From: John Young <jya-AT-pipeline.com>
Date: Sat, 30 Sep 1995 11:13:51 -0400
Subject: Schatz und Scheisse 


   The New York Times, Oct 1, 1995, Book Review, p. 39.


   Bookend/Judith Shulevitz

   Arendt and Heidegger: An Affair to Forget?


   Of all the tragedies of the Holocaust, that of the German
   Jews has to have been the most intimate. Auschwitz didn't
   just demonstrate the ease with which their entire community
   could be reduced to ashes; it turned their very identity
   into a contradiction in terms. It was the ultimate rebuff
   to what Walter Benjamin once called the German Jew's
   "unrequited love" for Germany.

   This exquisitely personal sense of loss, in any case, is
   the explanation of choice for scholars struggling to
   understand how Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger -- the
   German Jewish debunker of totalitarianism and the Nazi
   philosopher -- who were lovers before the war, could have
   become friends again after. "I think she did not want to
   believe that what had happened had contaminated the past
   completely," says Seyla Benhabib, a political philosopher
   who teaches at Harvard. "She wanted to believe that
   something could have been saved after the catastrophe."
   Beyond that, says Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, author of the
   definitive Arendt biography and the first to write about
   the affair, in 1982, "I think Arendt knew that Heidegger
   was, among 20th-century philosophers, a towering figure."

   There is one explanation, however, that nobody proposed. It
   would have been too crude, too distressing; it would have
   forced us to fantasize an Arendt -- a thinker of exemplary
   moral seriousness -- so in the thrall of her first great
   love that on catching sight of him again, she flings
   ethical reasoning to the winds. Until Elzbieta Ettinger
   published her book " Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger" last
   month, no one had dared hint at such things. And while
   almost every Arendt scholar in America and several in
   Germany (where the book appeared this summer) and not a few
   Heideggerians would happily consign Ms. Ettinger's book to
   the tabloid hell they figure it sprang from -- "It did have
   a very bodice-ripping romantic streak to it, don't you
   think?" asks Thomas Sheehan, a Heidegger scholar -- there
   is not much anybody can do about it, because Ms. Ettinger
   had something none of them had: access to Arendt and
   Heidegger's letters.

   "I will tell you how this whole thing came about," says
   Lotte Kohler, a friend of Arendt's who is now executor of
   the Hannah Arendt Literary Trust. "These letters, this
   correspondence, was very dear to her heart." When Arendt
   died in 1975, she asked Ms. Kohler to give them to the
   archive in Germany in which Heidegger had deposited his
   papers. "Of course, I made copies of them before I put them
   there," Ms. Kohler continues. "Very soon after it became
   known that her letters were there, Martin Heidegger's son
   Hermann put restrictions on the correspondence. No access.
   Nobody is supposed to read it." Nearly 20 years later, she
   says, "I wrote to Hermann Heidegger and I said: 'Both
   philosophers are dead. I think something should be done. I
   think serious scholars should have access to the
   correspondence.' "

   That the first to benefit from Ms. Kohler's new policy was
   Ms. Ettinger was something of an accident; she had simply
   applied at the right time. Ms. Ettinger, a professor of
   humanities at M.I.T. and, like Arendt, a refugee as well as
   a Holocaust survivor -- she grew up in the Warsaw ghetto --
   wished to write a biography of Arendt, and asked the estate
   for permission to read the letters. Ms. Kohler read Ms.
   Ettinger's previous biography, of Rosa Luxemburg, and liked
   it. But not long after she allowed Ms. Ettinger to read
   transcripts of the letters, the biographer granted an
   interview to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. The
   newspaper published bits of Arendt's side of the
   correspondence (Hermann Heidegger had given Ms. Ettinger
   permission only to look at his father's letters, not quote
   from them), and Ms. Ettinger realized that the story of the
   affair would make a good book in its own right. "When she
   told me she wants to publish just this chapter of the
   biography, I said, 'Oh, this is terrible,' " Ms. Kohler
   says. She and Mr. Heidegger -- who says he spotted "50
   mistakes" in the German edition of Ms. Ettinger's book,
   although he will not enumerate them -- have now resolved to
   publish the correspondence; a book is scheduled to appear
   in about two years.

   Perhaps what is most terrible about Ms. Ettinger's
   decision, for Ms. Kohler, is the wrath it has brought down
   upon her head. "The estate should have a policy of not
   making those correspondences available until they're
   available, if you know what I mean," an annoyed Elisabeth
   Young-Bruehl says. "Otherwise, you get one person's
   interpretation and nobody can check it." Ms. Benhabib, who
   is just finishing a book on Arendt's relationship to
   modernity, had asked to see the letters sometime after Ms.
   Ettinger did: "I wanted to know how Arendt assessed the
   transformations of Heidegger's thought." Her request was
   denied, because by then Ms. Ettinger, the estate and her
   German publisher, Piper, were caught up in a lawsuit
   involving Ms. Ettinger's claims that a Heidegger biographer
   had plagiarized her as-yet-unpublished manuscript. Ms.
   Benhabib says the experience left her "strongly
   disappointed" with Arendt's estate.

   Scandalmongering or not, for those who study the
   philosophers, the revelations in Ms. Ettinger's book are as
   unsettling as details of a parent's affair might be. Ms.
   Ettinger discloses that the couple's prewar relationship
   lasted for four years, not, as previously thought, one. She
   furnishes embarrassing minutiae, such as the signals the
   two set up to confirm secret rendezvous -- lights turned on
   and off and window shades pulled up and down. For
   Arendtians, though, the most troubling part of the book
   deals with her behavior five years after the war, long
   after Heidegger's appalling record of pro-Nazi activities
   became known. "You do have to ask what she knew when," Mr.
   Sheehan says. The letters don't say; instead, they show a
   woman determined to keep the bond alive at any cost.
   Perhaps the most distasteful part of the story involves
   Heidegger's wife, Elfride, a stauncher Nazi than he, to
   whom Heidegger had confessed the affair. He insisted that
   the three of them meet to thrash things out, and later
   Arendt acknowledged Elfride's right to read their
   correspondence.

   Why would Arendt submit to such undignified conditions? "No
   doubt he told her, 'Now I need you,' and that was paradise
   for her," Ms. Ettinger said in an interview recently. As
   for Heidegger, "I think he was using her," she said. In the
   book, Ms. Ettinger argues that he needed the well-respected
   Arendt to rescue him from obscurity.

   A masochistic ex-lover, a manipulative ex-Nazi: more than
   anything else, it is the Manichaean Night-Porterishness of
   it all that scholarly readers find so irksome. It is
   unsettling to entertain such thoughts about anyone you
   admire; it is particularly disconcerting with Arendt, whose
   experiences under totalitarianism led her to believe in the
   political importance of privacy: she considered the private
   realm the only space in which people can reject
   categorization and act spontaneotlsly, and she viewed
   spontaneity as the key to human freedom. "A great deal of
   her work is explicitly concerned with the need to protect
   the bounds of intimacy," says Bonnie Honig, editor of a
   forthcoming essay collection called "Feminist
   Interpretations of Hannah Arendt." Hugo Ott, the German
   historian whose 1988 biography of Heidegger left out no
   grim detail about his subject's Nazi past, says he steered
   clear of the relationship: "It was a closed garden for me."

   "Can you imagine how she would have felt about this?" Ms.
   Young-Bruehl asks. "The only thing that justifies attention
   to the affair as opposed to her contributions is if you can
   show that this affair had an impact on her thought. I don't
   see that here."

   But Ms. Ettinger fiercely defends her right to pry into
   Arendt's private life: "Why did she leave her entire
   correspondence? If she didn't want people to know about it,
   she would have destroyed it."

   Perhaps the strength of everyone's feeling stems from the
   sudden popularity of Arendt's thought. In the past
   half-decade, Arendt scholarship has turned into a cottage
   industry. Each new volume of her correspondence is a minor
   literary event, and this year alone will see five major
   symposiums on Arendt around the world. Her appeal may
   derive from the intellectual demands of the post-cold-war
   era: Arendt was a powerful critic of all ideology.
   "Thinkers without camps are interesting right now, because
   camps have played themselves out," Ms. Benhabib says.

   But philosophers are also fascinated by the way Arendt used
   and transformed the tenets of Heideggerian existentialism,
   a system of thought undergirding much of post-modernist
   theory. "People are ashamed to owe anything to Heidegger -- 
   and Hannah Arendt is the easy way out," the French
   philosopher Alain Finkielkraut says. Not, he hastens to
   add, because she was a less sophisticated thinker, but
   because she was a writer of uncommon decency and lucidity.
   Indeed, it may be the startling immediacy of Arendt's voice
   that has caused so many people to take the Heidegger
   question so personally.

   "There is a concept that is very important in Hannah
   Arendt's thinking," Mr. Finkielkraut continues, "It's the
   concept of friendship. When you read her, you get the
   feeling of friendship, and that's one of the reasons she is
   so highly praised -- because her philosophy is charming.
   It's as if when reading her, we were becoming friends with
   her. But friendship means trust. So if she decided to
   reconcile herself with Heidegger, I trust her. I want to
   know her reasons, but I have confidence in her."

   -----

   Judith Shulevitz, the former editor of Lingua Franca, is
   the deputy editor of New York magazine.

   [End]









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