In his poem “Little Gidding,” T.S. Eliot writes that “...the communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.” True enough, in the poetic and highly metaphoric way in which Eliot is writing,

Yet if it is true that the dead speak eloquently to us across time, another, more sobering and less poetic fact also confronts us: the dead cannot choose the time or manner of their speech. Their voices depend utterly on the machinations of the living. It is the living who exhume voices lost in time’s mist, or amplify the voices that drown in the dissonance of a contemporary media that seems often to be in a state of permanent revolution— if not outright explosion. In fact, as the Internet grows and spreads in influence, dissolving barriers of time, space and public access, one can argue that the great voices of literature are tongued also with a technological fire devised by the living.

In the spirit of this discussion, it is difficult to know what Hannah Arendt--one of the 20th Century’s most probing intellects--would have to say about the Internet. Would it be, to her mind, something akin to the “public space” that she hoped to carve out for intellectual discourse? Or would the negative aspects of cyberspace— the cacophony of equally-privileged and unvetted voices, and the narrow and easily choked-off portals—draw her considerable critical acumen?

Arendt cannot choose the time and manner in which we continue to hear and read her powerful voice— reasoning against darkness. Yet the continuing power of her words and the events that she has interpreted that has placed her, suddenly, at the forefront of 20th Century intellectuals with a presence on the World Wide Web. Her most controversial book, Eichmann in Jerusalem, remains a touchstone for interpreting the chillingly organized mass killings of our time. (The Wannsee conference where much of the protocol for the extermination of Jews and other categories of citizen that the Nazis saw as “undesirable” was depicted again in a movie starring Kenneth Branagh, shown recently on the popular American television network HBO.)

In fact, though Arendt died in 1975, only 26 years ago, the collection of her manuscripts and letters in the Library of Congress has been so heavily mined by scholars that it was literally beginning to disintegrate.

“The Arendt collection is very heavily used,” says Alice Birney, Cultural Manuscript Historian at the Library of Congress. “It’s becoming fragile, and it is in need of preservation.”

For most rare papers used heavily by scholars, a transfer to microfilm is the preferred solution to the problem posed by the disintegration of physical collections. The Library of Congress, with the New School University in New York City, and the Hannah Arendt Center at the University of Oldenburg, Germany, have settled on an even more technologically advanced solution: they are creating 75,000 digital images of each of the 25,000 manuscripts in the Arendt collection.

Abigail Grotke, a Digital Conversion Specialist at the Library of Congress who supervised the image transfer of Arendt’s materials, observes that “it was a massive effort” that has taken over two and a half years. Not only did the technical process of scanning each image and assuring its technical quality prove difficult, Grotke says, but there were even more basic issues to be addressed.

“Before scanning,” Grotke continues, “we cleaned up each folder. We put all the contents back in order, and made it as clean as it could possibly be.”

Even murkier than the physical condition of the manuscripts was the more vexing problem of intellectual property. Though the Library of Congress owned the manuscripts and correspondence written by Arendt, the copyrights on the letters written to Arendt by others proved to be a difficult problem for the librarians.

Birney says that the Library “knew from the beginning that there would be tremendous copyright issues” associated with digitizing the Arendt material. The Library employed what Birney calls “a contingent of searchers” to write letters to anyone whose writing was in the collection to ask for their approval. A number of Arendt’s correspondents were famous intellectual and cultural figures, but many were simply readers with no particular notoriety. All had to be contacted.

Part of the difficulty in obtaining rights to materials in the Arendt collection written by others involves an interesting bit of American cultural history. In the now-burgeoning American practice of U.S. voters electing actors and other cultural figures to public office (Ronald Reagan being the most prominent), the musician and actor Sonny Bono (who was the wife of international pop star and actress Cher) was elected to the U.S. Congress in 1994. Though Bono did not prove to be an influential politician in his over three years in office, before he died in a skiing accident in January 1998, one of his legacy was the “Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act of 1998”-- passed by the U.S. Congress after his death as a tribute. The legislation extended copyright protection for authors to the duration of their lifetimes, plus an additional 70 years.

In short, the effect of the act on collections of 20th Century materials, such as those in the Arendt collection, was to place the works of many of those who had corresponded with the writer back into a “copyright protected” status. Thus, specific permissions had to be obtained.

Birney notes that Arendt inadvertently added to the confusion over copyrights years after her death by her own habits of correspondence. Arendt made a practice of turning over letters that she received, and sticking them into a typewriter with her own stationary and a piece of carbon paper. Occasionally, Arendt’s word “bleed” into the words of others. Arendt’s words are permitted to be used, but if the correspondent or their executors have not given permission, their words cannot be used. “It’s a glitch,” Birney notes, “that ties things up in copyright.”

Despite the copyright struggles involved in digitizing and publishing Arendt’s work on the Internet, Grotke notes that the Library of Congress has had considerable success obtaining permissions, including approval from the estates of poet WH. Auden and critic Lionel Trilling, and from living writers such as Norman Podhoretz.

The scope of the Arendt project and the labor involved in it were underwritten by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Birney notes that the project would not have been possible without private financial support. “It would have been unthinkable,” Birney says, “without that funding.”

Though not all of the Arendt collection will be placed on the Internet, the entire collection will be available at the Library of Congress, the New School University, and the Hannah Arendt Center in Oldemburg, Germany. What is already available, however, is substantial and revealing material.

The first and final draft of Arendt’s 1961 book, Between Past and Future, and her 1963 book On Revolution, are available in their entirety on the Internet, as is the entire version of Eichmann in Jerusalem printed by The New Yorker magazine in 1962. More material will be placed online later in 2001, when the process is finished. The Library of Congress presentation of materials also includes an introduction to Arendt’s life and thought by New School University professor Jerome Kohn.

The exposure on the Internet will certainly spur even more interest in one of the 20th Century’s most profound thinkers, but it will also serve to protect the actual manuscripts themselves, allowing the living to continue to listen to Arendt’s wise and impassioned thoughts on human freedom and her indictment of its enemies.

The Arendt archives are available at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/arendthtml/arendthome.html