Susannah Gottlieb
“Total self-indulgence in tone [das totale Sich-Vergreifen im Ton]”—so pronounces the esteemed Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem on the work of Hannah Arendt.1 Scholem is responding specifically to Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, but he clearly means to indict all of Arendt’s writing, which, from his perspective, diverges from the tone appropriate to either scholarship or journalism. Scholem’s exasperated condemnation of Arendt’s tonal peculiarities and her deviation from generic norms is not unique among readers of Arendt, many of whom might have no patience with the other accusations Scholem levels against his erstwhile friend, but who nevertheless find themselves similarly confounded both by Arendt’s immoderate—occasionally inflammatory—tone, and by the heterogeneous, even promiscuous assortment of “genres” she pursued in her writing (from biography and historical portraits to historical analysis and political theory to the elements of what Aristotle would call “first philosophy”). Many readers have considered these fluctuations as failures, either of character or of training. But these complaints about tone and genre, which take many forms—and register at different pitches—all seem to miss what they otherwise see. Instead of understanding these persistent and intimately connected facets of her work as failings, I want to suggest we think of them as a version of what Friedrich Hölderlin called “the alteration of tone.”2 For Hölderlin—who was also accused of self-indulgence by the two pillars of German classical culture, Goethe and Schiller—the intricately devised doctrine of tonal alteration is an essential feature of his attempt to defend the art of poetry without recourse to any dubious idea of Bildung (understood as “high culture” and “self-formation”). Something similar is true of Arendt: the two aspects of her work that give rise to censorious judgments like Scholem’s are inevitable facets of a surprising, yet powerfully convincing and politically saturated, defense of poetry that runs like a red thread through all of her voluminous writings and gives them their specific, idiosyncratic character.
What, after all, draws Arendt to literature in general—and to poetry in particular, and how does this help us understand the peculiarities and provocations of her writing? One answer is clear enough: it is definitely not Bildung. As she emphasizes in a wide variety of writings, beginning with her biography of Rahel Varnhagen and culminating in her stinging assessment of Stefan Zweig, the embrace of the ideal of Bildung was one of the principal missteps of German Jews from the Goethezeit to the Nazi seizure of power. Acculturation is no protection from catastrophe, and those who bind themselves to monuments of Bildung are imperiled by their own delusion of security. Despite her radical critique of those who indulged in fantasies of Bildung, Arendt nevertheless finds in poetry something indispensable—she even uses the word “essential”—to the human condition: as the “expression of loss itself,”3 as that which “pitches itself against all that is most unsatisfactory in man’s condition on this earth and sucks its own strength from the wound,”4 and as that which “frames a cosmos out of all kinds of words.”5
None of this, however, gets us closer to understanding the characteristic provocations of Arendt’s own writings—and thus to her “alteration of tones.” An oblique approach to this question can be found in a brief passage from Arendt’s last and longest essay on Bertolt Brecht, where, with little preparation—as though she wished to jar her readers out of a certain complacency concerning what they already know about the alternately famous and infamous writer—she provides a revealing gloss on his expressed rationale for abstaining from suicide. Here is Brecht’s explanation: “It shouldn’t look as though one had too high an opinion of oneself.”6 To this, without any further comment, Arendt simply adds, “Above all, therefore, no pompous self-importance! [Wichtigtuerei].”7 This pithy maxim doubtless captures something of Brecht’s mordant humor, but it serves more importantly as a powerful and illuminating constraint on Arendt’s own writing. Although she imputes this understated yet trenchant imperative to a poet rather than claiming it as her own, the force with which this imperative constrains her own work is clear. Arendt avoids autobiography and generally refrains from speaking of herself in her published writings. And what makes this even more striking is that she refrains from speaking of herself despite the obvious ways in which her life clearly intersects with the topics she discusses: from her early reflections on “the doom” of acculturated (“gebildeten”) German Jews in the Berlin salons of Rahel Varnhagen, through her outrage that anti-Semitism could play such a decisive role in the machinery and ideology of Nazi power in The Origins of Totalitarianism, to her melancholic remembrances of the friends she lost and to whom she paid such moving tribute in essay after essay in Men in Dark Times and other late writings.
A subtle yet commanding tension thus emerges in her work. Even as she feels compelled to write about experiences that directly t ouch her life, Arendt suppresses any explicit autobiographical content. Arendt’s summary comment on this quote from Brecht’s “Epistle on Suicide” is at first, perhaps, amusing, but also jarring, and is also a minor example of a characteristic element of her writing that has troubled readers in different ways and to varying degrees throughout her career, from Rachel to Eichmann, namely, the outburst of an apparently inappropriate tone. The sometimes startling, often unclassifiable, strangeness that characterizes her writing (in tenor, style, and attitude) in both of these works, to take only these two examples, and her determined refusal of autobiographical writing, even where the subject of inquiry intersects so decidedly with her own life—these two elements of her work have perplexed, exasperated, and infuriated readers, and have often set the terms for assessments of her work and even her character: shoddy historian, haughty guardian of high German culture, and heartless and self-hating Jew. And there is a third element that is intimately connected to these other two: her sense—and consequent defense—of what she calls the “poetic essence” of everyday experience.8 The “essence” is poetic, above all, because it is poetry that captures it. Other modes of writing, which includes all of her published work, obscure this “essence.” For Arendt, it is only in poetry that experience enters into speech and the public sphere without violating the imperative against “pompous self-importance.” At the same time, this imperative leaves Arendt’s own experiences unvoiced. In short, the lack of restraint in her tone is a paradoxical function of the constraints imposed by the imperative against pompous self-importance. Despite its bold intellectual strokes, her thought betrays an absolutely persistent and characteristic reticence about those matters that touch her most deeply. In light of this paradox, the two other elements of Arendt’s writings become comprehensible as a single trait: she boldly alters genres and gives the impression of indulging in tone because each of these is a function of the constraints necessary to preserving life’s “poetic essence.”
The passage in Arendt’s essay on Brecht where she presents the absence of “pompous self-importance” as a new form of the categorical imperative reveals the elements of her writing in miniature. This terse, seemingly tossed-off denunciation of both embittered self-pity and desperate self-aggrandizement (who but Arendt would describe suicide as pompous?) is saturated with her own lived experiences of friendship, internment, and suicide. In 1938, Arendt’s friend and cousin through marriage, Walter Benjamin, visited Brecht in Denmark and when he returned to Paris, he gave Arendt Brecht’s unpublished poem on “The Legend of the Origin of the Tao-te-Ching on Lao Tsu’s Way into Exile,” which she learned by heart and described as “a rumor of good tidings”: “It travelled by word of mouth—a source of consolation and patience and endurance.”9 Benjamin would later write about this poem in a commentary on Brecht in terms of friendship “in the darkest and bloodiest times,”10 and Arendt’s soon-to-be husband, Heinrich Blücher, carried their copy with him when he was interned as an enemy alien in Villemalard, France. In one of the letters that survives from Blücher to Arendt from the camp, he writes, as if in a rough draft of Arendt’s later Brecht essay, “Above all, one shouldn’t make too much of a fuss about oneself.”11 And in a letter to Kurt Blumenfeld, written years later, Arendt describes this brusquely mocking response to the question of suicide with reference to her own internment in Gurs, France: “At least, that was my opinion in Gurs, where I posed the question [of suicide] to myself in earnest and answered myself somewhat jokingly.”12
Blücher’s letter to Arendt continues, “As you can imagine, there are quite a few people here who think of nothing but their own personal destiny—and in response, I have gone a little to the other extreme.”13 This rejection of self-pity and aversion to self-disclosure marks all of Arendt’s work. Instead of writing about herself, she undertakes investigations into a series of topics that traverse the course of her life. The intersection is perhaps most evident in her first book, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman, where Arendt so thoroughly adopts Rahel’s voice and perspective (famously presuming to “narrate the story of Rahel’s life as she herself might have told it”)14 that the distinction between biographer and the subject of biography tends to collapse. Much of Arendt’s subsequent work is characterized by a similar—and similarly unsettling, if less clearly discernible—set of methodologies and tonal modulations, which evoke her own experiences without explicitly revealing anything about them.
Traces of the course of Arendt’s life—from her early years in Königsberg to her experience of exile and statelessness—can be found in everything she wrote. But whereas her friend Walter Benjamin wrote such autobiographical texts as “Hashish in Marseilles” and A Berlin Childhood around 1900, Arendt wrote only obliquely about her youth, invoking, for example, Königsberg nursery rhymes in a number of her works. And whereas her onetime friend Gershom Scholem wrote volumes about his friendship with Benjamin and his own journey “from Berlin to Jerusalem,” Arendt never wrote of her equally eventful passage from Königsberg to New York City and never published the poem she wrote upon learning of Benjamin’s suicide. None of the details of their friendship is directly reflected in the portrait she wrote of Benjamin as one of her Men in Dark Times, nor in any of the other places where she quotes from or writes about his work.
Another index of Arendt’s reticence is one of the few public remarks she made abo ut her internment: “At the camp of Gurs, for instance, where I had the opportunity of spending some time, I heard only once about suicide.”15 The concentration camp as “opportunity” is not only bitter sarcasm but also expressive of precisely that tension in which the need to speak of her own experience is instantly checked by a demand that nothing of her life should be mentioned, partly, perhaps, because it would divert attention away from the enormity of the events under discussion, and partly for the reasons she outlines in the essay from which this quote is drawn. “One shouldn’t make too much of a fuss about oneself” could stand as the epigraph to Arendt’s pained and reproachful account of suicide as the last desperate attempt of the Jewish refugees who “fight like madmen for private existences with individual destinies”:
Our suicides are no mad rebels who hurl defiance at life and the world, who try to kill in themselves the whole universe. . . . In their opinion, generally, political events had nothing to do with their individual fate; in good or bad times they would believe solely in their personality. . . . Finally they die of a kind of selfishness.16
Gurs appears by name in a few other places among Arendt’s writings, including twice in Eichmann in Jerusalem: first, where she relates a German minister’s description of the conditions of the Jews at Gurs as worse than the conditions of those deported to Poland, and again, when she refers to the “notorious concentration camp at Gurs,” adding—in a remarkable parenthesis—“When the Final Solution was put into effect in France, the inmates of the Gurs camp were all shipped to Auschwitz.”17 Arendt’s experience during the war is thus suppressed and quietly inscribed into Eichmann in Jerusalem, and so, too, is a generalized version of the demand that there be “no pompous self-importance.” Not only does Arendt provide no eyewitness account of Gurs, she declines to mention that she was herself an inmate there. And she famously, or perhaps infamously, looks upon those who speak of their experiences during the trial with undeniable distance, suspicious at all times of self-dramatizing gestures. It is in giving voice to the angry indignation that Eichmann in Jerusalem has never ceased to elicit among some of its readers, that Scholem accuses Arendt of an “indulging [herself] tone.” There is doubtless something to this accusation, but it altogether misses the source of the perplexing tone that no careful reader of the book can fail to notice. She is responding to an unresolvable tension: the demand that the atrocities not be forgotten, which means that they must be spoken about, and the equally important counter-demand that she say nothing—or more exactly, that she keep her voice low, so that she may avoid the suggestion that her experiences are of the same order of significance as the catastrophic events that prompt her investigations, and so that withdrawal into private experience not obscure political conditions and imperatives—which are neglected to catastrophic consequences. And here we can locate at least one dimension of the shadow that eclipses the public sphere, as politics is absorbed by the social, and the ironic—or hyper-ironic—reversal in which insistence on private existence yields not individuality, but the loss of whatever would make individuality possible: the limitless and shapeless subject-matter of a monstrous experiment conducted on specimens.
Arendt’s sense of poetry’s significance and her reticence about her private life come together in a particularly illuminating manner in her little-discussed essay about another of her friends, the poet Robert Gilbert. She writes, “Every moment of this, our only life, demands to be recorded, but only if the recording is done in verse, for otherwise its poetic essence would be lost.”18 Despite the use of the Heidegger-sounding term “poetic essence,” Arendt’s remark is a complete departure from the concept of poetry that can be found in Heidegger’s work. To begin with, Gilbert is no Hölderlin or Goethe, and Arendt’s preface to his “Berlin street poems” makes no effort to equate him with these great poets. In Gilbert, beyond his friendship, she found a poet who enacted, as it were, the injunction against pompous self-importance and yet—or perhaps more accurately, and therefore—was able to allow a term such as “poetic essence” to be relieved of the grandiloquent or monumentalizing tendencies with which it would otherwise be associated. What Arendt identifies in this remark, and indeed throughout her reflections on Gilbert’s collection of poems, is a vulnerability of life that goes beyond its exposure to death. Not only can life be lost, so, too, can its “poetic essence.” Allowing a life to disappear without a trace into the annihilating “holes of oblivion” intended by totalitarian regimes is a shameful outrage. But speaking of one’s life in a way that fails to capture its “poetic essence” corresponds to other dangers Arendt sought strenuously to avoid, above all, the reduction of the free individual to the bare biological life of a species being. Arendt understood this danger through at least two coordinated experiences of her lifetime: the manufacture of living corpses accomplished in the concentration camps and the nihilistic “recognition” that all humans are beasts after all.
This double vulnerability of life—and the sometimes competing imperatives to record it faithfully and to preserve its poetic essence—are at the heart of Arendt’s career and provide the animating impulse of all her work. We may be able to begin to understand what she means by “poetic essence” with reference again to what Arendt writes about Walter Benjamin, especially in the following passage, which expresses in a subtle and subdued manner the “indulgence in tone” that Scholem sensed but did not have the patience or loyalty to think through. She writes of her friend after his suicide in flight from the Nazis:
Metaphors are the means by which the oneness of the world is poetically brought about. What is so hard to understand about Benjamin is that without being a poet, he thought poetically and therefore was bound to regard the metaphor as the greatest gift of language. Linguistic “transference” enables us to give material form to the invisible—“A mighty fortress is our God”—and thus to render it capable of being experienced.19
The quotation between the dashes (“A mighty fortress is our God”) refers, of course, to Luther’s 1529 hymn, “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott,” which may draw its inspiration from the Psalms but is nevertheless Luther’s own words and melody—as thoroughly Lutheran, one might say, as the tract he wrote some twenty years later, “The Jews and Their Lies.” And in Benjamin’s case, it is perhaps fair to say that Luther’s promise of protection is a lie: there was none. Even as she speaks of oneness, which would be accomplished through metaphor, she inscribes the mark of a divisiveness—here marked by the names “Benjamin” and “Luther”—that, in broad terms, has to do with poetry. One can think poetically without being a poet. This is a dimension of “poetic essence.” And this “poetic essence” is altogether unified with the living of one’s life, and yet, despite this, can be lost. Arendt’s “self-indulgence in tone” can be seen as one manifestation of her loyalty, as it were, to both poles of this incalculable relation between unity and divisiveness, the first associated with metaphor, the second enacted in the very metaphor she chooses to express the essence of poetic thinking.
Notes
1 Letter from Scholem to Hans Paeschke, March 24, 1968 in Arendt und Benjamin, ed. Detley Schöttker and Erdmut Wizisla (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2006), 189.
2 For an authoritative and informative exposition of Hölderlin’s theory and practice of tonal alteration, see Lawrence Ryan, Hölderlins Wechsel der Töne (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960).
3 Hannah Arendt, Reflections on Literature and Culture, ed. Susannah Gottlieb (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007), 23.
4 Ibid., 300.
5 Ibid., 331.
6 Ibid., 235.
7 Ibid., 339.
8 Ibid., 292.
9 Ibid., 252.
10 Walter Benjamin, Understanding Brecht, trans. A. Bostock (London: Verso, 1998), 73.
11 Blücher to Arendt, September 29, 1939 in Within Four Walls: The Correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, 1936-1968, ed. L Kohler, trans. P. Constantine (New York: Harcourt, 1996), 48.
12 Arendt to Kurt Blumenfeld, August 6, 1952 in In Keinem Besitz Verwurzelt: Die Korrespondenz, ed. Ingeborg Nordmann and Iris Pilling (Hamburg: Rotbuch, 1995), 62.
13 Blücher to Arendt, 48.
14 Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess, ed. L. Weissberg, trans. R. and C. Winston (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), xv.
15 Hannah Arendt, The Jew as Pariah: Jewish Identity and Politics in the Modern Age , ed. Ron H. Feldman (New York: Grove Press, 1978), 59.
16 Ibid., 59–60.
17 Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (New York: Penguin Books, 2016), 156.
18 Arendt, Reflections, 292.
19 Hannah Arendt, Men in Dark Times (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968), 166.