In Memoriam Ingeborg Nordmann

Roger Berkowitz

Few have done more to enrich Hannah Arendt scholarship than Ingeborg Nordmann. Nordmann worked with her friends and colleague Ursula Ludz to bring out the first edition of Arendt’s Denktagebuch in 2002 and reissued it in its present form in 2016. Their extraordinary edition has deepened and changed Arendt scholarship, offering a path to Arendt’s thought process and to her at times more personal reflections. Nordmann has also edited extraordinary collections of Arendt’s letters, including a collection of letters Arendt wrote with her female friends Charlotte Beradt, Rose Feitelson, Hilde Fränkel, Anne Weil and Helen Wolff Wie ich einmal ohne Dich leben soll, mag ich mir nicht vorstellen (How I could ever live without you, I cannot imagine, mit Ursula Ludz, 2017). In her editions of Arendt’s work, Nordmann introduces the intimate and private side of Arendt’s public face in ways that elevate our understanding of Arendt and her thinking.

Nordmann also edited a remarkable book, Wahrheit Gibt Es Nur Zu Zweien: Briefe an die Freunde (Truth is Only Given Between Two: Letters to Friends). The book is composed simply of letters by Arendt to the likes of Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Kurt Blumenfeld, Hilde Frankel, Heinrich Blücher, Mary McCarrthy, Gershom Scholem, and others—all without the originating or following letters from her correspondents. It is a story told from one side, and yet it is a story that encompasses the plurality of voices that friendship gave to Arendt’s multivalent voice. In her brief introduction to this remarkable collection, Nordmann writes:

The idea for this book has a famous model: Rahel Levin Varnhagen’s Book of Remembrance, in which Varnhagen herself compiled a selection of her letters to her friends, written between 1787 and 1833. It was her blueprint for the next century, which she hoped would fulfill the promises of the Enlightenment. But we are not just dealing with a remembrance, but with a way of thinking, or better yet, a different and new way of thinking. Rahel Varnhagen's correspondence reveals a new understanding of the letter. It is understood as an independent and enigmatic dialogue space in which more happens than the writers intended, and as a space of freedom in which one can move freely between different ways of thinking and writing.

If one considers the letter to be like Romanticism, as a medium of expression for subjectivity, then it seems self-evident that correspondence offers more dialogic diversity than a compilation in which only one person's letters are collected. But the “only” is already a dissembling restriction. If you look at the letter as a dialogue-space, it reveals an inner complexity that can easily be covered up in the back-and-forth of correspondence. This inner complexity lies in the fact that every letter is already an answer and the answer contains what was previously written. We are motivated to read otherwise and other realities push into focus. The frequent change of addressees creates a dialogue among many in the reader's perception. Even at the level of the glance, it becomes apparent how different the friendships are and that they have their own languages. A mosaic of polyphony emerges.

It is not known whether Hannah Arendt ever considered publishing her letters as books. Philosophical and political writings took precedence. But she kept the letters and organized the correspondence with Jaspers herself in the Marbach Literature Archive. Her ambivalent relationship to writing letters - "Writing letters is [...] dangerous nonsense"  - did not prevent her from becoming one of the most enthusiastic letter writers of her time, who found an informality of reflection in this medium so that sometimes on a single page one reads the draft for a whole book of life.

An astonishing number of correspondences have already been published since her death, especially considering that she is still almost our contemporary. Many unpublished letters and correspondence remain in the manuscript department of the Library of Congress in Washington and in other archives. If a subsequent compilation of Hannah Arendt's letters is attempted, which she had not foreseen, we can identify criteria from aspects of her biography and her world of thought that can give this project a comprehensible meaning.

The letter and the friendship are Hannah Arendt's answers to the “dark times'' in which people become refugees and stateless people overnight, friends are scattered all over the world, and the representation of a homeland has become problematic in general. For those who “are not rooted in any possessions and therefore always carry their Milieu with them, so to speak, or, more correctly, are dependent on constantly producing it anew,” who therefore have to be on the move in an existential sense, the Letter becomes an indispensable means of being able to found ways that a life hangs together. These ways of togetherness correspond to what Arendt calls friendship.