Linguistic cosmopolitans: Arendt,Čapek,Orwell

Abstract

Political resistance to Fascism in 1930s Europe was often animated by a particular cosmopolitan imaginary. In this article we explore a number of questions concealed within this dynamic. What is the status of language in a space that expands beyond the constraints of the territorial to encompass more mobile allegiances and differently scaled solidarities? Conversely, how does an impulse towards the cosmopolitan turn back to the nation and reframe internal dialogues surrounding the nature of its linguistic constitution? Hannah Arendt’s monograph on the nineteenth-century German-Jewish salonnière Rahel Varnhagen, the Czech novelist Karel Čapek’s sat^ire on twentieth-century totalitarianism, War with the Newts, and George Orwell’s accounts of both the Spanish Civil War and the culture of the English working class, all three written in the mid 1930s, engage with language as it detaches itself from the narrow optics of nationalism and reattaches itself to both a politics of the public and an ethics of friendship beyond the nation-state. That 1936 is the date around which these ideas of language and communication cohere gives them a singular resonance. For these three very different writers, ideas of the cosmopolitan provide not only a potential future for human solidarity, but a means of revisiting the nation itself, at once engaging with its history of linguistic repression and with the danger posed by the sovereign monolingualism of Fascism.