2004-2005 Season: Hannah and Martin
Sincerely Yours: Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Professor Karl Jaspers
“Promises are the uniquely human way of ordering the future, making it predictable and reliable to the extent that this is humanly possible.” – Hannah Arendt
Heidelberg , October 25, 1946
Dear Hannah Arendt,
Because you are a former student of mine who earned her doctorate with me twenty years ago in Heidelberg and who has remained a loyal friend to me through all these years, I hereby give to you as the person nearest to me the translation rights to all my works for the English language in America, to the extent that I possess said rights. I do this in the hope of expressing my thanks to you in a symbol both intellectual and material.
This gift is valid for your lifetime.
With warmest greetings as always,
Your,
Karl Jaspers
***
New York , February 19, 1953
Lieber Verehrtester
I’m picturing to myself that it’s Monday and that I’m in your house, which is so dear and familiar to me, and that I have a few minutes alone with you and feel free to say to you in the spoken word what in the written one sounds stupid and pompous.
I want to thank you for the seventy years of your life, for your existence, which would be cause enough for gratitude.
I want to thank you for the early years in Heidelburg when you were my teacher, the only one I have ever been able to recognize as such; and for the happiness and relief I found in seeing that one can be educated in freedom. I have never forgotten since then that the world and Germany, whatever else they may be, are the world in which you live and the country that produced you. I want to thank you for your friendship; you know what it means to me. It is such a great gift precisely because the mere fact of your existence would have been enough.
I feel funny sending wishes, because everything I wish you I also wish for my own sake. I hope you’ll remain healthy and live to be very old (I promise to come for your eightieth birthday!) and in full possession of your powers, so that you can complete everything
you mean to do without haste and live your life fully to its end. And I hope, too, that the world will honor you as much as I would like to honor you, because it seems to me that everyone would do well to put ceremony aside and examine his life in the light of yours. The part of the world that does honor you will then partake of the light that comes into a room when you enter it.
I don’t want to respond to your last letter today, but I think I can promise you that I will never cease to be a German in your sense of the word; that is, that I will not deny anything, not your Germany and Heinrich’s, not the tradition I grew up in or the language in which I think and in which the poems I love best were written. I won’t lay false claims to either a Jewish or an American past…
Give my warmest regards to your wife. This is a great and wonderful day for her, and I wish I could be there to help with the dishes or whatever.
In respect and gratitude and friendship I am,
Your,
Hannah
From Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926-1969, ed. Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner; tans. Robert and Rita Kimber; Harcourt Brace & Company 1992; pp. 63-4, 206-7.
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