Refugee Writers and Inner Emigrants
10-08-2012
‘They must remember that they are constantly on the run, and that the world’s reality is actually expressed by their escape.’
-Hannah Arendt, ‘On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing’
Hannah Arendt never forgot that she was on the run from totalitarianism. Neither did she cease to express its reality in her work. She is the late twentieth-century’s most politically articulate refugee writer: an escapologist who taught us about the real nature of our chains. But the ‘they’ who must remember that they are ‘on the run’ in this quotation are not refugees from persecution. They are fugitives of the mind, the ‘inner emigrants’ who retreated from totalitarianism in their heads.
Two of Arendt’s most elegant and characteristic ironic gestures are present in this sentence. First, addressing the inner emigrant using language that more properly belongs to the refugee (running, escaping) performs the intimate and uneasy relation between existential homelessness and political and historical homelessness that is at the heart of her work. Don’t think all your lofty freethinking somehow allows you to rise out of the world’s darkness; don’t forget that your contemplation is as much a symptom of your political times as it is an escape from them. The inner emigrant must learn her lessons from the refugee, from the one, indeed, who is never allowed to forget she is on the run.
The imperative for the inner emigrant to listen to the refugee is what also makes the irony of this sentence situational. The occasion is Arendt’s acceptance of the Lessing prize in Hamburg in 1959. Her theme, ‘thinking in dark times’, would have held few initial surprises for her audience who would have anticipated the reference to Lessing’s famous Selbstdenken, self-thinking as the perquisite of freedom. But Arendt offers scant comfort to those thinkers in her audience who might have counted themselves as inner emigrants under the Reich. Thinking in Lessing doesn’t mean retreating into self-absorption, she reminds them, but anticipating what we say with others. No point in being one’s own angry comedian. There is little to be gained by muttering alone in the dark. The real scandal of totalitarianism is that it condemns the humanity that comes from this kind of exchange to worldlessness. Running directly parallel to ‘the invisibility of thinking and feeling’ into which inner emigrants escape, therefore, is the invisibility of totalitarianism’s superfluous people, the refugees, the inmates of work and death camps, who take refuge together, she says, quietly, in the weird companionability of the ‘closely packed human beings.’
Few in Arendt’s Hamburg audience would have missed the fetid historical referent behind those ‘closely packed human beings’. The point she was making was not that the experiences were comparable (compassionate empathy for Arendt was always besides the political point), but rather that under Nazi totalitarianism there was no more place for the thinking mind than there was for the Jew. And this is the reality that the inner emigrant must keep in mind: the irreality to which so many were condemned. With characteristic understatement and rhetorical control, Arendt uses the historical occasion of her lecture to demonstrate her argument: the Jewish refugee comes out of the darkness into the very public space of the Free City of Hamburg to think about what happens when thoughts and persons are expelled from humanity. She then expresses the reality of her journey in the ironic dialogism of her prose. The full quote reads:
Flight from the world in dark times of impotence can always be justified as long as reality is not ignored, but is constantly acknowledged as the thing that must be escaped. When people chose this alternative, private life too can retain a by no means significant reality, even thought it remains impotent. Only it is essential for them to realize that the realness of this reality consists not in its deeply personal note, any more than it springs from privacy as such, but inheres in the world from which they have escaped. They must remember that they are constantly on the run, and that the world’s reality is actually expressed by their escape. Thus, too, the true force of escapism springs from persecution, and the personal strength of the fugitives increases as the persecution and danger increase.
As much as the distinctions between different kinds of emigration, it is the movement of flight, and everything that can be expressed in it, that Arendt is conveying here. In his translation of Rilke’s Die Tauben, which he dedicated to Arendt, Robert Lowell, re-casts homesickness as a feeling for ‘flight’s lost moment of fluttering terror.’ Fluttering between registers and contexts, between the mind and what it must remember, between inner and outer emigrants, Arendt’s writing keeps that terror in worldly view.
To talk about Arendt as a refugee writer, then, is not just to acknowledge her biographical circumstance or her major importance as one of the first theorists of modern statelessness. ‘Refugeeness’ cuts straight through her work like, she might have said, a thin red thread. She does not so much think from the position of a refugee, as think through the experience of exile to the extent that it becomes the paradigm rather than the exception. Thinking itself, indeed, becomes a refugee art in her later work. In this, perhaps, she offers a model for how we might approach the often hybrid and hard-to-place writing of some of her contemporaries in exile. In fact, we might even say, Arendt teaches us to look at the reality of totalitarianism from the only perspective that can truly matter, from one remove from that reality.
The late Elisabeth Young-Bruehl was one of the first to grasp the significance of Arendt’s refugee method. Her still unsurpassed biography is bisected by the chapter, ‘Stateless Persons’, which describes Arendt’s flight from Europe and the origins, biographical, political and historical, of her work on totalitarianism. When Young-Bruehl next came to write the life of the psychoanalyst Anna Freud, she repeated the gesture: the chapter ‘On Losing and Being Lost’ describes the self-analysis Freud underwent after her escape to England. Mourning both her father (Sigmund Freud died in exile in 1938) and her lost home (‘How strange it is to carry a past within oneself which can no longer be built upon’), the experience of emigration shifts not only the thinker, but also the ground on which she thinks. For Freud, as for Arendt too, the new threat is about a reality in which it is possible to totally disappear; of retreating into the mind to the extent that one becomes as lost as the object, person, past, or country, one mourns. In a world shadowed by the dark, writes Freud in ‘About Losing and Being Lost’, the temptation is ‘to follow the lost object into death.’
Arendt would have been uncomfortable, to say the least, with keeping intellectual company with a psychoanalyst (she might have been wryly amused to know that her work was the subject of discussion at a conference on ‘Psychoanalysis and Totalitarianism’ in London in September). Psychoanalysis is precisely where the inner emigrant might forget the reality she is fleeing and vanish into a hole of private self-absorption. Read both Arendt and Freud as refugee writers, however, and they arrive in a very similar place: for both the task of the mind after totalitarianism is to become reconciled to a ‘seemingly unendurable reality’ (in Arendt’s words); a reality in which oblivion is an ever-present threat. ‘The best that can be achieved’ after Nazi totalitarianism, Arendt tells her Hamburg audience in 1959 ‘is to know precisely what it was, and to endure this knowledge, and then to wait and see what comes of knowing and enduring.’ ‘What is true for today can become nonsense in no time at all’, echoes Freud in a line quoted by Young-Bruehl: ‘So one lives just in the present and must get used to it.’ These are not the statements of women who have found a new home in the world, but rather of two thinkers who understand how emigration has transformed not only the earth, but the ways in which the mind inhabits it.
-Lyndsey Stonebridge