From: John Young <jya-AT-pipeline.com>
Date: Tue, 12 Sep 1995 12:12:12 -0400
Subject: Re: Susan Says Here It Is, There It Isn't 


   The New York Times, September 11, 1995, p. C16.


   Obsession Transcends 'Banality of Evil'

      Hannah Arendt -- Martin Heidegger
      By Elzbieta Ettinger.
      139 pages. Yale University Press. $16.

      [Photos] Martin Heidegger, in 1934, and Hannah Arendt,
      about 1930.

   By Richard Bernstein


   The image of Hannah Arendt, the author of "The Origins of
   Totalitarianism" and coiner of the expression "the banality
   of evil," hangs on her intellectual brilliance and
   authority. How strange it is to learn then, in Elzbieta
   Ettinger's sensitive account of her private life, that
   Arendt was subject to a lifelong irrational attachment,
   irrational in the sense that its object was a man whose
   evil she was unable to see, even though it was all too
   visible to others.

   The man was Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher and
   author of "Being and Time." Heidegger was one of the most
   profound thinkers of the century, but his reputation has
   been fatally tarnished by the revelation that he was an
   enthusiastic supporter of National Socialism and a member
   of the Nazi Party.

   The paradox is that the Germanr-Jewish Arendt, who began a
   four-year sexual relationship with Heidegger in 1924 when
   she was a student and sustained an emotional attachment to
   him until her death 51 years later, played a major role in
   rehabilitating him after World War II. Heidegger told her
   in 1950, when they met for the first time in 17 years, that
   his reputation had been destroyed by a campaign of
   vilification, and Arendt believed him.

   And so, even as she was writing her path-breaking analysis
   of the nature of totalitarianism and anti-Semitism, Arendt
   remained blindly devoted to a figure who represented the
   totalitarian evil. She traveled from America to Germany to
   visit him, published influential essays exonerating him and
   supervised English translations of his works. In this
   sense, Ms. Ettinger, who is a professor of humanities at
   the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, tells a sad
   story, one whose lesson seems to be that even the most
   normally hardheaded and morally uncompromising of thinkers
   can will herself into suspending belief when emotion is
   powerful enough.

   Ms. Ettinger's account is succinct and straightforward,
   though at times so succinct that it feels skimpy, more an
   hors d'oeuvre than a main course. Her story of the
   sentimental relationship between Hannah and Martin which
   began when she was his 18-year-old student at the
   University of Marburg in Germany, is based largely on
   recently discovered letters and several interviews with
   people who knew them both. Early on, Ms. Ettinger advances
   a hypothesis: it is that Heidegger's "romantic
   predisposition seems to have led him both to a passionate
   attachment to Hannah Arendt and to a fascination with the
   Nazi vision of the rebirth of Germany."

   Unfortunately neither logic nor Ms. Ettinger's tale
   substantiates this idea. There have, after all, been many
   men with romantic predispositions toward women who
   manifested no sympathy for the concepts of racial purity,
   ultranationalism and global conquest. Besides, it may
   certainly have been passion that led the married Catholic
   35-year-old Professor Heidegger to initiate a love affair
   with one of his female students, but his passion for Hannah
   was briefer than his passion for National Socialism. He,
   not she, broke off the intimate relationship, substituting
   for it a strange on-again, off-again association in which
   Heidegger, self-centered, cunning and manipulative, was
   merely needful of Arendt's worshipful attention.

   Still, Ms. Ettinger's tale is absorbing and cruelly
   fascinating. She is scrupulously attentive to the known
   facts and unsparing in her exposure of both Heidegger's
   mendacity and Arendt's propensity for self-deception where
   the philosopher was concerned. Point by point she
   dismantles the structure of illusion that Arendt built
   around her former teacher and lover. A central ingredient
   of that structure, for example, was Arendt's belief that
   Heidegger's problems stemmed from his wife, Elfride, whose
   biases and resentments, she thought, undermined her
   husband's prestige "and created an atmosphere of hostility
   around him."

   "By shifting the entire blame for Heidegger's past onto his
   wife," Ms. Ettinger observes, "Arendt absolved him, the
   personification of the Geist, of any responsibility and
   therefore could in good conscience resume the role of muse
   and, most significantly, come to terms with herself and her
   fascination with him."

   Several elements in this situation make it all the more
   astonishing, among them Arendt's clairvoyance about the
   mesmerizing appeal of tyranny and, of course, her own
   Jewishness. In 1933, the year Hitler took power, Heidegger
   joined the Nazi Party; Arendt began her exile from Germany,
   first in Paris (where she got a job with an organization
   that trained Jewish youth for agricultural labor in
   Palestine), later in the United States.

   Then there was the enormity of Heidegger's offenses. They
   included not only Nazi Party membership but help in banning
   prominent Jews -- including his own teacher and patron,
   Edmund Husserl -- from German University faculties and
   ruining the careers of colleagues deemed insufficiently
   devoted to the Nazi cause. Heidegger blocked the promotion
   of one former student by writing a confidential memo
   accusing him of having become "closely tied to the Jew
   Frankel, formerly employed at Gottingen, and now dismissed
   from this university."

   Ms. Ettinger skillfully traces the transformation of
   Arendt's early infatuation with Heidegger into a misguided
   fidelity, though the skimpiness of the narrative is
   sometimes disappointing, especially in the early chapters.

   She evokes the letter that Heidegger wrote to the young
   Arendt in which he first hinted at his feelings for her,
   but though she describes it as "lyrical, beautifully
   phrased, a subtle caress and a firm statement," she neither
   quotes from it nor informs the reader why she fails to do
   so.

   Still, Ms. Ettinger makes a persistent effort to account
   for the main factor in the story, which is Arendt's love
   itself, attributing it to the power of Heidegger's
   intellect and a personal magnetism that in its way affected
   other major figures of German intellectual life also.

   In the end, Heidegger is the villain in Ms. Ettinger's
   account. Arendt's uncharacteristic lack of good judgment
   about him emerges as only all too human, diminishing
   nothing of the value of her work or her scholarly
   integrity. And yet, how is it that the shrewd observer of
   the banality of evil could have failed to see the banal
   evil of a man like Heidegger?

   Ms. Ettinger's book gives us the facts of the story, but
   that ultimate question remains a mystery.

   [End]









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