Hannah Arendt and the Twentieth Century
06-04-2020By Jonathon Catlin
In a tribute to her mentor Karl Jaspers, Hannah Arendt once said: “Humanity is never acquired in solitude, and never by giving one’s work to the public. It can be achieved only by one who has thrown his life and his person into the ‘venture into the public realm.’” As stay-at-home orders related to the coronavirus pandemic are beginning to ease around the world, leaders, institutions, and individuals are faced with difficult decisions about whether and how to undertake such ventures into public life.
On May 11, Berlin’s Deutsches Historisches Museum (DHM) opened the exhibition Hannah Arendt and the Twentieth Century to in-person visitors, six weeks after the scheduled opening was postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. In the meantime, the DHM made the exhibition partially accessible online through a virtual preview. The irony was not lost on me that opening the exhibition in the midst of a pandemic entailed something of an Arendtian social experiment. After all, maintaining public life in times of crisis and fear was a challenge Arendt’s work addressed at length. Several precautions have been put in place: visitors must wear mouth and nose coverings, maintain a certain distance from others, and book time-stamped tickets online in advance to limit the number of guests to an approved level. Strange times, then, to promote the exhibition with the Arendtian slogan, “No one has the right to obey” (1964).
Curated by philosopher Dr. Monika Boll, the exhibition leads visitors through sixteen chapters in the life of the German-Jewish thinker Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), centered on flashpoints in her transnational career and her many close friendships. The exhibition is vast, occupying two floors of the DHM’s I. M. Pei-designed glass and steel modern wing. It wagers that the life of a single intellectual—however iconic—can engage the general public at the same time as it deepens the understanding of specialists. The resulting compromise provides treatment of Arendt’s philosophical work sometimes as superficial as that of Margarethe von Trotta’s 2012 Arendt biopic. In both cases, the genre imperative of not overwhelming the viewer wins out, and nuanced philosophical discussions—the very stuff of judgment that ads for the exhibition tout—are often reduced to sparse, if pithy, quotations. Nevertheless, all visitors can enjoy following Arendt’s remarkable biography through a variety of media, from writings and videos of Arendt projected on the walls to insightful audio introductions for individual listening in cozy nooks.
