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Exile Readings H A N N A H A R E N D T ’ S L I B R A R Y r e i n h a r d l a u b e On May 1, 1972, the photographer Jill Krementz took a picture of Hannah Arendt in her library.1 As Lotte Kohler remembers it, this library was set up partly in the dining room of Arendt’s Riverside Drive apartment and partly in the study of her husband, Heinrich Blücher, who had died in 1970. After Hannah Arendt’s death in December 1975, Lotte Kohler and Mary McCarthy were faced, as executors of her will, with the task of liquidating the New York apartment and with it the library that was located there. While Arendt had already entered into agreements during her lifetime with the Library of Congress and the German Literary Archive in Marbach concerning the unpublished and handwritten portions of her literary effects, such agreements did not as a rule cover books.2 So Lotte Kohler thought she had to find a solution for this extensive working library. She first offered the volumes to the New School, which would have taken them but could not install the collection as an entity. The question was how best to handle the library. In fact, Arendt and Blücher had already entered into an agreement with Bard College in 1963 to donate their joint libraries to the college after their deaths.3 Although Kohler did not know of this circumstance, she nevertheless, in the summer of 1976, approached the president of Bard College, where Heinrich Blücher had taught as a philosophy professor for many years. Leon Botstein had been a former favorite student of Arendt’s, and she had even forwarded his research questions in 1966 on the discussion of Max Weber’s Science as Vocation to Karl Jaspers.4 Botstein accepted the libraries, and so the books were brought to the place where both Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher are buried, and where they had in fact wanted them to be. Individual books out of the collection, however , came into the hands of friends and students. Through Lotte Kohler, in this way, dedication copies of writings by Martin Heidegger also went to the German Literary Archive in Marbach; she also supplemented the holdings in the Hannah Arendt Collection of Bard College with books and offprints with Heidegger’s handwritten inscriptions.5 Facing: Hannah Arendt’s hectographed typescript of Walter Benjamin’s last work, “On the Concept of History,” which was posthumously edited by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno after Benjamin committed suicide while trying to escape France in 1940. The title page reads, “Walter Benjamin, In Memoriam.” Courtesy of the Hannah Arendt Collection, Stevenson Library, Bard College. 20 Exile Readings: Hannah Arendt’s Library The library of the philosopher and political thinker, Hannah Arendt (1906– 1975) is a part of her literary effects that must first be described in its extent and historically conditioned makeup. Beyond that, the question arises of the apt way of tracking her use of these materials and her reading, as well as the references in the catalogue, peculiar to this collection and its individual volumes . Of central importance, finally, is how a nonarbitrary examination can yield conclusions about the processes of textual genesis and Hannah Arendt’s readings under the circumstances of her emigration. the collection Lotte Kohler cannot remember a catalogue system in the library in the New York apartment except for a distinction between philosophy and literature. The collection that arrived at Bard in 1976 and that was installed as a unit contains more than 4,000 volumes, periodicals, offprints, brochures, and incidentals (Akzidenten). Some 3,100 of these titles have been catalogued so far and installed all together in a single room, ordered according to the classifications of the Library of Congress. This means that the original order of the library is not retained, although in the uncatalogued portion it is possible to gain an impression of how things had been put together: for example, yards of shelving devoted to French literature purchased in Paris, the literature of and about Walter Benjamin together with a hectographed version of his essay “On the Concept of History,” and yards more devoted to various individuals and themes. In general, the distinction between literature and philosophy noted by Lotte Kohler gets to the heart of a library that consists of several collections , which can in turn be...

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