What We Are Reading: Jana Schmidt Looks at the Complete Hannah Arendt

Samantha Hill

Hannah Arendt Center Associate Fellow Jana V. Schmidt writes about the publication of the first Critical Edition of Hannah Arendt’s Complete Works. Schmidt’s ranging engagement reaches out to the broader reception of Arendt’s work and the posthumously published volumes of her work.

Two blue volumes have already appeared, the Sechs Essays (“Six Essays”), originally addressed to a German audience in the immediate aftermath of the war, and the above-mentioned The Modern Challenge to Tradition, as the sixth volume of the edition. The remaining 15 books are scheduled to be released one by one until 2031 with the highly anticipated publication of the “un-McCarthyfied” The Life of the Mind expected for this year. Each volume will be accompanied by the launch, delayed by one year, of the free online component at hannah-arendt-edition.net, demonstrating the editors’ generous commitment to open access and to a vision of the digital humanities as an intensification of scholarship (rather than as the neoliberal rationalization project it often appears to encode).
 
Like a traditional edition, the Complete Works: Critical Edition assembles, for the first time, the entirety of Arendt’s published and unpublished writings in thematic volumes. But it also offers more than that. In addition to making different text variants, facsimiles, and unpublished materials broadly accessible and rendering cut-outs, deletions, and colored marks visible for close inspection, the most momentous offering of the Critical Edition is its presentation of Arendt as a bilingual thinker