Day and Night
Sharon Sliwinski
Night and dream confirmed and reproduced what day had glossed over or hid. The dream stopped at nothing, exposed the naked phenomena and did not mind their incomprehensibility.… It dragged all hidden things to light.
— Hannah Arendt, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman
Remember that old advice about what to do when someone points out your mistakes? Change, indeed, change gladly, Marcus Aurelius says: “The truth never harmed anyone. What harms us is to persist in self-deceit and ignorance.” It’s one of those pieces of wisdom that sounds easy enough. Until it happens to you.
My most egregious professional error (so far!) appears in print and therefore feels painfully permanent. In the introduction to Dreaming in Dark Times: Six Exercises in Political Thought, I unabashedly claim that Hannah Arendt never wrote about dream life. Reading the line back now, it seems like a completely unnecessary declaration. A little flourish of the pen, a telltale hint of hubris. At the time, I thought it important since the book leans so heavily on Arendt’s work to show how dream life is a crucial, if overlooked venue for political thought.
My error was pointed out in the gentlest way imaginable. Shortly after the book’s publication, I found myself in Providence giving a public talk. When I was finished, a graduate student from the university that was hosting me shyly approached the lectern. She introduced herself and disclosed that she was writing a dissertation about Arendt. She seemed excited about my attempt to treat dreams as a species of political thinking, but wanted to let me know that Arendt had, in fact, written about these nocturnal visions. Did I know her 1957 biography, Rahel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewish Woman?
I don’t think my mortification was entirely obvious. I somehow managed to respond, admitting that I had not, in fact, read the book. The student shrugged, acknowledging that it wasn’t widely consulted, even by Arendt scholars, largely because it wasn’t considered to be central to her political theory. She assured me I would find it of interest.
Change. Change gladly.
As it turns out, Arendt devotes an entire chapter to the dreams of the woman she calls “her closest friend,” despite the fact that Rahel died in 1833, a century before the biography was written. Rahel Varnhagen (née Levin) was born in Berlin in 1771 to a small community of wealthy Jewish families. Today, she is chiefly remembered for her influential salon: writers, artists, and aristocrats regularly rubbed shoulders at her “tea” meetings, first at her apartment on Jägerstraße 54, and then, after her marriage, in the Varnhagen home. But it was not this history of salon culture that interested Arendt. She was pursing something more intimate. In 1930, after finishing her doctorate on Augustine’s conception of love, she began a study of Rahel’s voluminous correspondence (some six thousand letters survive) as a way to gain a deeper understanding of the dilemmas of Jewish assimilation. Needless to say, this was a germane topic at the time Arendt was writing.
At the turn of the 19th century, the Jews of Berlin were denied full citizenship, banned from most occupations, and subject to various punishing fines and debts. “A political struggle for equal rights might have taken the place of the personal struggle,” Arendt notes: “But that was wholly unknown to this generation of Jews…who did not even want to be emancipated as a whole; all they wanted was to escape from Jewishness, as individuals if possible.” In this respect, Rahel was an exemplar of this generation. She experienced her “infamous birth” as a personal curse and described her Jewishness as her “greatest shame” that brought nothing but “misery and misfortune.” While Arendt is relentlessly critical of this example of what we might now call internalized antisemitism, she nevertheless used the biographical project as a vehicle to work out the ways history can concentrate its force on the individual’s experience of life. In other words, Arendt viewed Rahel’s personal emotional torment as politically salient. Indeed, one could say the book represents one of the key moments when Arendt turned her back on philosophy to become a political theorist.
And low and behold! At the very center of this turn is a study of dream life. In a chapter simply called “Day and Night” (an ingenious reversal of Cole Porter’s hit song, which was released while the biography was being written), Arendt shows how Rahel’s nocturnal visions exposed what she tried to actively repress during the day. Several of her dreams are recounted in full and treated as theatrical versions of what had, in fact, simply been the reality of Rahel’s life.
In one particularly violent nightmare, the dreamer finds herself perched on the ramparts of an old fortress. A rowdy mob agitates, demanding consent from an otherwise indifferent sovereign who is figured as one of Rahel’s former lovers, Count Karl von Finckenstein. At the climax of the dream, the king finally consents to the crowd’s demands and Rahel is thrown from the ramparts. Arendt reads the dream as a direct account of the dreamer’s reality: “it merely explained something that belonged to the day, something that was in any case reality: that F. simply sacrificed her…to the people, to public opinion, to his family.” After four years, Finckenstein had broken off their engagement at the behest of his family, who ultimately found Rahel’s Jewishness unsuitable.
Dreams dramatize our most potent crises — they reproduce what the day has glossed over, dragging what was hidden into the light, as Arendt intuits. But dreams also provide a means to metabolize these crises. They are one of our most powerful tools of transformation. As the title of my own book, Dreaming in Dark Times, meant to suggest, dream life can serve to reanimate a world that has been flattened by dark times. My thesis was twofold: on one hand, dreams manage to represent that which cannot be articulated otherwise; they convey the DNA of their time, so to speak, carrying the conflicts that preoccupy a particular cultural milieu, but which remain latent in its public discourse. Second, as Rahel’s letters also demonstrate, dreams have a way of compelling us to speak. Sharing a dream with others is a special form of communication, indeed, a potent form of political disclosure: a means to “insert ourselves into the human world,” as Arendt would say.
Each chapter of Dreaming in Dark Times re-inscribes a dream plucked from the historical record back into the bleak moment of its gestation. The landscapes are dramatically varied, as are the conditions of the disclosure of the dream: a notorious prison in Apartheid-era South Africa; the tangle of sexual relations in fin de siècle Vienna; an Allied military hospital during the Great War; one of the longest city sieges in history, the London Blitz; the psychiatric wards of colonial Algeria; and Berlin under the Third Reich. While the climate conditions in each of these cases are unique, in each instance I treat the reported dream as an extraordinarily fragile means by which an individual sought to disclose something about the terms of their existence — a means to exercise a measure of freedom despite the pressures of the time.
All to say, dreams matter. They matter both for the individual and for our shared political lives. These remarkable mental events are vehicles for otherwise unthinkable thoughts and a wellspring for the freedom of speech. Dreaming is an indispensable species of thought that helps us transfigure the force of a harsh reality. As Rahel’s example attests, a dream report is a unique speech-act that can shift the moorings of the dreamer’s subjectivity: by the end of her life, she described her relationship to her Jewishness as a “real rapture.”
But perhaps even more importantly, by sharing her dreams, Rahel transposed what was an otherwise private concern into a public thing, material from which the social fabric might be woven anew. By yielding to her impulse to communicate her dreams, Rahel inserted herself into the human world. And she found a fellow-traveller in Hannah Arendt, who, some hundred years later, would argue that such disclosures represent a means by which human beings can renew the polis — that shared political world that lies between us.
It is worth remembering this exemplar in our own dark times. What might be gained from disclosing our most private crises to one another? And what might be learned if we began treating dream life, as Arendt did, as a unique form of political thought?
To dream. And to take the risk of sharing these nocturnal visions. This is the stuff of which a radical new politics might just be made.
