Hannah Arendt: Martin Heidegger

Rating:
Summary: Identification with the aggressor
Review: First let me sound completely old- fashioned. The Heidegger - Arendt affair is immoral from the beginning because it is an adulterous relationship.
Secondly, Herr Philosopher did use his power and position to enchant the very enchantable fledgling philosopheress.
Thirdly, however morally distasteful the relationship before the War its renewal afterwards represents a tremendous moral failing on Arendt's part.
Fourthly, Arendt showed in ' Eichmann in Jerusalem' a kind of contempt for her own Jewishness. Her willingness to slip over Heidegger's Nazi connection shows a moral failing at the deepest level. Heidegger is no ordinary person, and as person of stature much more , not much less, should have been expected with him. He identified with those who killed one third of Arendt's people.
Fifthly, Jaspers Arendt's other great mentor and friend was a truly noble person. He set an example in regard to Heidegger which Arendt unfortunately was unable to follow.
Sixthly, Arendt in this relationship from the beginning was the subordinate, the secondary, and in some way the ' slave'. The Jew subordinated to the superior Aryan Heidegger. She never overcame this, and this represents a tremendous moral stain. She was a great thinker and in some of her life actions a noble person but in this relationship she failed the moral test. Heidegger was a Nazi sympathizer. For that reason I believe he deserves his own special place in a very low circle underground.


Rating:
Summary: Respectful account of a tragic love affair
Review: I must say, rarely do I find myself disagreeing as strongly with the consensus of other reviewers as I do in this case. Ettinger's book is a brief and restrained account of a characteristically German sentimental relationship which obviously had a strong long term impact on the thought of Hannah Arendt. The fact that Arendt, a fully assimilated German of Jewish origin, could enter so fully into a relationship of this nature, which is so typically a phenomenon of the Romantic German milieu, is both poignant and a profound rebuke to the obscene anti-Semitism from which she and so many millions suffered.

The Heidegger-Arendt love affair has much of the power of the great Abelard and Heloise love affair, with which it has strong affiinities.

Given the fact that the letters on which this book is based are intimate, and, in Arendt's case at least, were in many cases written by a young and still unformed intellect, Ettinger seems to have exercised great restraint and avoided scoring cheap points by being unsympathetic towards the excesses of the letter writers.

Ettinger does not flinch from contrasting Arendt's tormented and difficult-to-defend collaboration in Heidegger's post-War rehabilitation with Jaspers's principled and unyielding refusal to re-establish his relationship with Heidegger unless Heidegger rejected the Nazi Party and its crimes--which he never did, in private or public.

This is not a profound study--it is a refreshingly light 139 pages or so. But it accomplishes what it sets out to do: provide a preliminary account of a startling and anguished love affair which has an almost symbolic quality to it.

The only reason it doesn't get five stars is because of the extremely limited quotations from the letters themselves, which was probably a condition imposed on Ettinger by the Hannah Arendt Literary Trust.

Rating:
Summary: a day in the lives of...
Review: Just to be fair: The book is not exhaustive but nor is it "tabloid" as one reviewer put it. And it is certainly not "soft porn". There is nothing "lurid" in these pages. The writing is, as the more fair-minded reviewer suggested, restrained in a respectful way, to all parties concerned.
This brief account does not set out to describe the impact the affair had on the two individuals' respective work. For anyone to demand such an account seems to me totally unreasonable: That a private passion of the heart always impacts one's intellectual work is by no means a given.
What this book shows you, regardless of the subjective tinge the author may have imposed on the characters in question, is the mystery of the workings of the heart. Ettinger sketches a portrait of a woman in love but not just any woman, but a woman of exceptional intelligence, expansive soul, and loyalty -- to her own ideals of friendship. Cloying speculations concerning the psychological causes -- childhood traumas, etc -- that may have led these two individuals to live and love the way they did are left out and the book is the more elegant and tactful for it.
To call Arendt a naif for the way she allowed herself to be "abused over and over again" would be to admit to total lack of understanding of the very nature of love. Arendt shows over and over her desire, need, psychosis -- choose your favorite term -- to forgive a man who in many ways was unforgiveable. Love does that.
In this double portrait of two people who happened to be academic thinkers, some 50 years is rendered as if it were a day. Heidegger comes off here as a man not above the sort of pettiness and calculation you and I lapse into occasionally, while Arendt is portrayed, without forcing any evidence to this purpose, as the kind of woman who could leave behind a legacy of not only of thinking but also of loving in the grand style. Great and important as Heidegger may be in the history of western philosophy, he may, alas, very well have been one of those gnomish professors we've all come across in our lives: brilliant and thus all the more annoying when they put their intelligence and intellect in the service of self-serving calculation. This book, written in clear prose and balance, confirms the disturbing (and disappointing) fact character and thought are not always equally winged.
Forget the names of the characters involved. Read it as a document of a love that would have made a great B&W movie as well, with the late Ingrid Bergman as Arendt, and Mickey Rooney as Heidegger.

Rating:
Summary: Sensationalistic but shallow
Review: That Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger were lovers during her years as his student in Germany has been an item of gossipy curiousity for decades. She was young, attractive, and impressionable, he already a philosophical giant at the height of his career, and the relationship would have most likely been a flattering personal accomplishment for each. Most assumed it to have been a brief fling, with little lasting effect on either individual. Ettinger's book, however, reveals that this was anything but the case.

Ettinger, who was fortunate enough to gain access to the correspondence between the two lovers, shows in her most recent work that their relationship was far more involved - in depth and in chronological breadth - than anyone had previously imagined. She presents the strange affair between the young Jewish woman and the Nazi philosopher as affecting both parties deeply, blaming Arendt's more contentious conclusions about the Holocaust and her confused feelings about her own Jewish identity on this committment to her former teacher. Heidegger is presented as a conniving and selfish manipulator, using Arendt for sexual gratification, intellectual flattery, and finally as a means to gain exculpation from his Nazi past. Arendt comes across as an emotionally dependent naif, allowing herself time and time again to be so abused.

There is not enough substance in this book to do justice to either thinker, though. Netheir Arendt nor Heidegger should be so simplified. Ettinger writes in a torrid and overly Romantic style underlined by a condescending attitude, and one finishes the book with a slightly guilty feeling, looking for some way to rationalize any pleasure gained from gratuitously purusing the private lives of these two intellectuals. Again, this slim and simplified account is not enough to tease out what the lasting repercussions - on Arendt's reputation and in her word - the unveiling of this affair might be. I for one hope the version of Arendt Ettinger presents does not last. She - and Heidegger - both have much more to offer to the world than this sort of empty tabloid entertainment.

Rating:
Summary: I couldn't possibly be right about this.
Review: The German tradition in philosophy has been so notoriously wrong about the nature of women so often that it is only fair that I, who usually appears as nobody in the world of philosophy as often as I am wrongly genedered in any attempt to belong to the world of women, have to read this book occasionally to remind myself how unfair this whole question must be in any context. That philosophy, as a love of wisdom, might be compared to a love of women, as the kind of passion that Mozart might attempt to display in operatic splendor in "Don Giovanni" (I think this is the most reasonable opera that I have ever heard) faces grave danger in a book in which the man who has embraced most totally the greatness of philosophy (who but Heidegger might want this distinction?), is slammed for having an unreasonable love life. For all I know, this might have been the story of a philosopher who might as well have thought that all was fair in love and war, but it is really the story of the woman. The perfection in this book, for me, was the idea that Heidegger might have been offended when Arendt triumphantly returned to Germany as the author of a book on totalitarianism in which the style of the Nazi regime, which Heidegger supported in certain official capacities, was treated like communism under Stalin, the kind of enemy of freedom that modern people ought to be able to understand in a negative light much better than anything positive that I could say at this point. I doubt if I would have had much interest in Hannah Arendt, if not for this book. It made me wish that I could be that smart.

Rating:
Summary: Arendt / Heidgger
Review: The story of Arendt and Heidigger's love affair is an interesting one, and this book is interesting because it tells that story, but for no other reason. The author seems to have chosen this subject becuase she had access to the material in the archive, and not because she had anything to say about the subject. It left me feeling that, aside from a a few gossipy details, I knew no more about either person than before. Not only do Arendt and Heidigger remain elusive, Ettinger does not even seem to want to go after them! Their relationship is primerily of interest becuase of what they thought and wrote: Ettinger presents the few enough facts about their relationship in a readable style, but has no grasp of the thought of either one.

I find it impossible to agree with reviewer quoted on the back of the jacket, that this is "a most valuble book, an important record". It isn't: it's an evening's light reading. I can imagine a biographer of either figure (or a playwright or novelist, for that matter), immersed and *interested* in their work, who will really show us why their relartionship was important. (And why was a book that must of necessity include German names and words set in a typeface without umlauts? Bizarre!)

Rating:
Summary: Tabloid Philosophy
Review: When Hannah Arendt was a student she fell in love with and had an affair with her married professor and mentor. Nothing new in that; she wasn't the first and she certainly wasn't the last. And the whole thing would have been relegated to the dustbin of her life by biographers if that teacher was anyone but Martin Heidegger. The news of this discovery adds the lurid overtones necessary for philosophy to compete with the likes of Enquirer-style gossip in the hands of less talented practitioners, where it becomes a sort of an over-intellectual "The Blue Angel," only no one gets ruined.

Make no mistake about it, to judge from this book, Ettinger is one of the least talented practitioners out there. While their affair would make an interesting chapter in a biography of either, it certainly does not deserve a full-length book treatment. In the end she leaves more questions unanswered. What effect did their reconcilation in 1950 have on the thought of Arendt? To what extent, personal or professional, was Arendt an apologist for Heidegger? These are just two of the many questions the reader will not find the answer for in this book. Instead we are treated to a sweaty, turgid tale; soft porn for the intellectual set.

That Martin Heigegger had a prominent effect on the thought of Hannah Arendt is unmistakeable, but if you want a book about them, try Dana Villa's excellent Arendt and Heidegger. Leave this Paul Johnson (Intellectuals) wanna-be where it belongs,: in the remainder pile of intellectual history.