The odd couple
David Caute
HANNAH ARENDT/ MARTIN HEIDEGGER by Elzbieta Ettinger Yale, .£10.95, pp. 160 Why should a good Jewish girl remain in love with her professor long after his membership of the Nazi Party throughout the Third Reich was publicly exposed? Why should a famously knife-edged progressive intelligence engage in protract- ed self-deception about as duplicitous and reactionary a figure as Martin Heidegger? These are the central questions posed by Elzbieta Ettinger's reading of a correspondence between Hannah Arendt and Heidegger which extended over five decades.
From the outset of their passionate but clandestine affair — Heidegger was married and remained married to Elfride, a Valykrie of Wagnerian stature — Arendt displayed the passivity and shyness which excited the self-pitying bully. The girl who later became the abrasive author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition and Eichmann in Jerusalem would whisper to him 'if you want me' and `if you like'. Elzbieta Ettinger speculates that Hannah may subconsciously have been trying to 'obliterate the stereotype of a Jewess — loud, self-assured, clever . . . . ' But Arendt was also a German; the infor- mal relations between professors and stu- dents she later discovered in America appalled her.
The time of her close physical intimacy with the author of Sein and Zeit lasted only two years, until 1926, when she was 20. Heidegger then advised her that she must leave Marburg in the interests of her own intellectual growth, a sacrifice he was nobly prepared to make — and would she hence- forth not write to him without his permis- sion. Two years later he broke it all off. She replied with an anguished profession of eternal love: `And with God's will I will love you more after death.' Yet in 1933 she was spirited enough to convey to him her distress over the rumours that he now excluded Jews from his seminars at Freiburg, did not greet Jewish colleagues, and rejected his Jewish doctoral students. In reply, Heidegger 'vehemently and sar- castically denied the rumours'. Arendt could not have been aware that in October 1929 he had warned an official in the Ministry of Education against Verjudung (growing Judaisation) as a threat to `our, German spiritual life'.
After 1945 Heidegger was in deep trou- ble. He lied through his teeth and his rear end to the Allied Verification Commission; his claim that he had never read Mein Kampf was a whopper. He pleaded that the Nazis had banned his publications, though Being and Time was reissued in 1936 and 1942. At this juncture Arendt seems to have seen right through her sweating Siegfried. Writing to Karl Jaspers, she com- mented:
He certainly believed • . he could buy off the whole world at the lowest possible price and cheat his way out of everything that is embarrassing to him, and then do nothing but philosophise.
But in February 1950 came her first meeting with Heidegger since she left Germany in 1933. A spate of baroque love letters from the beleaguered philosopher, musing on his forbidden longing to run his fingers through her hair, and so weiter, evidently did the trick. From that time until her death in 1975 Arendt went to surprising lengths to minimise his Nazi record, blaming his defamation on the Adorno-Horkheimer circle in Frankfurt, and describing Theodor W. Adorno- Horkheimer as a 'half-Jew and one of the most repugnant people I know'.
According to Elzbieta Ettinger, what truly gripped Hannah Arendt was not erotic attraction but the special role she imagined she played in Heidegger's life, `the spiritual kinship she believed he shared with no one else'. When Arendt published The Human Condition in 1958 she told him that she would have dedicated the book to him 'had the relations between us not been star-crossed' — adding that her work 'owes you just about everything in every regard'. In February 1966, Der Spiegel published an exposé of his Nazi past and anti-Semitism. 'I didn't like it at all,' she wrote to Jaspers. 'He should be left in peace.' Jaspers disagreed:
He is a powerful presence, and one that everyone who wants an excuse for his own Nazi past wants to fall back on ...
The author of a major life of Rosa Luxemburg, Elzbieta Ettinger here offers a fascinating portrait of the formidable Arendt, but Heidegger remains flat on the page, a non-voice; barely a word of his is quoted, even though this charmer employed 'an elaborate and eloquent prose'. The reason for this gagging is squir- relled away in the briefest of prefaces: Arendt's letters were 'used' by permission, whereas Heidegger's were merely `perused'. One can only guess that Heideg- ger's estate did not grant permission to quote under copyright; one must guess because one is not told. Also missing are an index, a brief chronology of the two careers and a list of their principal publica- tions.
None of this need inhibit the movie, scripted by the late Lillian Hellman with additional philosophical dialogue by Tom Stoppard. A lot of the action will take place at ocean-liner terminals and on Bahnhof platforms, with anguished good- byes shrouded in steam, SS uniforms dis- creetly glimpsed in the background, and dazzling changes of zeitgeist costume for Meryl Streep. Direction by Schlondorff or Schlesinger. The ageing Heidegger will be brought on the lecture tour of America he never made, jealous of his protegee's fame, eager to sell his manuscripts to Texas, and finally exposed before a packed lecture hall by old Jaspers, while Arendt wrings her hands. Sartre will be seated in the back row, oyster-eyed and inscrutable: Heideg- ger, after all, was to Sartre what Hegel was to Marx. From the master of phenomenol- ogy Sartre learnt that the observing ego's field of vision is the field of Dasein being there. All this should be a doddle for Stoppard. However, according to rumours from the studios, the casting of Heidegger remains the stumbling block: no one mar- ketable fancies the Dasein.
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