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Rating: 
Summary: More Than a Correspondence - A Dialogue
Review: In 1926 Hannah Arendt was a student of Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg University. What began as the questions of a student to her teacher in 1926 blossomed into a friendly correspondence that ended with Arendt's forced emigration from Nazi Germany to the United States, with a stopover in France in the 30s, and then resumed in the Postwar years completely transformed into a rich, detailed dialogue between colleagues and friends, taking on a father-daughter feeling in many of the letters.It was during the years after 1945 that the two examined everything about their world and themselves. Of particular importance were the dual issues of German guilt for the war and, for Jaspers, what it meant to be a Jew, for not only was Arendt and her husband Jewish, but also Jaspers's wife. This issue becomes intertwined in their conversations about the future of West Germany, the Suez War of 1956, and Arendt's trip to Jerusalem to cover the trial of Adolf Eichmann. When they shift the political into the personal, Martin Heidegger, a colleague of Jaspers and a teacher of Arendt, is there for taking. The passages concerning Heidegger are quite gossipy at times and lend the reader a voyeuristic look into the private worlds of Arendt and Jaspers. It's almost as if when things get dull and weighty, a little dirt about Heidegger adds just the spice to make the letter memorable. The other strong point of this book is the portrait Arendt paints of politics in 1950s America, succinctly analyzing the Eisenhower (and later Kennedy) Administrations, describing the collapse of the cities in the 60s, and the "pointless" war in Vietnam. It's almost as if a mirror were held up to history, as insights about those turbelent times pour forth from every letter dispatched. An invaluable book, not only for those interested in the scholarly events of the times, but for anyone interested in the history of the times.
Rating:
Summary: Heartwarming and Intellectually Engaging
Review: Jaspers and Arendt cover everything and everyone: Sartre, Heidegger, Marx, Goethe, Camus; post-WWII Germany, "the infinitely complex red-tape existence of stateless persons," the Cold War, the "senile" Eisenhower administration, Eichmann, totalitarianism, the atom bomb, local democracy--it's all there. So too is a life-long, extremely close friendship between people who weathered a war from different sides of the globe, who faced cold war terror in radically different ways, who loved their spouses intensely but felt somehow separated by differences in world-view tracable to ethnicity(Gertrude was ethnically Jewish and Heinrich was ethnically Christian). Her admiration of him, her intellectual debt to him, her love for him; his seeming amazement at her vivacity, his admiration of her intellect, his cold, German form of love--and the walls cracking, and his sentiment sometimes pouring through. It's a warm book up until the very last entry, Arendt's address at Jaspers' funeral. That's enough to send a shiver up your spine--but only if you read it in the context of everything else.
Rating:
Summary: Heartwarming and Intellectually Engaging
Review: Jaspers and Arendt cover everything and everyone: Sartre, Heidegger, Marx, Goethe, Camus; post-WWII Germany, "the infinitely complex red-tape existence of stateless persons," the Cold War, the "senile" Eisenhower administration, Eichmann, totalitarianism, the atom bomb, local democracy--it's all there. So too is a life-long, extremely close friendship between people who weathered a war from different sides of the globe, who faced cold war terror in radically different ways, who loved their spouses intensely but felt somehow separated by differences in world-view tracable to ethnicity(Gertrude was ethnically Jewish and Heinrich was ethnically Christian). Her admiration of him, her intellectual debt to him, her love for him; his seeming amazement at her vivacity, his admiration of her intellect, his cold, German form of love--and the walls cracking, and his sentiment sometimes pouring through. It's a warm book up until the very last entry, Arendt's address at Jaspers' funeral. That's enough to send a shiver up your spine--but only if you read it in the context of everything else.
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