Illuminations

A little light in dark times

In 2010, I spent a year in Hannah Arendt’s archive at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. Every morning I’d wake up, make coffee, and walk from Dupont Circle to Capitol Hill to arrive five minutes before the Manuscript Division opened.

Each day I filled out a notecard with my requests and waited impatiently at an assigned desk. After ten minutes or so, a woman would appear through glass doors pushing a squeaking cart with cardboard boxes. After I approved them, she reminded me only to remove one folder at a time. Since I didn’t know where to start, I worked through Arendt’s papers alphabetically, beginning with “General Correspondence,” A-B.

On my third or fourth day thumbing through Arendt’s letters, I happened upon an exchange between Arendt and Theodor Adorno about Walter Benjamin’s last work, Theses on the Philosophy of History. Arendt was accusing Adorno of editing the Theses, and Adorno was arguing that many versions existed. (Last fall I finally translated those letters into English with my friend Susan Gillespie here.)

After Adorno came W.H. Auden, and then Walter Benjamin. I opened the manila folder labeled 1938-1940 and saw a white coversheet. My heart sank for a moment, until I lifted it up and turned it over. There in front of me was a brightly hued scrap of paper, closer to persimmon than orange. The blood rushed to my ears, my heart started pounding, and I stood up afraid I was going to faint. And then as I took my hand away from the paper, my eyes filled with tears. I knew exactly what it was: Hannah Arendt’s copy of the Theses on the Philosophy of History. One after the next, variations I had never seen, handmade corrections, all scribbled on colorful newspaper bands that had been broken open to write on. Benjamin had entrusted a suitcase full of his work to Arendt when they parted ways in Marseille, before he tried to escape. He had written the Theses in Paris after he was released from the internment camp at Vernuche near Nevers.

After the initial wave of excitement passed, a sense of panic set in: Why were these here? How could something so beautiful be hidden from the public? Who was I to be touching these? When are they going to come and take them away from me? Don’t they realize they’ve just handed over a great historical artifact to a lowly graduate student?

I carefully picked up the folder, walked to the front desk, and asked the librarian if I could make copies. He opened the folder, looked at the contents and said: “20 cents a piece.”

That was the day I fell in love with archives. (If you want to read the story of Benjamin’s last work, I’ve written about it here.)

As I’ve worked on my biography of Hannah Arendt and translated her poems for the past few years, it has been a pleasure to publish available documents from my archival research on social media. From Auden’s letters to Arendt’s syllabuses, posting has allowed me to share the thrill of archival research with many people, who hopefully enjoy it as much as I do. This space will be dedicated to an expanded version of that, and it will shift overtime alongside the projects I am working on.

In the coming weeks you can expect some of Hannah Arendt’s notecards, reflections on the need for forgiveness, lost love letters, a poem here and there, and an unpublished parable. For those of you who choose to offer something, your contributions will go to future archival endeavors, because it is an unfortunate reality of academic life that research budgets do not exist for humanities scholars. Thank you.

And one last thing:

When Hannah Arendt published Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, she decided to call the volume Illuminations. It was inspired by Bertolt Brecht’s poem To Posterity, which begins: Truly, I live in dark times! Arendt borrowed from Brecht and said, “even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination…” 

As she knew, it is an unfortunate fact of history that dark times are nothing new. And today, from the rise of illiberalism to the global pandemic, we live in dark times once more. It is in that spirit that I have stolen her title to hopefully offer a little illumination.

Yours, 

S