BIOGRAPHY : Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and ForgivenessBy Daniel Maier-Katkin Norton, 384pp. £18.99
AT THE University of Marburg, in Germany, in November 1924, Hannah Arendt, an 18-year-old Jewish student from Königsberg, attended a lecture by Martin Heidegger on Plato's Sophist. According to both thinkers, they fell in love at once: she with a darkly charismatic philosopher of 35 whom she later called the "secret king in the empire of thinking", he with "the silent prayer of your beloved hands and your shining brow". The difference in tone and perspective is telling. It's not hard to make Heidegger look a prize creep in retrospect, given his obvious manipulation of their brief affair and the fact that Arendt was but the first of his students on whom the author of Being and Timelavished such faintly comic encomia. But as Daniel Maier-Katkin argues in this balanced and thoughtful book, the relationship between Arendt and Heidegger was among the most profound and enigmatic intellectual friendships of the century. It was also a test – a test that one has to say Heidegger failed – of how far we can separate exalted thought from profane action.
The actual affair did not last long; Arendt moved on to study with Karl Jaspers (the other great philosophical presence in her life) at Freiburg and to a first, unsuccessful, marriage. When he was appointed professor of philosophy at Freiburg, in 1929, Heidegger, who was married with two sons, insisted they break off all contact.
What happened next has been well documented by scholars in recent decades, though its full significance for Heidegger’s philosophical legacy remains unclear. When the Nazis came to power Heidegger was appointed rector of the university and for the next year (until he fell from favour) carried out the dictates of the new regime with at best opportunistic energy, at worst knowing indifference towards its victims. While his lectures and writings trumpeted his optimism about Hitler’s ascendance, his most egregious act was to sign the papers that dismissed all Jewish faculty, including his philosophical mentor, Edmund Husserl.
Some measure of the man’s character at this time may be gleaned from Jaspers; when Heidegger visited him and his Jewish wife, and Jaspers mentioned her tears of despair at the worsening situation in Germany, Heidegger replied that sometimes crying made a person feel better.
It has often been claimed (notably by Richard Wolin, more frequently by lesser writers) that from her exile in the US Arendt’s enduring love for Heidegger made her blind to his behaviour and inclined to accept his claims, after the war, that he had in fact been a victim of the Nazi regime. Maier-Katkin shows this to be quite untrue – Arendt’s letters to Jaspers and her second husband, Heinrich Blücher, are filled with horror at his duplicity. But she does seem to have believed that his besetting sin was not anti-Semitism but a combination of arrogance, ambition and political obtuseness. Heidegger’s enthusiasm for the Third Reich, she wrote, “was matched only by his glaring ignorance of what he was talking about”. It was this conviction that allowed Arendt intermittently to make contact with Heidegger, who was excluded from the academic mainstream in Germany after the war, and ultimately to play a role in his rehabilitation as a thinker.
Maier-Katkin is a dutifully detailed guide to these postwar years. Arendt's own career as a scholar and public intellectual flourished in New York; The Origins of Totalitarianismwas published in 1951, and Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she first proposed the phrase "the banality of evil", brought wider literary fame in 1963. Heidegger, in his weirdly soppy way, had at least had the grace to cast their first encounter as a meeting of minds, even if he could not resist reminding Arendt that he was the teacher in their relationship. Now he simply ignored her intellectual achievements. His letters are filled with pastoral evasions of his own past and her present: "I was recently in the valley by the birch which says hello, as do the first cowslips." As Arendt put it, "I know that he cant bear to see my name in public, that I write books, etc."
Why, one might ask, did she bother with him? Maier-Katkin is right to assert that the standard line – Arendt was still hopelessly devoted to the lying old metaphysician, and thus traduced the Jewish dead with her continued defence of him – just won’t do. What’s clear is that for Arendt their relationship had opened up possibilities for thinking and dialogue that nobody else could have revealed to her. She must have known that he had not only betrayed that relationship (or what it had seemed that relationship promised) both personally and politically but had betrayed his own thought, too, and could find no way back. Assuredly, she loved him, but she seems also, especially in her late writings on forgiveness, to have thought productively about and against his fading presence.
In the US some overheated reviews of Stranger from Abroadhave already used it to trash Arendt's reputation once more over her questioning of the motives behind the Eichmann trial and her postwar stand against the militaristic isolationism of the new Israeli state. Perplexity about the relationship between Arendt and Heidegger shows no signs of waning, but Maier-Katkin has written an impressively calm and persuasive account of this complex case.
Brian Dillon is UK editor of
Cabinet
, a quarterly of art and culture based in New York. His
Tormented Hope: Nine Hypochondriac Lives
is published in paperback by Penguin
