Hannah & Martin on Jerry Springer

The New York Times, November 5, 1995, p. 26.


Book on Philosopher's Life Stirs Scholarly Debate Over Her
Legacy

How did a Jewish intellectual justify her affair with a
Nazi enthusiast?

[Photo] Martin Heidegger was a follower of Hitler, in
this photograph from the 1930's even striking a pose
reminiscent of the Nazi leader.

By William H. Honan


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 1920's 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 1930's, 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 unrepentent 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," sald Elie Wiesel, the Nobel laureate who
has written of his experiences in the Auschwltz 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 ot 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 Ettinger, 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 the 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 Frelburg, 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-establlshed 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 act
that is believed to have contributed to Husserl's death.

After the war, a de-Nazification tribunal informed of
Heldegger's Nazi ardor and vicious anti-Semitlsm, 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, Protessor 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 been commenting in journals. In a
particularly scathing attack on Arendt, 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 discoverd
correspondence casts the most controversial passages in
Arendt's writing in an "even uglier" light than 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-Heidegger 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."

[Photo] The philosopher Hannah Arendt was a student of
18 when this photograph was taken. It was during this
time that her affair with the married philosophy
professor Martin Heidegger began.

[End]












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