Pearl Diving: Writing History after the Break of Tradition

The Department of German at NYU and Deutsches Haus at NYU present a lecture by Susanne Lüdemann, Professor of German and Comparative Literature at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, on “Pearl Diving. Writing History after the Break of Tradition”.

The Pearl Diver is the title of the third part of Hannah Arendt’s essay on Walter Benjamin, published in 1968. In this essay, Arendt uses the metaphor of ‘pearl diving’ (derived from Shakespeare’s Tempest) to describe Benjamin’s method of collecting and (re)combining quotes. Also, she attests to him “the maybe not unique but extremely rare gift of thinking poetically.” In her talk, Lüdemann argues that Arendt’s description of Benjamin’s literary method is to a large extent also a description of her own method of writing history after what she calls the “break of tradition.” Both of them are concerned with uses of the past which in the first place are a working through language. The core question of Lüdemann’s talk is directed at ‘postmodern’ forms of transmission and inheritance.

From Deutsches Haus NYU