Hanna Arendt/Martin Heiddeger
By Elzbieta Ettinger
Yale University Press, 139 pages, $18.50
Much of the marvelous story recounted in this book has been known since 1982 when Elizabeth Young-Bruehl published her fine biography, “Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World.” Since then, apparently, Elizbieta Ettinger has been allowed–by the Heidegger family?–to paraphrase and characterize if not, unfortunately, to quote from the letters in the German Literary Archive in Marbach. Using them, she has written a coherent account of the relationship between these two extraordinary people who met, loved, separated and reunited around and within the most terrible events of what is, in some respects, the most terrible of centuries.
In 1924, the 18-year-old Hannah Arendt came to Marburg and attended the lectures of the mesmerizing revolutionary philosopher, Martin Heidegger. Intellectual, beautiful, learned, emancipated but naive, timid but ready for grand experience, she was enraptured by the small, dark, peasant-garbed, 35-year-old philosopher. Marburg was Heidegger’s first professorial post. It had been acquired with difficulty largely through the effort of Edmund Husserl, the Jewish phenomenologist who held the chair at Freiburg, which he would soon yield to his brilliant younger student, collaborator and rival. Heidegger would dedicate his reputation-making book, “Being and Time,” to Husserl and then, ten years later, remove the dedication and ignore his master’s illness and death.
Marburg was “a foggy place” whose “soft, flabby” air worked to undo the health Heidegger built up in the Black Forest hills where his wife had had a cabin built for him. There he skied, chopped wood, carried water from the well, wrote by oil lamp and relished the solitude indispensable to turning philosophy upside down. At Marburg, though, he wrote his friend, Karl Jaspers, in June 1924, “there is nothing happening, no stimulus at all.”
A few months later this had changed. “The hidden king . . . in the realm of thinking” had spotted the brilliant young Jewess taking in the intelligence which (she wrote 45 years later) was “completely of this world” but “so concealed in it that one can never be quite sure if it exists at all.” He invited her to talk. She came dressed in a raincoat, a hat pulled low on her face, her yeses and nos hardly audible. He wrote “Dear Miss Arendt” how much he respected her mind and soul, how he hoped that she would be faithful to herself and also understand the frightful loneliness of a man exclusively devoted to the scholar’s pursuit of truth.
Ettinger calls this letter, which she cannot quote, “a subtle caress . . . lyrical . . . seductive.” Four days later, a second letter comes to “Dear Hannah,” and two weeks after that, “a brief note” makes it clear that professor and student are lovers.
“A total giving of oneself to one person,” “the continuity of my life.” These are two of the many ways Arendt described what Heidegger was to her. Twenty-five years later, she would write her husband
Heinrich Blucher about a 1950s meeting with Heidegger and his wife Elfrida in which “he never denied that during all of twenty-five years, I was the passion of his life.”
In the small university town, however, the lecturer on Truth as the Unhidden did everything he could to hide what was happening. Assignations were made by mail (though Arendt was never to write him anything but innocuous cards signalling approval of his precisely-timed arrangements), signal lights blinked on and off in rooms. It was wearying, demoralizing. The passionate young woman was played like a yo-yo by the nervous, smitten philosopher. On the edge of leaving–“because of my love for you, to make nothing more difficult than it already was”–he sent her off.
She went to Heidelberg to study with Jaspers and write a doctoral dissertation on the concept of love in Augustine. She had an affair, then another, but every now and then, a letter would come from Heidegger summoning her to a train station here, a house there. Heidegger convinced her that she “could find happiness with another man while still loving him.” She married one of his students, Guenther Stern. Heidegger came to see them. He and Stern left together, Arendt hiding in the station for a final glimpse of her lover.
It was 1929, the air was thickening with the radical nationalism and biological racism of the Nazis. On a visit to the Heideggers, Stern had stood on his hands for five minutes, his athleticism so delighting them that they suggested he join the Nazi Party. He said, “look at me and you’ll see that I belong to those you wish to exclude.” Hearing this and other stories, Arendt wrote Heidegger about mistreatment of his Jewish students and colleagues. The response was a sarcastic account of all that he’d done for Jews who’d badgered him for favors. Had he been an anti-semite in Marburg (that is, when he’d made love to her?) This was the spring of 1933, he was Rector of the University of Freiburg, and, in April, gave the famous Rector’s Address which described Adolf Hitler as the expression of that essential Being which broke the filthy crust of history. Four months later, Arendt left Germany.
In the black years that followed, she knew exile, poverty, a heart lacerated by his deception and mendacity, and then, again, love. In 1936, her first marriage long over, she met Blucher who would slowly enable her to both love and remain–what Heidegger never allowed her to remain–herself. In 1941, they came to America and began building a life which saw her become one the world’s most renowned intellectuals. Her first public discussion of Heidegger came in 1946 where she described him as “the last (we hope) romantic . . . whose complete irresponsibility was attributed partly to the delusion of genius, partly to desperation.”
Arendt was in touch with Jaspers who, like her, understood the infantile, cowardly, and temporizing elements of this “mystagogue-cum-sorcerer . . . who occasionally succeeds in hitting the nerve of the philosophical enterprise in the most mysterious and marvelous way.” (This is from a Jaspers letter that had consequences for Heidegger’s denazification proceeding.)
Arendt told Jaspers of her affair with Heidegger–“How exciting,” he said–and then wrote Heidegger that she was coming to Freiburg. He came to her hotel and “recited” his life as a tragedy in which she had played a role for two acts. After that–she wrote Blucher–they had what was the first honest talk of their lives, so moving to both of them that it began another phase of what as to be a 50-year relationship.
Heidegger, who had never treated Arendt as a grown-up, and, for several post-war years, would not acknowledge that she was a writer and thinker of consequence, became, in the last years, her supporter, acknowledger and true friend. She became the vanguard of those who redeemed him: he had been deceived by the Nazis, had resigned the Rectorship after one year; the Nazis isolated and ignored him, then, after the fall, he was again humiliated, his house requisitioned by the occupying power, his library threatened; he was forced to sweep rubble from the Freiburg streets, he was forbidden to lecture. She acknowledged how much her own work owed him; he said she was the one who understood him best.
The last romantic? The last two romantics, as Elzbieta Ettinger quietly and methodically relates the history, one whose dimensions spring from the complexity of the protagonists and the terrible events in which they played parts. The reviewer sees the lovely young Jewish actress Winona Ryder as young Hannah; as for Heidegger–nobody. What the story lacks now is a first-rate script, and that may have to wait till the literary executors allow the publication of the letters themselves.
