The New York Times, Oct 1, 1995, Book Review, p. 39.
Bookend/Judith Shulevitz
Arendt and Heidegger: An Affair to Forget?
Of all the tragedies of the Holocaust, that of the German
Jews has to have been the most intimate. Auschwitz didn't
just demonstrate the ease with which their entire community
could be reduced to ashes; it turned their very identity
into a contradiction in terms. It was the ultimate rebuff
to what Walter Benjamin once called the German Jew's
"unrequited love" for Germany.
This exquisitely personal sense of loss, in any case, is
the explanation of choice for scholars struggling to
understand how Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger -- the
German Jewish debunker of totalitarianism and the Nazi
philosopher -- who were lovers before the war, could have
become friends again after. "I think she did not want to
believe that what had happened had contaminated the past
completely," says Seyla Benhabib, a political philosopher
who teaches at Harvard. "She wanted to believe that
something could have been saved after the catastrophe."
Beyond that, says Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, author of the
definitive Arendt biography and the first to write about
the affair, in 1982, "I think Arendt knew that Heidegger
was, among 20th-century philosophers, a towering figure."
There is one explanation, however, that nobody proposed. It
would have been too crude, too distressing; it would have
forced us to fantasize an Arendt -- a thinker of exemplary
moral seriousness -- so in the thrall of her first great
love that on catching sight of him again, she flings
ethical reasoning to the winds. Until Elzbieta Ettinger
published her book " Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger" last
month, no one had dared hint at such things. And while
almost every Arendt scholar in America and several in
Germany (where the book appeared this summer) and not a few
Heideggerians would happily consign Ms. Ettinger's book to
the tabloid hell they figure it sprang from -- "It did have
a very bodice-ripping romantic streak to it, don't you
think?" asks Thomas Sheehan, a Heidegger scholar -- there
is not much anybody can do about it, because Ms. Ettinger
had something none of them had: access to Arendt and
Heidegger's letters.
"I will tell you how this whole thing came about," says
Lotte Kohler, a friend of Arendt's who is now executor of
the Hannah Arendt Literary Trust. "These letters, this
correspondence, was very dear to her heart." When Arendt
died in 1975, she asked Ms. Kohler to give them to the
archive in Germany in which Heidegger had deposited his
papers. "Of course, I made copies of them before I put them
there," Ms. Kohler continues. "Very soon after it became
known that her letters were there, Martin Heidegger's son
Hermann put restrictions on the correspondence. No access.
Nobody is supposed to read it." Nearly 20 years later, she
says, "I wrote to Hermann Heidegger and I said: 'Both
philosophers are dead. I think something should be done. I
think serious scholars should have access to the
correspondence.' "
That the first to benefit from Ms. Kohler's new policy was
Ms. Ettinger was something of an accident; she had simply
applied at the right time. Ms. Ettinger, a professor of
humanities at M.I.T. and, like Arendt, a refugee as well as
a Holocaust survivor -- she grew up in the Warsaw ghetto --
wished to write a biography of Arendt, and asked the estate
for permission to read the letters. Ms. Kohler read Ms.
Ettinger's previous biography, of Rosa Luxemburg, and liked
it. But not long after she allowed Ms. Ettinger to read
transcripts of the letters, the biographer granted an
interview to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The
newspaper published bits of Arendt's side of the
correspondence (Hermann Heidegger had given Ms. Ettinger
permission only to look at his father's letters, not quote
from them), and Ms. Ettinger realized that the story of the
affair would make a good book in its own right. "When she
told me she wants to publish just this chapter of the
biography, I said, 'Oh, this is terrible,' " Ms. Kohler
says. She and Mr. Heidegger -- who says he spotted "50
mistakes" in the German edition of Ms. Ettinger's book,
although he will not enumerate them -- have now resolved to
publish the correspondence; a book is scheduled to appear
in about two years.
Perhaps what is most terrible about Ms. Ettinger's
decision, for Ms. Kohler, is the wrath it has brought down
upon her head. "The estate should have a policy of not
making those correspondences available until they're
available, if you know what I mean," an annoyed Elisabeth
Young-Bruehl says. "Otherwise, you get one person's
interpretation and nobody can check it." Ms. Benhabib, who
is just finishing a book on Arendt's relationship to
modernity, had asked to see the letters sometime after Ms.
Ettinger did: "I wanted to know how Arendt assessed the
transformations of Heidegger's thought." Her request was
denied, because by then Ms. Ettinger, the estate and her
German publisher, Piper, were caught up in a lawsuit
involving Ms. Ettinger's claims that a Heidegger biographer
had plagiarized her as-yet-unpublished manuscript. Ms.
Benhabib says the experience left her "strongly
disappointed" with Arendt's estate.
Scandalmongering or not, for those who study the
philosophers, the revelations in Ms. Ettinger's book are as
unsettling as details of a parent's affair might be. Ms.
Ettinger discloses that the couple's prewar relationship
lasted for four years, not, as previously thought, one. She
furnishes embarrassing minutiae, such as the signals the
two set up to confirm secret rendezvous -- lights turned on
and off and window shades pulled up and down. For
Arendtians, though, the most troubling part of the book
deals with her behavior five years after the war, long
after Heidegger's appalling record of pro-Nazi activities
became known. "You do have to ask what she knew when," Mr.
Sheehan says. The letters don't say; instead, they show a
woman determined to keep the bond alive at any cost.
Perhaps the most distasteful part of the story involves
Heidegger's wife, Elfride, a stauncher Nazi than he, to
whom Heidegger had confessed the affair. He insisted that
the three of them meet to thrash things out, and later
Arendt acknowledged Elfride's right to read their
correspondence.
Why would Arendt submit to such undignified conditions? "No
doubt he told her, 'Now I need you,' and that was paradise
for her," Ms. Ettinger said in an interview recently. As
for Heidegger, "I think he was using her," she said. In the
book, Ms. Ettinger argues that he needed the well-respected
Arendt to rescue him from obscurity.
A masochistic ex-lover, a manipulative ex-Nazi: more than
anything else, it is the Manichaean Night-Porterishness of
it all that scholarly readers find so irksome. It is
unsettling to entertain such thoughts about anyone you
admire; it is particularly disconcerting with Arendt, whose
experiences under totalitarianism led her to believe in the
political importance of privacy: she considered the private
realm the only space in which people can reject
categorization and act spontaneotlsly, and she viewed
spontaneity as the key to human freedom. "A great deal of
her work is explicitly concerned with the need to protect
the bounds of intimacy," says Bonnie Honig, editor of a
forthcoming essay collection called "Feminist
Interpretations of Hannah Arendt." Hugo Ott, the German
historian whose 1988 biography of Heidegger left out no
grim detail about his subject's Nazi past, says he steered
clear of the relationship: "It was a closed garden for me."
"Can you imagine how she would have felt about this?" Ms.
Young-Bruehl asks. "The only thing that justifies attention
to the affair as opposed to her contributions is if you can
show that this affair had an impact on her thought. I don't
see that here."
But Ms. Ettinger fiercely defends her right to pry into
Arendt's private life: "Why did she leave her entire
correspondence? If she didn't want people to know about it,
she would have destroyed it."
Perhaps the strength of everyone's feeling stems from the
sudden popularity of Arendt's thought. In the past
half-decade, Arendt scholarship has turned into a cottage
industry. Each new volume of her correspondence is a minor
literary event, and this year alone will see five major
symposiums on Arendt around the world. Her appeal may
derive from the intellectual demands of the post-cold-war
era: Arendt was a powerful critic of all ideology.
"Thinkers without camps are interesting right now, because
camps have played themselves out," Ms. Benhabib says.
But philosophers are also fascinated by the way Arendt used
and transformed the tenets of Heideggerian existentialism,
a system of thought undergirding much of post-modernist
theory. "People are ashamed to owe anything to Heidegger --
and Hannah Arendt is the easy way out," the French
philosopher Alain Finkielkraut says. Not, he hastens to
add, because she was a less sophisticated thinker, but
because she was a writer of uncommon decency and lucidity.
Indeed, it may be the startling immediacy of Arendt's voice
that has caused so many people to take the Heidegger
question so personally.
"There is a concept that is very important in Hannah
Arendt's thinking," Mr. Finkielkraut continues, "It's the
concept of friendship. When you read her, you get the
feeling of friendship, and that's one of the reasons she is
so highly praised -- because her philosophy is charming.
It's as if when reading her, we were becoming friends with
her. But friendship means trust. So if she decided to
reconcile herself with Heidegger, I trust her. I want to
know her reasons, but I have confidence in her."
-----
Judith Shulevitz, the former editor of Lingua Franca, is
the deputy editor of New York magazine.
[End]
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---
Bookend/Judith Shulevitz
Arendt and Heidegger: An Affair to Forget?
Of all the tragedies of the Holocaust, that of the German
Jews has to have been the most intimate. Auschwitz didn't
just demonstrate the ease with which their entire community
could be reduced to ashes; it turned their very identity
into a contradiction in terms. It was the ultimate rebuff
to what Walter Benjamin once called the German Jew's
"unrequited love" for Germany.
This exquisitely personal sense of loss, in any case, is
the explanation of choice for scholars struggling to
understand how Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger -- the
German Jewish debunker of totalitarianism and the Nazi
philosopher -- who were lovers before the war, could have
become friends again after. "I think she did not want to
believe that what had happened had contaminated the past
completely," says Seyla Benhabib, a political philosopher
who teaches at Harvard. "She wanted to believe that
something could have been saved after the catastrophe."
Beyond that, says Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, author of the
definitive Arendt biography and the first to write about
the affair, in 1982, "I think Arendt knew that Heidegger
was, among 20th-century philosophers, a towering figure."
There is one explanation, however, that nobody proposed. It
would have been too crude, too distressing; it would have
forced us to fantasize an Arendt -- a thinker of exemplary
moral seriousness -- so in the thrall of her first great
love that on catching sight of him again, she flings
ethical reasoning to the winds. Until Elzbieta Ettinger
published her book " Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger" last
month, no one had dared hint at such things. And while
almost every Arendt scholar in America and several in
Germany (where the book appeared this summer) and not a few
Heideggerians would happily consign Ms. Ettinger's book to
the tabloid hell they figure it sprang from -- "It did have
a very bodice-ripping romantic streak to it, don't you
think?" asks Thomas Sheehan, a Heidegger scholar -- there
is not much anybody can do about it, because Ms. Ettinger
had something none of them had: access to Arendt and
Heidegger's letters.
"I will tell you how this whole thing came about," says
Lotte Kohler, a friend of Arendt's who is now executor of
the Hannah Arendt Literary Trust. "These letters, this
correspondence, was very dear to her heart." When Arendt
died in 1975, she asked Ms. Kohler to give them to the
archive in Germany in which Heidegger had deposited his
papers. "Of course, I made copies of them before I put them
there," Ms. Kohler continues. "Very soon after it became
known that her letters were there, Martin Heidegger's son
Hermann put restrictions on the correspondence. No access.
Nobody is supposed to read it." Nearly 20 years later, she
says, "I wrote to Hermann Heidegger and I said: 'Both
philosophers are dead. I think something should be done. I
think serious scholars should have access to the
correspondence.' "
That the first to benefit from Ms. Kohler's new policy was
Ms. Ettinger was something of an accident; she had simply
applied at the right time. Ms. Ettinger, a professor of
humanities at M.I.T. and, like Arendt, a refugee as well as
a Holocaust survivor -- she grew up in the Warsaw ghetto --
wished to write a biography of Arendt, and asked the estate
for permission to read the letters. Ms. Kohler read Ms.
Ettinger's previous biography, of Rosa Luxemburg, and liked
it. But not long after she allowed Ms. Ettinger to read
transcripts of the letters, the biographer granted an
interview to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The
newspaper published bits of Arendt's side of the
correspondence (Hermann Heidegger had given Ms. Ettinger
permission only to look at his father's letters, not quote
from them), and Ms. Ettinger realized that the story of the
affair would make a good book in its own right. "When she
told me she wants to publish just this chapter of the
biography, I said, 'Oh, this is terrible,' " Ms. Kohler
says. She and Mr. Heidegger -- who says he spotted "50
mistakes" in the German edition of Ms. Ettinger's book,
although he will not enumerate them -- have now resolved to
publish the correspondence; a book is scheduled to appear
in about two years.
Perhaps what is most terrible about Ms. Ettinger's
decision, for Ms. Kohler, is the wrath it has brought down
upon her head. "The estate should have a policy of not
making those correspondences available until they're
available, if you know what I mean," an annoyed Elisabeth
Young-Bruehl says. "Otherwise, you get one person's
interpretation and nobody can check it." Ms. Benhabib, who
is just finishing a book on Arendt's relationship to
modernity, had asked to see the letters sometime after Ms.
Ettinger did: "I wanted to know how Arendt assessed the
transformations of Heidegger's thought." Her request was
denied, because by then Ms. Ettinger, the estate and her
German publisher, Piper, were caught up in a lawsuit
involving Ms. Ettinger's claims that a Heidegger biographer
had plagiarized her as-yet-unpublished manuscript. Ms.
Benhabib says the experience left her "strongly
disappointed" with Arendt's estate.
Scandalmongering or not, for those who study the
philosophers, the revelations in Ms. Ettinger's book are as
unsettling as details of a parent's affair might be. Ms.
Ettinger discloses that the couple's prewar relationship
lasted for four years, not, as previously thought, one. She
furnishes embarrassing minutiae, such as the signals the
two set up to confirm secret rendezvous -- lights turned on
and off and window shades pulled up and down. For
Arendtians, though, the most troubling part of the book
deals with her behavior five years after the war, long
after Heidegger's appalling record of pro-Nazi activities
became known. "You do have to ask what she knew when," Mr.
Sheehan says. The letters don't say; instead, they show a
woman determined to keep the bond alive at any cost.
Perhaps the most distasteful part of the story involves
Heidegger's wife, Elfride, a stauncher Nazi than he, to
whom Heidegger had confessed the affair. He insisted that
the three of them meet to thrash things out, and later
Arendt acknowledged Elfride's right to read their
correspondence.
Why would Arendt submit to such undignified conditions? "No
doubt he told her, 'Now I need you,' and that was paradise
for her," Ms. Ettinger said in an interview recently. As
for Heidegger, "I think he was using her," she said. In the
book, Ms. Ettinger argues that he needed the well-respected
Arendt to rescue him from obscurity.
A masochistic ex-lover, a manipulative ex-Nazi: more than
anything else, it is the Manichaean Night-Porterishness of
it all that scholarly readers find so irksome. It is
unsettling to entertain such thoughts about anyone you
admire; it is particularly disconcerting with Arendt, whose
experiences under totalitarianism led her to believe in the
political importance of privacy: she considered the private
realm the only space in which people can reject
categorization and act spontaneotlsly, and she viewed
spontaneity as the key to human freedom. "A great deal of
her work is explicitly concerned with the need to protect
the bounds of intimacy," says Bonnie Honig, editor of a
forthcoming essay collection called "Feminist
Interpretations of Hannah Arendt." Hugo Ott, the German
historian whose 1988 biography of Heidegger left out no
grim detail about his subject's Nazi past, says he steered
clear of the relationship: "It was a closed garden for me."
"Can you imagine how she would have felt about this?" Ms.
Young-Bruehl asks. "The only thing that justifies attention
to the affair as opposed to her contributions is if you can
show that this affair had an impact on her thought. I don't
see that here."
But Ms. Ettinger fiercely defends her right to pry into
Arendt's private life: "Why did she leave her entire
correspondence? If she didn't want people to know about it,
she would have destroyed it."
Perhaps the strength of everyone's feeling stems from the
sudden popularity of Arendt's thought. In the past
half-decade, Arendt scholarship has turned into a cottage
industry. Each new volume of her correspondence is a minor
literary event, and this year alone will see five major
symposiums on Arendt around the world. Her appeal may
derive from the intellectual demands of the post-cold-war
era: Arendt was a powerful critic of all ideology.
"Thinkers without camps are interesting right now, because
camps have played themselves out," Ms. Benhabib says.
But philosophers are also fascinated by the way Arendt used
and transformed the tenets of Heideggerian existentialism,
a system of thought undergirding much of post-modernist
theory. "People are ashamed to owe anything to Heidegger --
and Hannah Arendt is the easy way out," the French
philosopher Alain Finkielkraut says. Not, he hastens to
add, because she was a less sophisticated thinker, but
because she was a writer of uncommon decency and lucidity.
Indeed, it may be the startling immediacy of Arendt's voice
that has caused so many people to take the Heidegger
question so personally.
"There is a concept that is very important in Hannah
Arendt's thinking," Mr. Finkielkraut continues, "It's the
concept of friendship. When you read her, you get the
feeling of friendship, and that's one of the reasons she is
so highly praised -- because her philosophy is charming.
It's as if when reading her, we were becoming friends with
her. But friendship means trust. So if she decided to
reconcile herself with Heidegger, I trust her. I want to
know her reasons, but I have confidence in her."
-----
Judith Shulevitz, the former editor of Lingua Franca, is
the deputy editor of New York magazine.
[End]
--- from list heidegger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx ---