The Critical Edition of the Complete Works of Hannah Arendt will present all of Arendt’s published and unpublished works on the basis of philologically-established texts, a project that involves editing approximately 21,000 pages of material from books, articles, and typed or handwritten manuscripts. Along with material from well-known archival sources (the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach; Bard College in New York), several thousand pages of previously unknown documents (typescripts, corrected galleys, notes, etc.) have been identified in archives around the world and integrated into the text corpus.
The Critical Edition will, for the first time, present Arendt’s texts in complete form, with textual commentary, and in the diversity of languages in which they were composed. It presents works that Hannah Arendt published in her lifetime (monographs, essay collections, articles, interviews, etc.) along with thousands of pages of unpublished documents from her literary estate (typescripts, notes, drafts, and revisions), in their original languages (German, English, French, Yiddish). Hannah Arendt composed versions of nearly all her writings in more than one language; this critical edition unlocks this fundamentally plural dimension of her work as never before.
The Critical Edition is conceived as a hybrid edition (print and digital): the print edition is published by Wallstein Verlag in Göttingen, the digital version is hosted by the Freie Universität Berlin. The systematic interconnections between the printed books and the webportal realize the full potential of each medium.
The team behind the Critical Edition includes international experts in the work of Hannah Arendt, in critical philology, and in the digital humanities.
The interdisciplinary committee leading the Critical Edition is made up of:
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