on The Human Condition. In Hoffman’s view, Arendt’s criticism is driven by the normative principle to revive past lives objectified in works of art like literature. This critical task involves activating the reader’s sense of connection to the author’s life as their own concern through the literature that emerged from it� Hoffman’s close readings of Arendt’s Benjamin and Brecht essays again point to how Arendt’s unique use of quotation serves both to approach and maintain distance to the discussed author - a distance that allows her to mediate through literature between past, present, and future readerly and writerly lives, creating a literary contemporary based on shared concerns� In “On Arendt’s Brechtian Adages and the Sins of the Poet,” Karen Feldman discusses Arendt’s Brecht essay as a singular case of Arendt’s literary criticism� Tracing the precise origins of Arendt’s references, Feldman shows how Arendt deliberately changes and adopts quotations while still ascribing them to the respective canonical authority� This citational laxity demonstrates to Feldman the cunning of Arendt’s literary criticism, a move reminiscent of Wein’s similar claim that Arendt quotes literarily rather than scholarly� Indeed, Arendt’s interpretive authority, Feldman argues, consists exactly in this literary quality� Reading Arendt’s Brecht essay, Feldman traces how Arendt judges Brecht’s work by formulating literary wisdom sayings rather than philosophical doctrines� Indeed, the “overtly moralistic” tone and “didactic impulse” of her essay on Brecht is couched, as Feldman observes, in something like a fugue of epigrammatic claims that gain clout through quotability rather than argumentative soundness� Thus, Feldman concludes that Arendt develops normative maxims for her readers based on the poet in discussion� In ascribing them to the poet, Introduction: Hannah Arendt - Writing with Literature 5 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0001 Arendt’s own role as a normative interpreter becomes veiled� This points to a claim in which Feldman agrees with Hoffman, Wein, and other scholars like Eva Geulen: that Arendt plays with distance and proximity to her subject in her writing on literary figures (Geulen). In “Portrait of a Parvenu: Arendt reads Stefan Zweig,” Annie Pfeifer examines another case of Arendt’s biographical approach to criticism as an attempt to provide a historical correction of Zweig’s apolitical stance in his autobiography The World of Yesterday. Pfeifer shows how Arendt’s review unmasks Zweig’s obsession with prestige and auratic personality and how it was linked to the cult of charisma in both Viennese theater as well as his apolitical mode of collecting the manuscripts of famous writers� Only at the end of his life, after having lost all his wealth and glamour, Arendt argues, did Zweig find his political voice� Pfeifer contributes a nuanced perspective on the recurring yet neglected theme of fame in Arendt’s writing on literary figures - a topic that Wein also addresses� In Zweig’s case, his fame correlated with a suspicious silence that he only broke after his reputation faded in exile� Like in the American version of Arendt’s Benjamin essay, “posthumous fame” is the mark of true genius and integral character� Awarded posthumously, fame belongs to the marginalized, oppressed, drowned-out voices who still dared to speak despite the darkness surrounding them� Pfeifer interprets Arendt’s review of Zweig as an antecedent to her later use of theatrical language in her political theory to postulate identity formation modes� But while Arendt successfully unmasks Zweig’s attempt to hide his Jewish heritage behind sparkling stage curtains, Pfeifer observes, she fails to attend to his work per se. She specifically neglects his theatrical writing, which stages the very issues he seems to ignore as a public personality� Thus, Pfeifer draws attention to the limits of Arendt’s biographical approach, arguing that the life of Zweig’s texts receives insufficient attention from the critic. Upon reading Pfeifer, we might ask ourselves: Is Arendt’s writing on literary figures really literary criticism or rather simply historiography? After all, Arendt’s focus seems to be ethical and political� Reminiscent of the Brechtian ‘sin,’ to which she ascribes the poet’s diminishing powers, Arendt’s review pivots on Zweig’s shame, disgrace, and lack of honor, perhaps imparting a lesson on the reader about how success ruins one’s political acuity or how those who have the platform to speak are responsible for handing on the microphone� Like Hoffman, Pfeifer relates Arendt’s critical approach to her contemporary moment, pointing out that with its biographical, historical focus, Arendt’s distant reading differs considerably from New Criticism, the dominant trend in postwar US literary criticism. In “Hannah Arendts Begriff Menschlicher Unbestimmtheit,” Florian Klinger offers an in-depth philosophical exploration of the relationship between aesthetics 6 Cosima Mattner DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0001 and politics in Arendt’s work� Attending to her interpretation of Kant’s Kritik der Urteilskraft, Klinger examines how Arendt builds on Kant’s concept of reflective judgement to arrive at an understanding of human freedom as indeterminate� He demonstrates how Arendt, by conceiving of freedom as a matter of a certain type of judgment, emancipates herself from the philosophical tradition of German Idealism� Klinger argues, on the basis of her lecture Über Kants politische Philosophie , that Arendt introduces a third, non-dualistic notion of the ‘human’ between Kant’s two poles of the human as a naturally determined versus a practical being. Arendt understands the ‘human’ to be defined not teleologically or practically (that is, with reference to the second part of Kritik der Urteilskraft or Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, respectively) but by means of aesthetic judgment (first part of Kritik der Urteilskraft ), and ‘sensus communis,’ a genuinely social predisposition� In adding this third understanding, Arendt emancipates the ‘human’ from being either heteronomously or solipsistically determined� Klinger shows how Arendt’s recourse to Kant’s aesthetic judgment, as a special type of reflective judgment, allows her to think about the political in a way independent of conceptual, determinate thinking - as the performance of an indeterminacy� Klinger convincingly questions how such reflective judgment can become the basis of a political philosophy defined by human plurality. The answer, Klinger suggests, consists in the inherent communicative, mediative quality of the exemplary (based on which reflective judgment develops the general rule fitting the respective particular) which requires confirmation by others to have any validity at all� While Klinger emphasizes that Arendt’s work neither features the indeterminate in terms of an independent concept of the aesthetic nor in an overall aestheticizing tendency, he suggests that indeterminacy structurally appears throughout her writing and thus could be considered a productive feature of her work� Klinger’s essay shows again how independently Arendt approaches reading canonical figures. Similar to her free adaption and adoption of a line by Goethe or Eichendorff, Arendt thinks with and beyond what she reads in Kant. The undecidability appearing in some of her writing, sometimes even in the form of contradictoriness, often remains unresolved� After all, even her reading of Kant shows signs of this indeterminacy, Klinger argues, as Arendt bases her notion of the political, as concerted action, on an understanding of reflective judgment as conditioned by isolation and limited to an only imagined exchange with others� In their oscillation between approximation and distancing, dramatic citation, and historiographical narrative, Arendt’s literary portraits constitute a paradigmatic subset of her work in which indeterminacy particularly comes to shine� While far from resolving the paradox pointed out by Klinger that reflective judgment is simply distinct from concerted action, these portraits realize the political impetus of open-ended communication and intersubjective understanding by Introduction: Hannah Arendt - Writing with Literature 7 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0001 offering provocative, sometimes contradictory judgments to the reader, often wrapped in a citational style that requires the readers’ disentangling of voices� Indeterminacy is also at play in Arendt’s Benjamin essay - another prominent essay in Men in Dark Times � Emphatically arguing for Benjamin’s incomparability, Arendt pivots on how he frustrates all attempts at categorizing him in any way - and yet, Arendt connects him to the most canonical literary and philosophical tradition imaginable, including Goethe, Homer, Shakespeare, and even Heidegger� As I argue elsewhere, Arendt grounds Benjamin’s paradoxical exceptional canonicity in his ‘critical’ character, whose specific quality she illustrates for her readers through her reader through a performative citation (Mattner)� Involving her readership in her own reading of Benjamin, Arendt’s portrait of him paradigmatically shows how indeterminacy drives her critical judgment as a political impetus to create intersubjective understanding� Like in her other literary portraits, Arendt’s citational practice introduces an indeterminate element in her writing because it merges Arendt’s and her subject’s voice into an at points undistinguishable third, which to interpret and tear apart is left to the reader� We are invited to accept indeterminacy as central to interpreting Arendt’s texts - rather than ironing out the indeterminate in her work� In the indeterminate is where politics, plurality, and friendship happen - driven by the love of literature� Notes 1 “What is Permitted to Jove�” The New Yorker , 5 Nov� 1966, 68—122, here 69� Republished as “Bertolt Brecht: 1898-1956” in Men in Dark Times 207—50� Works Cited Arendt, Hannah� Denktagebuch: 1950 bis 1973 � Munich: Piper, 2002� —� Men in Dark Times � New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968� —� Reflections on Literature and Culture . Stanford: Stanford UP, 2007. Geulen, Eva� “Bucklicht Männlein�” Merkur 76�878 (2022): 41—53� Kim, David D� Arendt’s Solidarity. Anti-Semitism and Racism in the Atlantic World. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2024. Mattner, Cosima� “Hannah Arendt’s Transatlantic Walter Benjamin�” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 98�3 (2023): 301—14� Meyer, Thomas� Hannah Arendt: Die Biografie � Munich: Piper ebooks, 2023� Schweikle, Günther, and Irmgard Schweikle, eds� Metzler Literaturlexikon: Stichwörter zur Weltliteratur � Stuttgart: J�B� Metzler, 1984� Shawn, William� Letter to Hannah Arendt� 6 April 1965� MS� Hannah Arendt Papers: Correspondence, 1938-1976� Manuscripts, Box 31� Library of Congress, Washington, D�C�