ELISABETH YOUNG-BRUEHL
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narrative, I thought of myself as producing a meditation on the
modalities of time-on the interplay of past, present, and future
in the psychological, historical, and philosophical dimensions
of one person's life. Beginning in the first chapter, and continu–
ing through to the last, I tried to show how Hannah Arendt lived
not just in our times but in time. With this meditation, I hoped
to present-not describe, but present in narrative-what I take to
be the fundamental chord of her philosophizing: bei"ng-in-time,
the life of
homo temporalis.
. Finally, I made existential statements about the situations–
Karl Jaspers would have called them
Grenzensituationen,
boun–
dary situations-in which Hannah Arendt's life took on its
characteristic forms, in which she achieved not one
Lebensform
but several. I kept in mind Karl Jasper's philosophical reflec–
tions on what it is to elucidate-not describe, but elucidate–
boundary situations like the following (in his words): "that I am
always in situations; that I cannot live without struggling and
suffering; that I cannot avoid guilt; that I must die.... " On this
level of my biography, I tried to develop a theme: it is not possi–
ble to
know
another's existential self, another's
Existenz;
it is
possible only to show the person's forms of communication with
companions. In other words, how a person makes and maintains
friendships is
how-if
not
who-she
is.
The question that guided me through these levels was very
simple-and very difficult: What kind of biography will build
toward the last level wi thout fixing the relations between the
levels, without becoming architectonic? What kind of biography
will preserve my respect for what will always remain hidden to
me?
As for the political question a biographer must, it seems to
me, answer, biographies are many things, many more than I
have indicated in this rough survey. And in each historical era
biographies have a different role to play in the private and pub–
lic domains of memory. I believe the biographer's first political
responsibility ought to be to think about the prevailing condi–
tions of memory, and to write what is needed for contemporary
memorialization. This may, at first, Sf'em like a very limited
point of view, but I believe it is not.
In our time, we have had to learn that it is human to re–
member, and that to be deprived of memory-perhaps even just
