On Hannah Arendt's 'What Remains'

For much of her life, the German philosopher Hannah Arendt, best known today for The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and her reporting and reflections on the trial of Adolf Eichmann in 1961, wrote poetry that it seems she never thought to publish. Arendt’s poems, of which seventy-four survive, were discovered when her friend and literary executor Mary McCarthy opened her archive in 1988, thirteen years after Arendt’s death. They had been carefully typed, bound, and arranged chronologically—by year but also by season, as if that explained a summery or wintry mood in this or that poem. Perhaps it did; in What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt, translators and editors Samantha Rose Hill and Genese Grill contend that her poems were not just private in the sense of being unpublished, but part of her interior life: a regular (but interrupted) practice alongside notebook entries on favored poets such as Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Rainer Maria Rilke.