ARENDT'S RELATIONSHIP WITH HEIDEGGER
BY WILLIAM H. HONAN
NEW YORK TIMES - SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 5, 1995
ARENDT, Hannah, (1906-1975), German-American
political scientist who characterised 'totalitarianism'.
Received Doctorate from the University of
Heidelberg at the age of 22 after studying
under Martin Heidegger. In 1933 she went
to France to escape the Nazis and, in 1941,
fled to the U. S., becoming a U. S. citizen
in 1951. Arendt was research director, Conference on Jewish Relations (1944-46); chief editor, Schocken Books (1946-48);
executive secretary, Jewish Cultural Reconstruction (1949-52); visiting professor, Princeton
(1959), Columbia (1960); professor, U. of
Chicago at Berkeley (1963-67), New School
for Social Research (1967-75). Author of
Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), On Revolution Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), On Violence (1970).
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One of the gossipy curiosities of 20th-century
philosophy is that Hannah Arendt, the German-born
Jewish philosopher remembered for her fierce
and unforgiving attacks on totalitarianism,
had a youthful fling in the 1920s with Martin
Heidegger.
Heidegger, the influential philosopher, later
became a prominent Nazi and at one time aspired
to be Hitler s chief ideologue.
Most scholars believed that by the 1930s
Arendt and Heidegger had gone their separate
ways and their early liaison could be dismissed
as a short- lived dalliance.
But now a book based on their newly unsealed
correspondence, "Hannah Arendt/Martin
Heidegger" (Yale University Press) by
Elzbieta Ettinger, has revealed that their
affair was not evanescent but burned with
white hot intensity for four years. Most
disturbing to some scholars after the war,
Arendt and Heidegger resumed their friendship.
And Arendt, whose fiery reproach had extended
to European Jews whom she said had "collaborated"
with the Nazis in their own destruction,
did almost everything she could to whitewash
the unrepentant Heidegger, who had succeeded
in banning Jewish professors from the University
of Freiburg, which he led from 1933 to 1934.
"She devoted herself to popularizing
his philosophy in the United States and to
vindicating his name in the eyes of his critics,"
wrote Professor Ettinger.
The revelations have stirred one of the most
heated scholarly debates in recent memory,
taking hold in publications and planned seminars
that raise such issues as the extent to which
influential thinkers should be judged by
their private acts.
"The book shows that Arendt was so arrogant
that she thought she alone could decide who
should be forgiven and who should not,"
said Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate who
has written of his experiences in the Auschwitz
death camp. "I'm not so sure her moral
stature will remain intact."
Ismar Schorsh, chancellor of the Jewish Theological
Seminary of America, reacted strongly. "Arendt's
reputation will not recover," he said.
"Her defense of Heidegger, when she
knew better, is hard to forgive."
Defensive of the reputations of both Arendt
and Heidegger is Sandra Hinchman, a professor
of political science at St. Lawrence University
in Canton, N. Y., who has edited with her
husband, Lewis Hinchman, an anthology of
Arendt's articles.
"Some of the greatest philosophers were
despicable people," she said. "Rousseau
abandoned his five children to a Catholic
orphanage before writing 'Emile' his treatise
on education. My fear is that if we concentrate
on the lives of some philosophers we may
become prejudiced against their work."
At the center of the storm is Elzbieta Ellinger,
an M. I. T. professor who is a survivor of
the Warsaw ghetto and author of many books
including a biography of the socialist leader
Rosa Luxemburg. Professor Ettinger said she
first learned of the existence of the long-sealed
Arendt-Heidegger correspondence in 1988 from
Arendt's friend Mary McCarthy. Ms. McCarthy,
Professor Ettinger said, encouraged her to
write a biography of Arendt.
With Ms. McCarthy's support, Professor Ettinger
obtained access to the correspondence in
the Hannah Arendt Literary Trust in New York.
Heidegger's correspondence with Arendt at
the Deutsches Nationalarchiv in Marbach am
Neckar. Germany, remains closed but Professor
Ettinger was able to obtain copies of his
letters and to paraphrase them without violating
copyright law.
"The letters reveal that Arendt and
Heidegger were emotionally dependent on each
other for most of their lives," Professor
Ettinger said. "She could have destroyed
these letters but preserved them because
she did not wish to be the invisible woman
in Heidegger's life as Ellen Ternan was in
Dickens's life. She was proud that the most
important philosopher of the century had
chosen her."
Arendt and Heidegger began their affair in
1924 when she, then 18, enrolled in his course
in philosophy at the University of Marburg.
He was then 35, married, the Father of two
sons and was completing his masterwork "Being
and Time", which would soon launch him
into the top rank of modern philosophers.
Putting both his marriage and career at risk,
Heidegger invited her to his office one evening
and initiated the affair. Subsequently, they
pursued this relationship with clandestine
signals such as, "If you see a light
in my office at exactly 9 P. M., you can
come."
While she gazed at him adoringly, he expounded
on ancient and modern philosophy, literature,
poetry, Bach, Beethoven, Rilke and Thomas
Mann. In 1929, she told him that "our
love became the blessing of our life."
In 1933 in her last letter to Heidegger until
after the war, Arendt complained of having
heard that he was barring Jews from his seminars,
refusing to speak to Jewish colleagues and
rejecting Jewish doctoral students.
Heidegger, then the newly appointed rector
of Albert-Ludwigs-University in Freiburg,
had just joined the Nazi party and had delivered
the infamous rector's address in which he
declared his allegiance to Hitler. With heavy
sarcasm, he denied Arendt's accusations.
The truth is, as Professor Ettinger points
out, his anti-Semitism had been well established
four years previously when he wrote to warn
a high official in the Ministry of Education
against the "growing Judiaization"
of Germany's "spiritual life."
Among his more abominable acts while rector
in Freiburg, Heidegger banned from the campus
all Jewish professors including his mentor,
the aging Edmund Husserl -- an achat is believed
to have contributed to Husserl's death.
After the war, a de-Nazification tribunal
informed of Heidegger's Nazi ardor and vicious
anti-Semitism, brushed aside the fact that
his intellectual work laid the foundation
for much post-modern thought and banned him
from university life.
Arendt was well aware of these proceedings.
Referring to the death of Husserl in a letter
in 1946 to the philosopher Karl Jaspers,
Arendt called Heidegger "a potential
murderer." But almost from the moment
she was reunited with Heidegger in 1950,
Professor Ettinger said, Arendt forgave him
everything.
Writing a tribute to Heidegger in The New
York Review of Books in 1971 on the occasion
of Heidegger's 80th birthday, Arendt dismissed
his Nazi past humorously by likening him
to Thales, the Greek philosopher who while
gazing at the stars stumbled into a well.
Arendt died in 1975, a year before the death
of Heidegger.
Since the Ettinger book was published, the
academic community has him as a giant in
the history of been commenting in journals.
In a particularly scathing attack on Ardent,
Richard Wolin, a Rice University historian
and the author of "The Politics of Being:
The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger"
(Columbia University Press), declared in
a long essay in The New Republic last month
that the newly discovered correspondence
casts the most controversial passages in
Arendt's writing in an "even uglier"
lighhan before.
Could it be, Professor Wolin asked, that
Arendt's inflammatory charge in her report
on the trial of Adolph Eichmann in Jerusalem
that the Jews of Europe were partly responsible
for their own slaughter was "meant somehow
to absolve the magician of Messkirch [Heidegger]
of his own crimes by showing that his victims
were also guilty?" Clearly, Professor
Wolin believes the answer is yes.
On the other side of the debate, Lisa Disch,
an assistant professor of political science
at the University of Minnesota and the author
of "Hannah Arendt and the Limits of
Philosophy" (Cornell University Press),
scorned Professor Ettinger's book as "tabloid
scholarship," adding, "It's a shame
it's getting so much attention."
Dana Villa, a professor of political theory
at Amherst College whose book "Arendt
and Heidegger: the Fate of the Political"
has just been published by Princeton University
Press, said: "I think Ettinger gets
it wrong in portraying Arendt as a dupe of
Heidegger. She respected him as a giant in
the history of Western thought, and she was
influenced by him, but she wasn't uncritical.
In her last book, she expressed her distrust
of philosophy as pure thinking divorced from
moral and political judgment."
Professor Villa also said that Professor
Ettinger has exaggerated Heidegger's villainy.
"He was an ordinary German," he
said. "He believed the Nazi line and
he was perhaps self-deluded, but he was not
part of the apparatus of killing. He hurt
some Jews but he also helped some. He was
not unique."
Professor Ettinger said that in the final
analysis the Arendt-Deidegger relationship
was the stuff of poetic tragedy.
"No person who knows about love and
passion will consider Arendt's forgiveness
of Heidegger unusual," she said. "Americans
have great difficulty understanding passion.
When I discuss 'Anna Karenina' with my students,
they can't understand why Anna gives up a
loving husband, a beautiful home and a wonderful
child for this jerk of an officer. I tell
them to read 'Manon Lescaut' or D. H. Lawrence's
'Women in Love.' Then they understand. Love
is irrational. There is nothing we can do
about it."
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