Bibliogr. s. 32-33

The article aims at presenting Hannah Arendt's complicated relation with romanticism and romantic imagination and pays particular attention to dream life. It discovers that the theme of dreams-that-turn-out-to-be-real-life mysteriously appears throughout Arendt’s works. The primary source of this theme would be a self-reflective essay Die Schatten written in 1925 by 19-year-old Arendt, in which she admits that in dreams she lives "her proper life" (ihr eigentliches Leben) and feels internal harmony as well as harmony with the world. Interestingly, the essay ends with a wish to have, in the real life, scope for free verbal expression that would enable her to "release her soul," thus to dwell in a real, non-perfect version of dreamlike harmony. This source-as well as other texts, including the book on Rahel Varnhagen and unknown youthful notes on Sophocles-allows me to find out that it is both tempting and justified to describe Arendt's mature concept of political realm as a realm where the involuntary features of dreams, namely the perfect expression of uniqueness of the individual as well as his or her internal har-mony and harmony with the world, are to some extent recaptured.