In the Archive with Hannah Arendt

“The question is: Is there a form of thinking that is not tyrannical?”[1]

— Hannah Arendt

When Hannah Arendt arrived at the German Literature Archive in Marbach Germany in June 1975 to organize Karl Jasper’s papers, she stood up in the cafeteria and began reciting Friedrich Schiller by heart. She was fond of “Das Mädchen aus der Fremde”, but this is pure speculation. As Arendt said to Günter Gaus in her last interview, she carried German poems around in her hinterkopf. I’d wager she knew more than one. [2]

The German Literature Archive is an expansive brutalist building designed by Jörg and Elisabeth Kiefner, set next to the Friedrich Schiller Museum. Built in the early 1970s, it houses papers from some of the world’s most famous writers: Friedrich Schiller, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Erich Kästner, Franz Kafka, Siegfried Kracauer, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, and Hannah Arendt. While most of Arendt’s papers are at The Library of Congress in Washington, DC, the archive in Marbach holds her Denktagebuch, or thinking journals, alongside her correspondence with Heidegger, Jaspers, Hilde Domin, and Hermann Broch among others. I went to visit her journals.

Hannah Arendt kept her thinking journals between 1950 and 1971.[3] The twenty-eight notebooks are 5x8, mottled reddish-brown. Arendt favored The Champion Line Wiremaster, ruled, 45 sheets, 15 or 20 cents apiece. She ordered the journals with roman numerals on the covers, and numbered the inner left and right hand…