Hannah Arendt Haus – appeal for help
A world that is to have room for the public cannot be built for only one generation, or planned only for the living; it must transcend the lifespan of mortal men.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition.
The Hannah Arendt Haus in Hanover, Germany, is a refugee library and community centre. I first visited the library and met with its custodian, Walter Koch, when I began the research for We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience. It was an important visit for me. The library is constructed in the world-affirming spirit of its namesake. The project had to move last year, and is now urgently seeking help to continue its work. Do please think about contributing if you can here.
You can read about the Hannah Arendt Haus in this extract from We are Free:
The Hannah Arendt Haus
The Hannah Arendt Haus in Hannover is not Hannah Arendt’s childhood home, but a small community library housed in a room on the first floor of an old school, now a citizens’ centre, in the Nordstadt district of the city. The autumn light filtering through the trees and visible through the tall windows on the day I visited in September 2019 cast the same warmth it would have done when Arendt was born in October 1906. The custodian, Walter Koch, had written to welcome me and had made it clear that it was Hannah Arendt the radical who lived in this house:
You are welcome to Hannah Arendt Library, Hannover. It is not a place to venerate personalities but to try to undermine European and German ‘closed shops’. We try to follow stories of flight, of new beginning and of resistance . . . Naturally we are also inspired by books, essays like ‘We Refugees’ or On Revolution . . . and are glad to live in the tradition of Elizabeth Eckford’s struggle.
The first thing Walter pointed out to me as I entered the room was the worn path on the floorboards, trodden into the wood by the regular pacing of long-dead teachers.
The Hannah Arendt Haus is a library made up of books that migrants and refugees have brought with them to Hannover or which have been sent on from their homes. Thanks to the historically close relationship between Germany and Iran, Iranians have the biggest collection. There are shelves filled with volumes from China, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kurdistan. Books deposited by Palestinians sit next to those left by Israeli dissidents, some of whose older hardbacks may well have returned to Germany having fled with their previous owners during the Holocaust. A few years ago, the man who runs the Greek workers’ co-operative upstairs presented Walter with a volume that told of his own family’s expulsion from Turkey in 1923. Walter supplemented the Turkish collection with some lavishly illustrated volumes on the Ottoman Empire from his grandfather’s library.
The Hannah Arendt Haus is a library of survival. Separately, each collection conserves a small piece of national tradition, culture and history. But the books are there in the first place because of political, economic and, now, environmental catastrophes. Violence, seen and unseen, fast and slow, blew these volumes off their former bookshelves and into the Hannah Arendt Haus. It is a library of, and for, the modern uprooted.
The mood of the Hannah Arendt Haus is the opposite to that of the lonely scholars and readers who inhabit ‘The Library of Babel’ in Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges’s famous short story first published in 1941, the year that Arendt left Europe for the United States. ‘The Library of Babel’ contains the infinity of the universe, all knowledge is there; all that has been thought and written. Yet, no matter how hard they search among the books, for all their theories, all their intellectual endeavour, the citizens can find no explanation as to why they live as they do, in hexagonal libraries, following traditions and rules that appear to have come from nowhere and make little sense, until they die and their bodies are gently pushed out into space by their friends.
Hannah Arendt would say that the readers were looking in the wrong place to start with. What really makes life in the library meaningful is what goes on between the people, and between their books, themselves. Nobody knows the meaning of the storybook of mankind, but without it life would be unbearable. (HC 184) The human world is built on little more than the necessities and hazards of living, speaking and being human together. The little more, of course, is also everything there is. It is on this precious ground, Hannah Arendt believed, recognizing both our powerlessness and our courage, our banality and our splendour, that we are free to start something new in the world.
An air of fragility permeates the Hannah Arendt Haus. But the warm light and Walter’s orderly shelves hold, rather than disguise, the sense of lives suddenly and unexpectedly thrown in the air, and the library is a quiet not a sad place. I asked Walter about its history how had the library begun? He began to tell me how during the early 1990s he and other activists wanted to open an alternative venue to access the scientific knowledge that was then only available behind the walls of nearby Leibniz University. So much was happening so quickly, particularly with climate science and with nuclear, genetic and information technology, it was important that ordinary citizens had the means to understand and respond to a rapidly changing world situation. But then he stopped and asked: Did I know about Gotthold Lessing? And had I ever been to Hamburg?
