In the Back of my Mind. Corporeity and Politics in the symbolic Cut of the Mother Tongue

Abstract

“Your mother tongue and another language are so different. I can put it simply. I know a lot of German poetry by heart. The poems are always in the back of my mind. I could achieve that in a second language. I say things in German I’d never let myself say in English” (Arendt, 1964). Thus speaks Hannah Arendt, in an interview with Günter Gaus on October 28, 1964, in response to a question regarding her life in Europe and her connection with pre-Hitler’s Germany. “I don’t long for that. I can you assure of that. What has remained? The language remains” (Arendt, 1964). After the traumatic experience of escaping from Nazism and statelessness for Arendt, there remains in that past world only the relationship with the mother tongue, perceived as something concrete, involuntary, a trace deposited in the body and returning from there, resurfaces, bringing to mind verses of poems otherwise forgotten. It is no accident that, to give it back its meaning, Arendt interrupts the conversation in German and uses an English idiomatic expression – ‘in the back of my mind’ – in an attempt to express in word, to translate material reality into a form of the untranslatable, unrepeatable and not entirely symbolizable relationship that she maintains with the German mother tongue.

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