Posted on February 4, 2008 by Steve Pollak
It's the classic love story, really. Nazi-sympathizer boy meets Jewish girl, they fall in love and live happily ever after.
Well, actually, the romance of Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt was a little more complicated than that. Presumably, Daniel Maier-Katkin (pictured right) will sort things out and bring us something new for this story. His forthcoming book, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger and the Experience of Germans and Jews in the 20th Century, has been sold to Norton. Publishers Weekly reported the deal last month but did not give a publication date. According to the article, Maier-Katkin "will examine the relationship between the two icons and what it tells us about their philosophies and their times."
There's been quite a bit written about this out-of-the-ordinary romance already. As Adam Kirsch, a book critic for the New York Sun recounted in this excellent essay on Nextbook.org, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's 1982 biography of Arendt, For Love of the World, revealed publicly that Arendt and Heidegger had had an affair in the 1920s while both were at the University of Marburg. The future author of Eichmann in Jerusalem was an 18-year-old student and the future Nazi party enthusiast was a 35-year-old married philosophy professor.
Another book on their relationship came out in 1995 and it caused more of a stir. Elzbieta Ettinger's Martin Heidegger/Hannah Arendt brought to light a trove of unpublished correspondence between the two. This book moved the story forward by revealing the fact that their relationship lasted much longer than anyone previously thought. However, Kirsch notes that the book drew "a lurid, judgmental portrait of their relationship:"
Ettinger did not have permission to quote the original letters, but her paraphrases were calculated to excite readers who might not have previously devoted much attention to Heidegger's Being and Time. "He needed her in order to breathe fully and deeply, to enjoy being alive"; "Arendt gave her love freely, happily, defying convention": in such cliched phrases was the Arendt-Heidegger correspondence first reported to the world.
As a result, Kirsch says, the Arendt and Heidegger estates gave their respective permissions to publish a complete edition of the letters. It appeared in German in 1998 and an English edition, Letters: 1925-1975, came out in 2003.
So, there's probably plenty of room for Maier-Katkin to analyze the relationship and draw some additional meaning out of it.
For some more recent scholarship on Arendt's thoughts on Judaism, Israel and other Jewish issues, see The Jewish Writings.
Here's an excerpt from a well-written review of Jewish Writings by Vivian Gornick in Boston Review:
The Jewish Writings is a collection of Arendt's articles and essays written between 1932 and 1966. For this reviewer, they come as a revelation. I had never understood, exactly, the mental road Arendt traveled to get to the pronouncements for which she has been both celebrated (the reality of men trumps the concept of Man), and damned (evil was ordinary; the Jews were to be held accountable). To read the book straight through is to see clearly the origin and steady development of the single critical insight that informed much of Arendt's subsequent work: namely, that the world is what we ourselves make it. The need to breathe free is a given; the right to do so is not. Among human beings, the will to power is an embodied force that continually challenges the right of those not like ourselves to occupy space. Under no condition is the one-not-like-oneself free to ignore the challenge. What's more, the challenge must be resisted in the terms in which it is flung down. As Arendt put it, "When one is attacked as a Jew one must respond not as a German or a Frenchman or a world citizen, but as a Jew."