Hannah Arendt’s Message of Ill Tidings

Poetic language and literary history mattered to Hannah Arendt in her thinking about community because they told a story about how political worlds, whether bound by nation states or by international laws and treaties, traffic with the worlds we imagine and create. These worlds are not equivalent, but the idea of the world making potential of literature that she inherited from German Romanticism also gave her the means to re-imagine new political terms for humanity at mid-century. What Arendt first described in 1949 as ‘the right to have rights’ had its own poetry. Returning to her work on Rahel Varnhagen, pariah literature, and Bertolt Brecht, this chapter shows how Arendt’s political theory was indebted to her developing understanding of the world-making capacities of poetry and writing in her own period of statelessness.