Hannah Arendt

a storyteller between past and future

Abstract

This essay presents the link between the thought of Hannah Arendt and the act of narrating. Arendt’s work brings a narrative experience by talking intensively with literature creating new possibilities of relating to the past. In relating human experiences to events in History, Arendt sought to understand how generations of the past had thought and acted publicly in the common world. Between past and future it has been broken the thread of the tradition. The tradition has that selects and names the experiences to be transmitted from an older generation to a younger generation. But even in the gap between past and future, Arendt’s narrative finds “treasures” in the past, stories that constitute a legacy of experiences of a world common to future generations. Understanding human experiences in the past through stories, enables the uniqueness of the new generations to take root in the common world.