GAUS:… in Chicago. You live in New York. Your husband whom you married in 1940, is also a professor, of philosophy, in America. The academic community, of which you are again a member-after the disillusionment of 1933-is international. Yet 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. For myself In put it extremely simply: In German I know a rather large part of German poetry by heart; the poems are always somehow in the back of my mind. I can never do that again. I do things in German that I would not permit myself to do in English That is, sometimes I do them in English too, because I have become bold, but in general I have maintained a certain distance. 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. And, second, there is no substitution for the mother tongue. People can forget their mother tongue. That’s true-I have seen it. There are people who speak the new language better than I do. I still speak with a very heavy accent, and I often speak unidiomatically. They can all do these things correctly. But they do them in a language in which one cliché chases another because the productivity that one has in one’s own language is cut off when one forgets that language.
GAUS: The cases in which the mother tongue was forgotten: Is it your impression that this was the result of repression?
ARENDT: Yes, very frequently. I have seen it in people as a result of shock. You know, what was decisive was not the year 1933, at least not for me. What was decisive was the day we learned about Auschwitz.
Hannah Arendt; “WHAT REMAINS? THE LANGUAGE REMAINS” A conversation with Gunter Gaus ;ZUR PERSON; ZDF TV, GERMANY OCTOBER 28, 1964, Translated by Joan Stambaugh
Photo: Edmonton at night
