Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger [Paperback]

Ms. Elzbieta Ettinger (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 20, 1997

This book is the first to tell in detail the story of the passionate and secret love affair between two of the most prominent philosophers of the twentieth century, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. Drawing on their previously unknown correspondence, Elzbieta Ettinger describes a relationship that lasted for more than half a century, a relationship that sheds startling light on both individuals, challenging our image of Heidegger as an austere and abstract thinker and of Arendt as a consummately independent and self-assured personality. Arendt and Heidegger met in 1924 at the University of Marburg, when Arendt, an eighteen-year-old German Jew, became a student of Heidegger, a thirty-five-year-old married man. They were lovers for about four years; separated for almost twenty years, during which time Heidegger became a Nazi and Arendt emigrated to the United States and involved herself with issues of political theory and philosophy; resumed their relationship in 1950 and in spite of its complexities remained close friends until Arendt's death in 1975. Ettinger provides engrossing details of this strange and tormented relationship. She shows how Heidegger used Arendt but also influenced her thought, how Arendt struggled to forgive Heidegger for his prominent involvement with the Nazis, and how Heidegger's love for Arendt and fascination with Nazism can be linked to his romantic predisposition. A dramatic love story and a revealing look at the emotional lives of two intellectual giants, the book will fascinate anyone interested in the complexities of the human psyche.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In 1924, Hannah Arendt, then an 18-year-old assimilated German Jew, fell in love with future Nazi Martin Heidegger, her 35-year-old married philosophy professor at the University of Marburg. Insecure, vulnerable Arendt, whose father died when she was seven, idealized Heidegger, who found in their four-year love affair a passionate physical and spiritual bond. Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and openly declared his support for Hitler in 1933; later that year, Arendt fled Germany and severed her ties with Heidegger. She went on to condemn fascism in The Origins of Totalitarianism, yet in 1950, encouraged by her second husband, Heinrich Bluecher, a German ex-communist and an admirer of Heidegger's philosophy, she resumed a friendship with her erstwhile lover, swallowing his lies that he was a helpless victim of malicious slander. As Massachusetts Institute of Technology humanities professor Ettinger shows in this revealing account of a strange mutual dependency that lasted until Arendt's death in 1975, Arendt became Heidegger's willing apologist despite mutual rancor, conflicting emotions and her branding of her former professor as a "potential murderer."
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

In addition to Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's comprehensive biography, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (LJ 5/1/82), several studies of Arendt have appeared recently, and her correspondence is now available for critical examination. (See, for instance, Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1973, LJ 12/94, and Correspondence, 1926-1969, LJ 9/15/92, which collects her exchanges with Karl Jaspers and others.) What Ettinger (humanities, MIT) adds to this scholarship seems to be well-informed marginalia. Arendt's curious, troubled, and lengthy relationship with Heidegger is fairly presented in this slim work, but considerable knowledge of the personalities and professional works of both major players is presumed, and readers already familiar with the earlier and more comprehensive biographical works will find little new here, either in fact or in analysis. For comprehensive collections only.?Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 152 pages
• Publisher: Yale University Press (October 20, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0300072546
• ISBN-13: 978-0300072549
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #719,589 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #9 in Books > Biographies & Memoirs > People, A-Z > ( A ) > Arendt, Hannah

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Respectful account of a tragic love affair, January 12, 2002

By 

Christopher W. Coffman (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (Hardcover)

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.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Arendt / Heidgger, March 16, 2002

By 

James Martin (Seattle) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (Hardcover)

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!)

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars a day in the lives of..., March 9, 2002

By 

Saul Boulschett "Anyway" (Dry land) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (Hardcover)

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.