DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 Arendt’s Criticism of Life Christopher T. Hoffman Columbia University Abstract: Querying Arendt’s preoccupation with the biography of the literary figures she writes about, this article studies her concept of life and its consequences for her literary criticism� It reads Arendt against the backdrop of Geistesgeschichte , a current prominent in German literary discourse during her university years, works through the role of “life” in theoretical works like the Human Condition , and asks how her biographical criticism operates concretely in her essays on Brecht and Benjamin, in order to make her approach more legible in the context of twenty-first-century debates about methodology in literary studies� Keywords: Hannah Arendt, literary criticism, biography, critical distance, literary ethos Arendt’s writings on literature have only rarely been treated as works of literary criticism that can be read fruitfully in light of that discipline’s means and ends� Those works can look more occasional than systematic, the questions she asks sui generis rather than being in implicit dialogue with how her contemporaries practiced literary study. Nor does she offer any definitive statement on what literary criticism ought to accomplish� In the following, I propose an inductive reading that distills from her criticism a persistent concern that I take to motivate, in part, her contributions on literature: how it interfaces with the lives of its writers and readers� I do this by describing in detail how Arendt takes up biography as a mode of criticism� Arendt often addresses the lives of the authors whose work she writes about, and I argue that the imbrication of “life” and “art” - schematic terms that nonetheless help make more concrete what is at stake for her - is key to her critical intentions� I set out to describe how that relation works for Arendt both conceptually and in her literary-critical practice, and what kinds of insights she means to offer her readers. First, I situate the inquiry against two relevant backgrounds: the literary criticism of the early twentieth century, and 30 Christopher T. Hoffman DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 her later theorizations of life and art, especially in The Human Condition. Then, I offer close readings of the role of the life of the writer in two of her most developed literary-critical essays on Brecht and Benjamin. Finally, I offer conclusions about what practitioners of literary criticism might learn from her example� For Arendt, it is not the work or the movement that is the relevant unit of analysis but the artist� 1 In this, she stands apart from those twentieth-century critics who shaped a new norm condemning “biographism” as an illegitimate mode of argumentation, a form of the “intentional fallacy�” This describes an approach to literary texts that means to explain them through the biography of the person who produced them, or, conversely, using the literary text primarily as a source with which to illuminate that person’s biography� Critics of biographism contest that it tends to inflate the amount of insight into the author’s person that can be had from a literary source, that biography fails to explain literary texts in a more than circumstantial fashion, and that the focus on the author is ideological in origin� 2 The resistance to biographism also involves a second-order claim about the ends of literary study� In centering biographical questions, this kind of reasoning assimilates literary studies to the historical disciplines by foreshortening its object of study, literature, failing to treat it as a source with distinct epistemic claims. This observation justifies literary study as against other forms of scholarship, in which literary texts serve as one type of source among many� Arendt’s literary criticism shows an enduring concern with the biographical, both in a narrower sense, the biographical circumstances of her subjects, and as a genre, viz� biography, which her work takes up� For example, the 1946 essay “Franz Kafka, Appreciated Anew,” which surveys Kafka’s novelistic work, describes how he “clearly did not want to be considered a genius,” and how he “by no means intended to be an exceptional case, but rather a fellow citizen […]�” Likewise, Kafka “wants to destroy this world [of the Trial ] by delineating its hideous structure with utmost precision, and thus contrasting reality and pretense” (Arendt, Reflections 108, 98)� Arendt writes of Kafka as someone whose personality is basically scrutable and communicable to the reader, and whose intentions legibly pass between his life and the content of his written work� Invoking Kafka’s person affords at least two basic and mutually conditioning forms of argument: an understanding of the person behind the books enriches our understanding of his literary production, just as an appropriate grasp of those books can clarify the person Kafka� The writer’s life and their artistic work explain each other� The reciprocity of “life” and “work” has, for Arendt, a potentially explosive effect on “reality”: the work of depicting, in The Trial , the “pretense” of Kafka’s world could help “destroy” it� Likewise, a long passage in the section on antisemitism in Origins of Totalitarianism (103—14) treats Proust’s Arendt’s Criticism of Life 31 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 literary work� The latter succeeds as a potent “analysis of society as such” (111) because Proust set out to write an “ apologia pro vita sua ”: The life of this greatest writer of twentieth-century France was spent exclusively in society; all events appeared to him as they are reflected in society and reconsidered by the individual, so that reflections and reconsiderations constitute the specific reality and texture of Proust’s world� (103) The works of Kafka and Proust draw Arendt’s attention in part because their biographical, literary, and historical circumstances interpenetrate so deeply� Arendt’s focus on the imbrication of “life” and “work” obtains in much of her critical writings� It could be objected that Arendt is using a common shorthand in which an author’s work is referred to by their proper name� On this account, “Kafka” would refer not to his historical person, but metonymically to the set of works created by him� For example, in an unpublished review of a translation of Stifter’s Rock Crystal , Arendt writes that “‘Rock Crystal’[…] is a wonderful - though not the greatest - example of Stifter’s peculiar qualities” (Arendt, Reflections 113)� The review culminates in the judgment that Stifter is, as the title has it, a “great friend of reality�” Does “Stifter” refer to the author or to his work? To call him a “friend of reality” seems like a personalizing description, but this is complicated by the metonymic sense of the proper name� The matter is made more difficult still by how ubiquitous the identification of an author with their work has become in both formal and informal communication on literature, such that the phrase “nature in Goethe” seems evidently to refer to a theme in Goethe’s corpus. Arendt seems to be speaking in this fashion. The effort to separate biographistic and non-biographistic discourse appears difficult, and probably quixotic, as they are often unintentionally mingled in much writing about literature� On the other hand, it is implausible to suggest that Arendt did not ascribe any importance to the biographies of her literary subjects in light of the density of reference to personal circumstances she makes, though it would be anachronistic to accuse her of violating a critical norm for this reason� In fact, her biographism plays a key role in her work� Arendt is at her most biographical in the early book on Rahel Varnhagen, which is filled with claims about the author’s aims and intentions. In oft-quoted passages, Arendt describes how “[m]y portrait therefore follows as closely as possible the course of Rahel’s own reflections upon herself […]. It does not venture beyond this frame even when Rahel is apparently being examined critically�” A few lines later follows the bold claim that “[t]he criticism corresponds to Rahel’s self-criticism” (Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen xvi)� Arendt writes that 32 Christopher T. Hoffman DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 [i]t was never my intention to write a book about Rahel; about her personality, which might lend itself to various interpretations according to the psychological standards and categories that the author introduces from outside […]� What interested me solely was to narrate the story of Rahel’s life as she herself might have told it� (xv) These lines, and those she writes of Proust, Stifter, and Kafka, signal the desire for a kind of critical empathy with her subjects that helps readers understand them in the depths of their character� Evident here is Arendt’s rejection of the sober attitude of literary scholars� If she fails to abide by the philologist’s scholarly norms, this is at least in part because her criticism does not share their cognitive goals, seeking a different approach to literature. For this reason, it is more productive to ask what motivated Arendt in the first place. Why would it even be desirable to understand the life of the author in the way she proposes to do with Varnhagen, and what justifies a mode of argumentation that promises such a heroic reconstruction of the author’s inspirations? Posing this question presumes some level of coherence to the corpus of literary essays that Arendt published on an outwardly occasional basis� Arendt’s biographical interest opens onto wider questions about her project for literary criticism, which remains relatively understudied in comparison to her work on the arts and aesthetics more broadly� 3 Arendt’s essays pursue a form of literary criticism distinct from that practiced by professor-critics, one unabashedly political in design and seeking a wide public in outlets like The New Yorker and Merkur . I argue that the antipositivism of figures like Friedrich Gundolf provided key impulses for Arendt� That her work mediates between German inspirations and an English-language public helps to clarify the unfashionably central role she lends to biography� 4 This effort to historicize her aspirations for literary criticism looks to make her work available as a point of reference for ongoing debates about the role of literary studies inside and outside the university� 5 The picture of Arendt that emerges can help supplement recent attempts to retrieve more democratic forms of literary study from the discipline’s history (cf. Buurma and Heffernan, North). The literary context for Arendt’s formation was the turn in German literary studies towards hermeneutics and Geistesgeschichte from the 1910s on, led to a significant extent by members of the George Circle (cf. Wehrli, Ruehl). 6 Arendt was familiar with this movement: she was studying in Heidelberg at the same time that one of the circle’s leading scholars, Friedrich Gundolf, taught at the university, and she attended lectures and Sommerveranstaltungen he organized� It is likely that she read his epochal Goethe or otherwise took note of the methodological revolt against literary positivism he meant to bring about� 7 The critical principles elaborated by this movement resonate with Arendt’s interest Arendt’s Criticism of Life 33 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 in biography. Looking briefly at how they understood their method, and how it means to depart from the philological pedantry they ascribed to their no less biographizing predecessors, will shed light on Arendt’s own procedure� Gundolf ’s Goethe , which can be taken as a kind of demonstration of the critical project that his generation espoused, begins with a harsh criticism of the penchant for “mere biography” which their nineteenth-century predecessors engaged in� 8 Gundolf distinguishes between the “biographers,” who treat the author’s works as mere data, “Zeugnisse eines Ablaufs,” and “observers of the Gestalt ,” for whom “Leben und Werk nur die verschiedenen Attribute einer und derselben Substanz [sind], einer geistig leiblichen Einheit, die zugleich als Bewegung und als Form erscheint” (1)� Despite the rhetoric, Gundolf and others like him could claim a real methodological advance in treating the relation between life and work, arguing that the philologists reduced the latter to the former, producing a foreshortened picture of both� The artist’s biography and their art should be grasped as a unity - a prospect that puts considerable demands on the reader, who must experience something of the existential weight of what they read: Wem aber die Kunst nicht Gegenstand, Folge, oder Zweck menschlichen Daseins bedeutet […], der wird auch in den Werken der großen Künstler nicht die Auslösungen, die Abbildungen, die Erläuterungen ihres Lebens sehen, sondern den Ausdruck, die Gestalt, die Form ihres Lebens sehen, d�h� also nicht etwas das diesem Leben folgt, sondern etwas das in und mit und über ihm ist, ja was dies Leben selbst ist� Die Werke sind dann nicht die Zeichen welche ein Leben bedeuten, sondern die Körper welche es enthalten� Der Künstler existiert nur insofern er sich im Kunstwerk ausdrückt� (1—2) 9 Gundolf offers a biographism of his own distinct from that of the philologists. But his version of it means to go beyond the narrow circuit correlating the minutiae of biographical data and literary text� Because the work of a great like Goethe is accessible, and in fact contemporary, to modern readers, they can participate in an emphatic sense in his life and its world-historical achievements, particularly with the help of a sufficiently audacious critic like Gundolf. 10 In the latter’s language, the word “life” becomes a term capable of describing the unity of the literary work and the author’s way of life as a historic, geistig achievement in which new readers can partake� Despite his reputation, not undeserved, as an irrationalistic writer, Gundolf and critics like him mounted a real challenge to philological positivism� They could plausibly accuse the latter of neglecting literature’s significance for readers’ “form of life” [ Lebensform ]� 11 If criticism is to take this into account, the critic’s perspective must reflect literature’s transformative influence, shedding the pretense of objectivity and reproducing the existential event of literature in 34 Christopher T. Hoffman DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 the critical instance itself� Gundolf ’s solution to this problem lies in dramatizing the “life”-giving force of great works of literature in which writer, critic, and reader can partake� This also obliged Gundolf to adopt a normative, heroizing reverence for authors like Goethe, Shakespeare, and Dante who were able to live life with uncommon intensity� In his language, “life” begins to take on a double meaning, describing both the merely biographical, and the “living” nexus (writer-critic-reader) surveyed by critical discourse� This double role points to an ambivalence in the term that can be seen in Arendt’s work, too: “life” must be taken both in the valorized sense, a life circulating between author, text, and critic, and its dull, historical underside, the mundane data recorded about the author� For Gundolf as for Arendt, the former, elevated sense of life can be rearticulated in an intervention that makes plain its vitality once more� That Arendt’s criticism bears the imprint of this movement does not mean that she took on its ambitions without modification. In what follows, I will show how her criticism appropriates them in novel ways� But before that, I will suggest a few ways in which her works of political theory, in theorizing life, prefigure the literary expression of this concept in her criticism� Two forms of life, contemplative and active, occupied Arendt in major works of political theory� The Human Condition takes the former as its object in light of the considerable challenges she sees it facing in the present� If the vita activa comprises three activities, “labor, work, and action” (Arendt, The Human Condition 7), it is the last of these that she sees as the most intrinsically valuable� She sets out to understand why, “with the rise of the vita activa , it was precisely the laboring activity that was to be elevated to the highest rank of man’s capacities or, to put it another way, why within the diversity of the human condition with its varied human capacities it was precisely life that overruled all other considerations” (313)� Life is the “laboring metabolism of man with nature” (320), those activities necessary for the reproduction of human life, “a process that everywhere uses up durability, wears it down, makes it disappear, until eventually dead matter […] returns into the overall gigantic circle of nature herself, where no beginning and no end exist and where all natural things swing in changeless, deathless repetition” (96)� If both “labor,” that is, “life,” and “action” fall under the vita activa , they stand in opposition to each other: the latter traces a “rectilinear course” that “cuts through the circular movement of biological life,” producing, at its best, “things - works and deeds and words - which would deserve to be […] at home in everlastingness” (19)� 12 A conceptual redoubling takes place: “life” is both the vita activa , i�e�, action, the highest and most deliberate expression of human capabilities, and labor, the unthinking substrate of all other activities� 13 Arendt’s Criticism of Life 35 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 In the section entitled “Labor and Life,” Arendt relates the higher sense of life to the genre of biography: The word ‘life,’ however, has an altogether different meaning if it is related to the world and meant to designate the time interval between life and death […]� The chief characteristic of this specifically human life, whose appearance and disappearance constitute worldly events, is that it is itself always full of events which ultimately can be told as a story, establish a biography; it is of this life, bios as distinguished from mere zoe , that Aristotle said that it ‘somehow is a kind of praxis. ’ (97) “Life” is ennobled by being shaped into a narrative whose “strictly linear movement” exceeds its cyclical, biological basis. Biography reflects on human life at one degree of abstraction; as I will show, Arendt’s criticism shows great interest in moments in which literary texts push into heightened self-reflexivity. Arendt’s valorization of art finds another elaboration in the twenty-third chapter of The Human Condition , which transitions between sections on her concepts of “Work” and “Action” (167—74)� There, she emphasizes how art, while bearing a resemblance to other, useful forms of human artifice, nonetheless exceeds the “exigencies and wants of daily life” and the “corroding effects of natural processes�” Despite its resemblance to forms of “work” which generate “products,” it involves the “transfiguration” and “veritable metamorphosis” of human work into something “of an entirely different nature from the manifold activities of fabrication” (174), “something immortal achieved by mortal hands” (168)� Art distinguishes itself by transcending the cyclicality of “life,” arriving at something permanent: We mentioned before that this reification and materialization [in art objects], without which no thought can become a tangible thing, is always paid for, and that the price is life itself: it is always the “dead letter” in which the “living spirit” must survive, a deadness from which it can be rescued only when the dead letter comes again into contact with a life willing to resurrect it, although this resurrection of the dead shares with all living things that it, too, will die again� (169) Playing on the Pauline trope, artmaking involves, for Arendt, a strange transaction between “life” and the “dead” art object� The artwork, sapping its creator’s vitality, requires its readers to revive it, allowing the “life” and “worldliness” that generated it in the first place to shine through. By pointing to how great works emerge from “merely” human life, Arendt connects the banal and emphatic senses of “life” in a way that can be read as justifying, retrospectively, her biographistic criticism� These passages shed light on her practice of criticism, as she aims to bring to the work the “living spirit” it lacks� It remains to be seen what this means more concretely� In what follows, I work through two of the most 36 Christopher T. Hoffman DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 elaborate examples of her criticism, on Brecht and Benjamin, and the complex play of perspective and implication that seeks to realize that goal� In these readings, I turn my attention not just to Arendt’s biographical argumentation, but to the question of what it accomplishes in her criticism, its critical “work�” My reading of these two essays does not aim to provide a full account of their ambitions, pursuing instead a synoptic reading of key passages where answers to that question come into view� The selection of passages, then, is motivated by attention to the different ways that Arendt talks about the writer and their life, and what that discloses about her critical goals� Arendt’s essay on Brecht hinges on two key biographical claims: that Brecht was one of the greatest writers of his era, and that he lost his poetic gift in the last years of his life� 14 This loss she understands as the result of his “sins,” the consequence of having “transgressed the rather wide limits set for poets” ( Men in Dark Times 211—12, 215)� For this reason, the text presents itself as a search for those “sins,” which justifies her scouring his biography. This might be unexpected of someone who affirms the relative independence of literature. That is just what is at stake: Arendt describes Brecht’s fall from grace as “teach[ing] us a lesson [in the German: “ Lektion ”; Menschen in finsteren Zeiten 269] about the great permissiveness enjoyed by those who live under the laws of Apollo” ( Men in Dark Times 215), namely that it is not boundless, and that at some point their worldly transgressions interrupt their poetic life� Brecht’s example helps clarify those bounds, and in order to untangle how his fall transpired, she begins a crossed reading of his corpus and biography� Arendt argues not just for the greatness of his work, but also, motivating her double focus, the inextricability of his art and life: “[…] side by side with the great poet and playwright there is also the case of Bertolt Brecht� And this case is of concern to all citizens who wish to share their world with poets� It cannot be left to the literature departments but is the business of political scientists as well” (218)� To the interested parties, the “political scientist” and the “citizen,” can be added a yet broader formulation from the corresponding passage in the German edition: “Und dieser Fall geht alle an, die sich eine Welt ohne die Dichter nicht vorstellen mögen” ( Menschen in finsteren Zeiten 271)� The task implied for the essay itself, then, assumes considerable proportions: she appeals to a perspective that takes seriously, in the most general terms, how artistic expression can be reconciled with the needs of politics and society� Perhaps because of the enormity of the concerns voiced, the secondary literature has focused more on answering in straightforward terms what Arendt actually takes to be Brecht’s misdeeds, as if the matter came down to identifying a certain mistake that future readers could learn to avoid� 15 In fact, the essay encompasses a holistic accounting of Brecht’s life and work, and this breadth must be accounted for to understand its objectives� Arendt’s Criticism of Life 37 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 Despite voicing the desire to invoke only “a few, a very few, biographical circumstances” ( Men in Dark Times 218), the essay’s structure is plainly biographical� It follows Brecht through his career through the motif of “poetic distance�” Brecht’s “genius” in the wake of the First World War was to express a kind of “freshness”: after the war’s destruction, “[n]othing seemed left but the purity of the elements, the simplicity of sky and earth, of man and animals, of life itself� Hence it was life that the young poet fell in love with - everything that the earth, in its sheer thereness, had to offer” (229). His poetry, for Arendt, sings his living connection to the world as its inspiration� “Nowhere else in modern literature,” she writes, “is there such a clear understanding that what Nietzsche called the ‘death of God’ does not necessarily lead into despair, but, on the contrary, since it eliminates the fear of Hell, can end in sheer jubilation, in a new ‘yes’ to life” (233)� But this early inspiration, which Arendt traces in Baal , The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and the Threepenny Opera , exhausts itself in a kind of weightlessness� Passion for the moment, once depleted, leaves him in a state of boredom that would “condemn[] him to irrelevance” (235) without further innovation� It is because of this self-generated crisis, the boredom and Weltferne his poetry had once served to deliver him from, that he turns to Marxism, the Communist Party, and what Arendt condemns as “compassion,” a self-deluding declaration of solidarity with the downtrodden, motivated really by his weakening poetic vocation� Arendt describes how Brecht betrays the “poetic distance” necessary to establish a healthy connection with reality between the extremes of abstraction from and total immersion in “life�” The diachronic portrait she provides, then, draws attention above all to the writer’s “poetic distance,” a phronetic capacity to transform his experience of reality into something artistically illuminated� She fills out this principle by weaving together long quotations from Brecht’s work with the stations of his life� 16 This procedure makes up the bulk of the essay itself and aims to make the concept of poetic distance plausible in the first place. But alongside the diachronic story she traces are moments that can be described as a sort of portraiture, like the following 17 : So also ungefähr sieht der Mensch aus, der hinter dem Dichter stand� Im Besitz einer durchdringenden, untheoretischen, hintergründigen Klugheit, nicht schweigsam, aber ungewöhnlich verschwiegen und reserviert, immer bedacht, Distanz zu halten, und vermutlich auch ein wenig schüchtern, ganz uninteressiert an sich selbst, aber von großem Wissensdurst […] dabei vorerst und vor allem ein Dichter, also einer, der sagen muß, wo andere verstummen, und sich darum hüten muß zu reden, wo alle reden� ( Menschen in finsteren Zeiten 283) 38 Christopher T. Hoffman DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 One detects here not just a presentation of Brecht and his work but a demonstration of Arendt’s own judgment on his character� Such a judgment asks for its readers’ assent on a matter that exceeds what is factually verifiable; its plausibility depends on Arendt’s own powers for moral discernment� To center such a claim, I suggest, must raise the question in the attentive reader of the critic’s “poetic distance” to her subject, mirroring the problem of Brecht’s own poetic distance, and, ultimately, of the reader’s� It could be argued that, despite the scholarly drive for factuality, scholarship is always also carried out by a person with their own, sometimes obscure, motivations that guide them� 18 But Arendt’s essay foregrounds its intimacy with the essay’s subject (viz� Brecht and his work), and the moral demands it places on those who would earnestly engage with it� That she acts out a vulnerable, “lived” engagement with literature and elaborately works through it before the reader - what she describes elsewhere as an exercise in thought 19 - is the point� The relevance of Arendt’s “portraiture” and the question of poetic distance it raises is further complicated by the similarity of her own efforts with what she calls Brecht’s “self-portrait�” One prominent section reads “Der Herr der Fische,” (his “portrait of the artist as a young man”; Men in Dark Times 221) alongside several other poems, including “On Poor B. B.” and “To Those Born After Us,” that she says deserve this moniker� Long quotations from them are closely followed by another sketch: his self-portrait, presenting the poet in all his remoteness, his mixture of pride and humility, “a stranger and a friend to everybody,” hence both rejected and welcome, […] useless for everyday life, silent about himself, as though there were nothing to talk about, curious and in desperate need of every bit of reality he can catch, gives us at least a hint of the enormous difficulties the young Brecht must have had in making himself at home in the world of his fellow men� (221—22) Arendt’s mode of writing challenges the reader to hold the critical voice apart from what it presents as Brecht’s own voice, even as it invites the proximity that might threaten the appropriate “distance�” This is not always simple; Eva Geulen has observed a tendency to simply identify Arendt’s own project with that of her subject, particularly in the Benjamin essay� 20 She observes that “[d] as Paradox des Stils von Arendts Texten besteht in der Gleichzeitigkeit einer fulminanten Präsenz der Person [i�e�, Arendt] einerseits und deren Verschwinden, weniger in, als vielmehr hinter den Figuren andererseits” (Geulen, “Streit-Zeit” 7)� This tendency presents a real interpretive problem that may bring readers to run together too quickly the different layers of mediation present in the text� If this invites an interpretive failure, it may be the predictable result of the intimacy that Arendt built into her work, in the sense that it challenges the Arendt’s Criticism of Life 39 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 reader to experience this familiarity and identification without hastily drawing conclusions� Arendt’s critical practice insists on the distinction between writer, critic, and the presumed reader of criticism, even as her essays demonstratively bring them close� In her extended quotations of Brecht, Arendt elaborates a dialogical reflection between his work and her critical response to it� These quotations both serve as moments where the reader is asked to affirm the greatness of his work and to take them at the same time as documents of his changing ability to manage “poetic distance.” For the reader to find the essay’s judgments plausible, she must agree that it has struck the correct critical distance and “resurrect[ed]” its subject (Arendt, The Human Condition 169) - which in turn demands the reader find their own distance. The principle of poetic distance reverberates outward. In this process, there is no perspective that could stand objective and apart, as the philologist’s reconstruction intends: each participant must assume a “living” relation to the material before them, especially the reader who is interpellated by the critical process itself� 21 In this manner she elaborates a nexus of art and life in which the reader is already caught up: in Arendt’s eyes, Brecht’s example represents a “live” problem that persists into her present, and probably beyond it� The essay wants to bring its reader to see the life/ work problem it works through as one that concerns them as much as the writer and critic� What such an exercise stands to accomplish goes beyond the imperfect self-understanding of the author, grasping both what they understood and did not understand about themselves, and opening the possibility that criticism will allow the keen reader to better confront this problem� Arendt’s Brecht essay combines a strong critical voice with the conceit of letting the subject speak for himself� In an outwardly biographical essay, the play of critical presence and absence that Geulen thematizes may seem contradictory, but it grounds itself in something like a critical ethos that the essay demonstratively acts out for (and demands from) its readers� If the Brecht essay foregrounds the arc of his biography, the Benjamin essay outdoes it by treating its subject’s life in three sections that each offer discrete modes of access. The triptych structure of the essay further intensifies her specific approach by focusing more strongly on “portraiture” and layering distinct ways of figuring what she calls “poetic distance” in the Brecht essay� A special place is given at the outset of the essay to an anecdote based on the hunchback poem from Des Knaben Wunderhorn : The hunchback was an early acquaintance of Benjamin, who had first met him when, still a child, he found the poem in a children’s book, and he never forgot� But only once (at the end of A Berlin Childhood around 1900 ), when anticipating death, he attempted 40 Christopher T. Hoffman DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 to get hold of “his ‘entire life’ […] as it is said to pass before the eyes of the dying,” and clearly stated who and what it was that had terrified him so early in life and was to accompany him until his death� His mother, like millions of other mothers in Germany, used to say, “Mr� Bungle sends his regards” […] whenever one of the countless little catastrophes of childhood had taken place� […] The mother referred to the ‘little hunchback,’ who caused the objects to play their mischievous tricks upon children […] [quoting Berlin Childhood ]� For ‘anyone whom the little man looks at pays no attention; not to himself and not to the little man� In consternation he stands before a pile of debris�’ (Arendt, Men in Dark Times 158—59) The passage is preceded by a quotation of the poem “Das Bucklicht Männlein” from Des Knaben Wunderhorn � This anecdote stands as an emblem for the essay as a whole, setting a theme which resonates throughout� Ostensibly, it presents itself as an exposition of what is implicit in the passage of Berliner Kindheit , which the critic Arendt connects perceptively to Benjamin’s relation to his mother and certain psychological, critical, and political problems which dogged him� However, to describe it so would shortchange how it resonates both with certain problems raised in the other essays (justifying its role as the “header” for the whole work), and how it stages, like the Brecht essay, the continuity of the problems it raises into the present� It is worth reconstructing in detail how this “literary” resonance reaches the reader� Simply enumerating the voices at work in the passage builds an appreciation for its complexity: there is i) the lyrical speaker associated with the poem from Des Knaben Wunderhorn ; ii) the text Berliner Kindheit , which reproduces that poem; iii) the critical instance which blends paraphrase and quotation of (ii) and (i) without reproducing the former word for word; iv) the personality of Benjamin’s mother, present in Kindheit but woven into Arendt’s essay; v) the hunchback; vi) Benjamin in his own person as the writer of Kindheit , and, at least implicitly; vii) the critic’s person and; viii) the reader� To distinguish all these voices or perspectives may be extreme, and it is not obvious that a clear answer can be given to the question of how truly distinct they are, but it does demonstrate the density of voices in play� 22 The discursive instance here presents an even more complex case than the Brecht essay, and the relevant question becomes why it speaks to Benjamin’s life in such a reflexive way. Attending to the generic resonances of the passage sheds light on it� The “Bucklicht Männlein” is a fairy tale, a genre that conventionally serves to instruct children by soliciting a “moral�” The hunchback embodies the child’s carelessness in a world whose fragility they may not understand, as well as their penchant for fantasy and lack of responsibility� This tale’s moral is that the listener should recognize the consequences of their actions: the hunchback’s Arendt’s Criticism of Life 41 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 carelessness is their own� They should, so to speak, have done with fantasy� In taking responsibility in this manner, the mode of speech - the reference to the hunchback - which alienates the child from their clumsy or destructive actions becomes obsolete� To understand the moral is to disenchant the fairy tale, obviating the naïve perspective from which alone the moral can be drawn� Having been disabused of the fairy tale’s reality, the child can appreciate it only nostalgically, even as its “truth-content” has been integrated by the person who could internalize it and mature out of childish irresponsibility� But the fairy tale also bears the danger of arresting this maturation by inviting overinvestment into the imaginative world fueled by the nostalgia it generates as a genre� In this sequence, the problem of the reader’s “poetic distance” to literary form and the imaginative investment it incites reappears� The essay can be taken as serving a purpose analogous to the fairy tale, telling a fabulous story and admitting of a “moral,” viz� not to fall into the “self-imposed immaturity” that Arendt’s essay charges Benjamin with (cf� also the moral of Brecht’s “sins”). Benjamin’s example - one all the more significant because he was himself, like Arendt, a literary critic - might instead prompt the reader to resist the immature tendencies he represents� But among these can be counted the desire for a clear moral from literature, or, likewise, a directive from the critic� On this account, it would not do simply to take on Arendt’s judgments without evaluating them oneself by cultivating one’s own capacity for judgment� This attitude, incited by Arendt’s essay, bears reciprocally on the reader’s reception of it, and thus involves a parallelism between the fairy tale and its moral� But her essay’s “moral” is an outlook resistant to a determinate moral� By deploying this anecdote, she draws attention to the question of literature’s normative force - including that of her own essays - without giving any easy answers about how they are to be read� Despite the bold tone of the judgments she makes on Benjamin (like Brecht), her work leaves the reader to formulate their own response to the questions she raises� Reactivating this citational nexus between Des Knaben Wunderhorn and the Berliner Kindheit , the essay revives these reflexive moral questions and foists them anew on the reader. In this passage, Arendt heightens the literary reflexivity already present in Benjamin’s Berliner Kindheit , generating a multi-leveled play of identification, misrecognition, and implication� The question raised in the vignette could be stated so: what intensity of identification with e.g., the hunchback, the poem, or literature broadly, is permissible before one loses one’s sense of reality or “poetic distance”? The notion of poetic distance borrowed from the Brecht essay can be restated as a healthy lived disposition towards literature that neither surrenders to it nor denies its pleasures and insights� The density of voices in the passage, its emphatically literary character, affords particular benefits: it asks 42 Christopher T. Hoffman DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 the reader to build their capacity for the “maturity” to mediate between these many layers and relate them to the contradictions of the present� The image of criticism Arendt gives is an optimistic one: past problems can be worked through, and the reader may be able to come to greater self-understanding than their predecessors� Arendt’s essays suggest she thinks that a more robust critical ethos can be won by working through the failures of distance that Brecht’s and Benjamin’s lives represent so as to accede to the free action and thought that she valorizes� Her readings, which weave together the writer’s work with their life, are not meant to be coolly assessed by the reader, but rather to force the comparison to their own lives by insisting that these past problems can be recognized in their own� Where the biographism of her predecessors posited an asymmetry between the scholarly instance (both classical philology’s compiler of biographical data and the Geistesgeschichtler ’s reverential interpreter of great poets) and the writer or work under examination, Arendt foregrounds the provisional character and mutuality of the relationship between writer and work, critic and reader and sets them on an equal footing� Her biographical argumentation serves to implicate the reader in the problems raised by the subject’s life, especially that of critical responsibility, and incite in them a process of deepening self-reflection. These are, at least, some of the aspirations of Arendt’s literary writings that can be extrapolated from studying her criticism of life� Her essays suggest that there is not one sole, correct critical distance, but perhaps a variety of different attitudes or dispositions the reader can embody in relation to literature that would meet her plea for responsibility� Arendt does not prescribe a determinate practice that would solve the problems Brecht and Benjamin confront, but engages in literary exercises for generating an adequate response to them� The stridency with which she calls out Brecht’s sins may obscure how her essays solicit an open and searching revision of the reader’s own disposition� For Arendt, their “cases” deserve further attention because their problems remain� Her concern with the critic’s life speaks ultimately to the question of what epistemic virtues literary criticism asks of its practitioners� The discipline’s recent methodological controversies can be read in terms of diverging conceptions of what skills, competencies, and values the literary critic should embody� Arendt’s work - her transformation of the concept of “life” propagated by Gundolf and other Geistesgeschichtler in her US-based literary criticism - can be read as an intervention in the long history of conflict over disciplinary ethos. Arendt’s Criticism of Life 43 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 Notes Chris would like to thank all the contributors and the team at Colloquia Germanica for making this wonderful project come to fruition� Cosima's tenacity and insight made for a great collaboration� He also thanks his wife Liz for her boundless support and inspiration� 1 Consider the titles of her literary essays in Reflections on Literature and Culture , pg� vii—viii, including “Friedrich von Gentz: On the 100th Anniversary of his Death, June 9, 1932”; “Franz Kafka, Appreciated Anew”; “Great Friend of Reality: Adalbert Stifter”; “The Achievement of Hermann Broch”; and “Beyond Personal Frustration: The Poetry of Bertolt Brecht�” 2 Two heterogeneous camps are known for elaborating arguments against biographical interpretation: the poststructuralists, cf� Barthes; and the New Critics, cf. Beardsley and Wimsatt. Danneberg offers a thorough discussion of the central interpretive questions they posed, under the rubric of authorial intention� I have foregrounded the matter of biography and biographism as that discursive form where these authors’ interventions overlap with Arendt’s pronounced concern for the artistic way of life� 3 Regarding Arendt’s engagement with the arts, see Heuer and von der Lühe, and Sjöholm� Regarding literary history, see Wild; Gottlieb’s introduction to Arendt, Reflections (xi—xxxi); and Geulen, “Streit-Zeit�” One interesting intervention has been undertaken by Verónica Zebadúa-Yáñez, who argues that Arendt pursues a “politico-biographical hermeneutics” in the Varnhagen book� 4 Mattner, in “Hannah Arendt’s Transatlantic Walter Benjamin” (2023) and Citation and Tradition (2024), elaborates a “transatlantic” lens for Arendt’s criticism, alongside her contemporary Susan Sontag� 5 I refer here to what have been called the “method wars,” a primarily Anglophone conversation about the means and ends of literary study, on which cf� “Critique of Critical Criticism,” in Guillory (79—102)� Guillory argues that the professionalization of literary studies led to debilitating contradictions in the discipline’s coherence: despite critics’ aspirations to the “criticism of society,” the conversation is shared, for the most part, only by professionals� Geulen, in “Altes und Neues aus den Literaturwissenschaften” (2020), responds to the new methodological discussion with reference to continental Germanistik � 6 Reitter and Wellmon, in their study of the modern humanities’ emergence as a sort of reaction-formation to the persistent sense of crisis in modern knowledge, discuss Gundolf and other members of the George Circle, especially Erich von Kahler, and their rejection of the disenchanting effects of the sciences and the “dream of reenchanted knowledge” (201—04)� 44 Christopher T. Hoffman DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 7 Christophersen argues strongly for this conclusion: comparing Arendt and Gundolf ’s methodological pronouncements, she suggests that the latter “auf [sie] einfärbte, auf sie einwirkte, von ihr als schlüssig empfunden und deshalb sogar adaptiert wurde” (“Ein Leben wird gestaltet” 22)� Cf� also the list of these Veranstaltungen in Christophersen, Hannah Arendt über Rahel Varnhagen 7, and “Ein Leben wird gestaltet” 20� Young-Bruehl (67—68) also suggests that they could have met at Marianne Weber’s salons, and that attending his lectures brought Arendt to take interest in Varnhagen and the Romantics� Gundolf ’s notoriety alone would probably have been enough for Arendt to learn of him: “[L]ong into the 1930s, there would hardly have been a single library in households of the German educated middle class that did not contain the book [ Goethe ]” (Osterkamp, “The Poet as Cultural Savior” 11)� 8 Kruckis describes a process of inner exhaustion of the philologists’ research program - “Was jetzt kritisiert wird, ist vor allem der unmittelbare Kurzschluß von Leben und Werk […]” (573) - and the new philosophical sources which reinvigorated the discipline, especially Dilthey� Gundolf ’s role is depicted pessimistically as a kind of irrationalistic outcome of this process: “[m]it seinem divinatorischen […] Verfahren hat Gundolf die Grenzen nachprüfbarer Wissenschaftlichkeit verlassen und statt dessen ein Kultbuch oder - wie Burdach später meint - ‘gnostische Literaturgeschichtsdichtung’ geschaffen” (575). 9 Regarding the notion of Gestalt , cf� Ruehl: “Gundolf had set a precedent for a new type of scholarship that aimed at the vivid ( anschaulich ) representation of historical personalities in their essential totality ( Gestalt ), discarding the dissecting, analytical gaze of the ‘scientist’ and turning the great individuals of the past into myths and models for the present” (242)� 10 With reference to Gundolf, Dainat describes how “der Künstler interessiert nicht im Sinne der bisherigen Biographik als historisches Individuum, sondern als normative Gestalt. Als Symbol oder Typus bringt er, d�h� bringt der Literaturwissenschaftler [such as Gundolf] die sinnhaltige Tiefendimension der Geschichte oder des Lebens, wie das neue Zauberwort, Totalitätsbegriff und höchste Norm in einem, heißt, in der Gegenwart zur Geltung” (529—30)� 11 Here I suggest that what Gundolf found lacking in earlier forms of literary study could be phrased, with reference to modern philosophical discourse, as consideration for literature’s relation to one’s “form of life�” Rahel Jaeggi has described Lebensformen in philosophical terms as the “kulturell geprägte Formen menschlichen Zusammenlebens, ‘Ordnungen menschlicher Koexistenz’, die ein ‘Ensemble von Praktiken und Orientierungen’, aber auch deren institutionelle Manifestationen und Materialisierungen umfassen” (21)� A handful of recent works of literary scholarship broach these Arendt’s Criticism of Life 45 DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 topics anew� Andreas Gailus studies the interaction between literature and forms of life in biopolitical perspective� Gabriel Trop develops the concept of “aesthetic exercise” to describe the capacity of literature to solicit from its readers a “way of reading, an absorptive and attentive focus that probes, analyzes, gathers, and associates in order to uncover the latent and potential exercise value harbored in each work, a tentative and provisional response to the question: what sort of self does this text call into being, what practices of life does it invoke? ” (11)� Contributions by Pierre Hadot and Marielle Macé, too, resonate with some of the concerns Gundolf voices� 12 In this, her work follows Aristotle, the central reference for the different vitae , for whom they are strictly distinguished from “life” in the broad sense, especially the lives of non-citizens and slaves who powered Athenian society (see Aristotle, Politics 14ff.). As Arendt points out, Aristotle would consider neither “labor nor work […] to possess sufficient dignity to constitute a bios at all” ( The Human Condition 13) and hence her account stands “in manifest contradiction to the tradition” - precisely because she doubts the “hierarchical order inherent in it from its inception” (17)� 13 The conceptualization of “life” per se is less central in Life of the Mind � There, Arendt returns repeatedly to how paradoxical it is to ascribe a “life-character” to the vita contemplativa , which would aspire to complete stillness and inaction: the “complete quietness in the Vita Contemplativa was so overwhelming that compared with this stillness all other differences between the various activities in the Vita Activa disappeared” (Arendt, The Life of the Mind 7—8)� To deal with this paradox, she dissolves the vita into activities (thinking, willing, and judging), to which the lives and actions of artists cannot be straightforwardly assimilated� 14 Arendt’s high praise for Brecht’s work is expressed more straightforwardly in an essay from 1948 (“Beyond Personal Frustration: The Poetry of Bertolt Brecht,” in Arendt, Reflections 133—42)� 15 While Markell and Knott are basically unanimous in agreeing that the betrayal of “poetic distance” is Brecht’s sin, there is a fair deal of disagreement about how this expresses itself in the actual biographical portrait Arendt offers: Knott ascribes it to her proximity, physical and spiritual, to the powers that be in the GDR, while Markell focuses more closely on the specifically literary character of his sins� In this special issue, Karen Feldman dissents, arguing that the distance from reality she criticized is synonymous with his association with communism� 16 On Arendt’s approach to citation, see Wein in this special volume� 17 On Arendt’s “portraiture,” see especially Geulen, “Bucklicht Männlein�” 46 Christopher T. Hoffman DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 18 Wellmon (esp� chapter 6) depicts the formation of the modern scholarly ethos as in part the effort to merge personal inclination with philological exactitude, such that scholarly procedure is less the suppression of the scholar’s personality than the site around which they construct their “form of life” or (with Weber) their vocation� 19 The expression is taken from the introduction to Arendt, Between Past and Future (13—14), describing the titular essays� An exercise in thought, she argues, has a “natural affinity” with the essay “as a literary form” (14). Her notion of exercise befits the Brecht and Benjamin essays: for her, the exercises’ “only aim is to gain experience in how to think; they do not contain prescriptions on what to think or which truths to hold […]� Throughout these exercises the problem of truth is kept in abeyance; the concern is solely with how to move in the gap -the only region perhaps where truth will eventually appear” (13—14)� 20 “So ist beispielsweise die Formel ‘dichterisch denken’, mit der Arendt im ersten und im letzten ihrer drei […] Essays zu Walter Benjamin diesen charakterisiert, so häufig wie umstandslos als ihr eigenes Verfahren bestimmt und sie selbst als ‘Perlentaucherin’ beschrieben worden, die Bruchstücke der Verfangenheit ‘aus des Meeres Hut’ birgt” (Geulen, “Streit-Zeit” 7)� 21 In a rare alignment, Arendt’s vision has something in common with Adorno’s practice. In his “Essay as Form,” he affirms something like the irreducibility of subjective access to the text: “In order to be disclosed, however, the objective wealth of meanings encapsulated in every intellectual phenomenon demands of the recipient the same spontaneity of subjective fantasy that is castigated in the name of objective discipline� Nothing can be interpreted out of something that is not interpreted into it at the same time� The criteria for such interpretation are its compatibility with the text and with itself, and its power to give voice to the elements of the object in conjunction with one another” (4—5)� 22 In Eva Geulen’s words, “stets arbeitet Arendt so eng, intensiv und virtuos mit dem Primärmaterial, dass man den Eindruck gewinnt, die porträtierten Figuren selbst erzählten ihr Leben” (Geulen, “Bucklicht Männlein” 42)� Works Cited Adorno, Theodor W� “The Essay as Form�” Notes to Literature � Ed� Rolf Tiedemann� Trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Vol. 1. 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Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Barthes, Roland� “The Death of the Author�” The Rustle of Language. Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P, 1989. 49—55. Benjamin, Walter� Berliner Kindheit um 1900 � Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2020� Buurma, Rachel Sagner, and Laura Heffernan. The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study . Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2020. Christophersen, Claudia� “--es ist mit dem Leben etwas gemeint”. Hannah Arendt über Rahel Varnhagen . Königstein/ Taunus: U. Helmer, 2002. —� “Ein Leben wird gestaltet� Rahel Varnhagens Goethe-Verehrung aus der Sicht von Hannah Arendt�” Dichterisch Denken. Hannah Arendt und die Künste. Ed� Wolfgang Heuer and Irmela von der Lühe� Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007� 15—30� Danneberg, Lutz� “Zum Autorkonstrukt und zu einem methodologischen Konzept der Autorintention�” Rückkehr des Autors. 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Essays on the Organization of Literary Study � Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2022. Gundolf, Friedrich� Goethe � Berlin: Verlag Bondi, 1916� Hadot, Pierre� Don’t Forget to Live: Goethe and the Tradition of Spiritual Exercises � Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2023. Heuer, Wolfgang, and Irmela von der Lühe, eds� Dichterisch Denken: Hannah Arendt und die Künste � Göttingen: Wallstein, 2007� 48 Christopher T. Hoffman DOI 10.24053/ CG-58-0003 Jaeggi, Rahel� Kritik von Lebensformen � Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2014� Knott, Marie Luise� “Die ‘Verlorene Generation’ und der Totalitarismus: Hannah Arendt liest Bertolt Brecht�” Dichterisch Denken. Hannah Arendt und die Künste � Ed� Wolfgang Heuer and Irmela von der Lühe� Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2007� 50—61� Kruckis, Hans-Martin� “Biographie als literaturwissenschaftliche Darstellungsform im 19� Jahrhundert�” Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Germanistik im 19. Jahrhundert. Ed� Jürgen Fohrmann and Wilhelm Voßkamp� Stuttgart & Weimar: Verlag J�B� Metzler, 1994� 550—75� Macé, Marielle� Façons de lire, manières d’être � Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 2022� Markell, Patchen� “Politics and the Case of Poetry: Arendt on Brecht�” Modern Intellectual History 15�2 (2018): 503—33� Mattner, Cosima� “Hannah Arendt’s Transatlantic Walter Benjamin�” The Germanic Review 98�3 (2023): 301—14� —� Citation and Tradition: Hannah Arendt’s and Susan Sontag’s Walter Benjamin Portraits . Dissertation Columbia U, 2024. North, Joseph� Literary Criticism: A Concise Political History . Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2017. Osterkamp, Ernst� “Friedrich Gundolf zwischen Kunst und Wissenschaft� Zur Problematik eines Germanisten aus dem George-Kreis�” Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte. 1910-1925. Ed� Christoph König and Eberhard Lämmert� Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1993� 177—98� —� “The Poet as Cultural Savior: Friedrich Gundolf ’s Goethe �” Telos 176 (2016): 11—31� Reitter, Paul, and Chad Wellmon� Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age. Chicago & London: U of Chicago P, 2021. Ruehl, Martin A� “Aesthetic Fundamentalism in Weimar Poetry: Stefan George and his Circle, 1918-1933�” Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy � Ed� Peter E� Gordon and John P. McCormick. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton UP, 2013. 240—72. Sjöholm, Cecilia� Doing Aesthetics with Arendt: How to See Things � New York & Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia UP, 2015. Trop, Gabriel� Poetry as a Way of Life. Aesthetics and Askesis in the German Eighteenth Century . Evanston: Northwestern UP, 2015. Wehrli, Max� “Was ist / war Geistesgeschichte? ” Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 1910 bis 1925. Ed� Christoph König and Eberhard Lämmert� Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993� 23—37� Wellmon, Chad� Organizing Enlightenment: Information Overload and the Invention of the Modern Research University . Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2015. Wild, Thomas� Nach dem Geschichtsbruch: Deutsche Schriftsteller um Hannah Arendt. Berlin: Matthes & Seitz, 2009� Wimsatt, W� K�, and Monroe C� Beardsley� “The Intentional Fallacy�” The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry . Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 1954. 2—18. Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth� Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World. New Haven & London: Yale UP, 1982. Zebadúa-Yáñez, Verónica� “Reading the Lives of Others: Biography as Political Thought in Hannah Arendt and Simone de Beauvoir�” Hypatia 33�1 (2018): 94—110�