Trích đoạn: Hannah Arendt: The Last Interview: And Other Conversations.

Hannah Arendt (1994)

"WHAT REMAINS? THE LANGUAGE REMAINS": A Conversation with Günter Gaus

❁ ..all Jewish children encountered anti-Semitism. And it poisoned the souls of many children. The difference with us was that my mother was always convinced that you mustn't let it get to you. You have to defend yourself! When my teachers made anti-Semitic remarks - mostly not about me, but about other Jewish girls, eastern Jewish students in particular - I was told to get up immediately, leave the classroom, come home, and report everything exactly. Then my mother wrote one of her many registered letters; and for me that matter was completely settled. I had a day off from school, and that was marvelous! But when it came from children, I was not permitted to tell about it at home. That didn't count. You defended yourself against what came from children. Thus these matters never were a problem for me. There were rules of conduct by which I retained my dignity, so to speak, and I was protected, absolutely protected, at home.

❁ But I still think that it belongs to the essence of being an intellectual that one fabricates ideas about everything.

Gaus: ...I should like to ask you whether you miss the Europe of the pre-Hitler period, which will never exist again. When you come to Europe, what, in your impression, remains and what is irretrievably lost?

Arendt: The Europe of the pre-Hitler period? I do not long for that, I can tell you. What remains? The language remains.

Gaus: And that means a great deal to you?

Arendt: A great deal. I have always consciously refused to lose my mother tongue. I have always maintained a certain distance from French, which I then spoke very well, as well as from English, which I write today.

Gaus: I wanted to ask you that. You write in English now?

Arendt: I write in English, but I have never lost a feeling of distance from it. There is a tremendous difference between your mother tongue and another language. [...] The German language is the essential thing that has remained and that I have always consciously preserved.

Gaus: Even in the most bitter time?

Arendt: Always. I thought to myself, What is one to do? It wasn't the German language that went crazy.

Arendt: I do not believe that there is any thought process possible without personal experience. Every thought is an afterthought, that is, a reflection on some matter or event. Isn't that so? I live in the modern world, and obviously my experience is in and of the modern world. This, after all, is not controversial. But the matter of merely laboring and consuming is of crucial importance for the reason that a kind of wordlessness defines itself there too. Nobody cares any longer what the world looks like.

Gaus: "World" understood always as the space in which politics can originate.

Arendt: I comprehend it now in a much larger sense, as the space in which thing become public, as the space in which one lives and which must look presentable. In which art appears, of course. In which all kinds of things appear.

❁ A peculiar loneliness arises in the process of labor. I cannot go into that right now, because it would lead us too far afield. But this loneliness consists in being thrown back upon oneself; a state of affairs in which, so to speak, consumption takes the place of all the truly relating activities.

❁ Whenever men come together, in whatever numbers, public interests come into play.

❁ So long as you're alone, you're always powerless, however strong you may be.