"What remains? The language remains..."

The title of this blog comes from the evocative title of an interview published in Hannah Arendt's Essays in Understanding 1930-1954. In an interview, Günter Gaus ask Arendt if she had returned to Germany after her fleeing to the US in the late 1930s and if so, what remains of the pre-war Germany that she once knew so well. Here is an excerpt.

Gaus: When you come to Europe, what, in your impression, remains and what is irretrievably lost?

Arendt: The Europe of the pre-Hitler period? I do not long for that. I can tell you. What remains? The language remains....the German language is the essential thing that has remained and that I have always consciously preserved.

Gaus: Even in the most bitter time?

Arendt: Always. I thought to myself, What is one to do? It wasn't the German language that went crazy. And, second, there is no substitution of the mother tongue. People can forget their mother tongue. That's true--I have seen it. There are people who speak the new language better that I do. I still speak with a very heavy accent, and I often speak unidiomatically. They can all do these things correctly. But they do them in a language in which one cliche chases another because the productivity that one has in one's own language is cut off when one forgets that language. (pp. 12-13)

This dialogue is interesting and telling for many reasons. The permanence of the mother tongue for Arendt demonstrates that language lives somewhere deep inside all of us, even when it can be connected with profound trauma. Arendt appears to have made an active choice to not equate the German language with the atrocities that occurred in Germany in the Second World War. Therefore, she has remained in contact with the language that she thinks and writes in everyday. Second, she recognizes that access to her mother tongue is essential to be able to be creative in any language and avoid, as she says, chasing one cliche to another.

What happens when the language does not remain? When language is lost, suppress or dumbed down?  How many people have no access to their mother tongues because of monolingual schooling and/or linguistic nationalism that "act like heavy tanks advancing out from a more or less distant centre which claims uniqueness for itself, flattening any cultural and linguistic diversity they find in their path” (De Mauro in Italian Cultural Studies, 1996, p. 95).

What is lost when languages die, are forgotten, or are hidden far from "view"?