The
Centenary
The centenary of Hannah
Arendt’s birth on October 14, 2006 is being
celebrated all over the world.
Some of the celebrations are being organized by groups that
have been dedicated to studying her life and work for many
years, like the Hannah Arendt Center in Oldenburg, Germany,
which has also produced The Hannah Arendt Newsletter
(starting in April, 1999, for five issues on paper, and
thereafter online). Others are in places associated with
her life, like Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York,
USA, where her husband Heinrich Bluecher taught, where her
library is housed, and where he and she are both buried.
And others are at universities where Hannah Arendt’s
works are taught in undergraduate and graduate seminars
–from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, USA,
to the University of Oslo in Norway to Tel-Aviv University
in Israel. (
See the list of events.)
Most of these celebrations have a common theme, which is
captured in the title of a conference to be held in New
York in December, 2006: HANNAH ARENDT RIGHT NOW. They are
concerned with revisiting Arendt’s work to ask what
it might mean for the present situation in America, about
which Arendt wrote so often in her last essays, and the
present situation in the world. In a sense, these
celebrations constitute a desire that Arendt might be still
living to offer her commentary on current events, to be a
public presence, an example of concern for the public
realm. So the celebrations are, in effect, a eulogy, which
is a type of speech that Hannah Arendt described in these
words (quoted from Men In Dark Times) when she delivered
one as her teacher Karl Jaspers received the German Book
Trade’s Peace Prize:
[The} laudatio [is] a
eulogy whose task it is to praise the man rather than his
work. How to do this we can perhaps learn from the Romans,
who, more experienced in matters of public significance
than we are, tell us what such an enterprise should be all
about: in laudationibus …ad personarum dignitatem
omnia referrentur, said Cicero—“in
eulogies…the sole consideration is the greatness and
dignity of the individuals concerned.”
In other words, a eulogy
concerns the dignity that pertains to the man insofar as he
is more than everything he does or creates. To recognize
and celebrate this dignity is not the business of experts
and colleagues in a profession; it is the public that must
judge a life which has been exposed to the public view and
proved itself in the public realm.