Richard Cohen: The Banality of Love
[Richard Cohen is a columnist for the Washington Post.]
Around 1924, the professor seduced his student. He was 35 and married; she was 18 and single. He was an important philosopher, and she was a precocious kid, destined for great things herself. He was to become a Nazi and she was a Jew -- Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. If you could understand them both, as a couple and individually, you would understand the world and all its mysteries. You might also never sleep again.
The Heidegger-Arendt affair is a much-told tale that never loses its attraction for writers. Yet another book has appeared, "Stranger From Abroad" by Daniel Maier-Katkin, which was reviewed, along with a separate book on Heidegger, on the front of Sunday's New York Times Book Review -- a place of honor befitting these two intellectual giants, not to mention their very strange, and in terms of affection, enduring affair. After World War II, Arendt defended Heidegger and resumed the friendship.
The affair is easy enough to understand. She was a fetching young woman, and he was a robust man of great intellectual achievement, a celebrity of sorts before that entailed dancing or self-abasement on TV. It is harder, much harder, to either understand or excuse Arendt's determination -- or was it need? -- to continue the relationship after the war. After all, Heidegger was not a Nazi in some sort of passive sense. He heaped praise on Hitler and, as rector of Freiburg University, he helped purge the faculty of Jews -- his very colleagues.
As for Arendt, in the postwar years, she became downright famous. Her accounts of the Adolf Eichmann trial for the New Yorker -- and later in the book "Eichmann in Jerusalem" -- became both a sensation and a cause celebre. She formulated the phrase "the banality of evil," so apt that it has suffered the fate of all truisms, becoming a cliche. She was also celebrated and loathed for indicting some of her fellow Jews for alleged complicity in the Holocaust -- a harsh and malicious judgment....
Read entire article at WaPo
Around 1924, the professor seduced his student. He was 35 and married; she was 18 and single. He was an important philosopher, and she was a precocious kid, destined for great things herself. He was to become a Nazi and she was a Jew -- Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. If you could understand them both, as a couple and individually, you would understand the world and all its mysteries. You might also never sleep again.
The Heidegger-Arendt affair is a much-told tale that never loses its attraction for writers. Yet another book has appeared, "Stranger From Abroad" by Daniel Maier-Katkin, which was reviewed, along with a separate book on Heidegger, on the front of Sunday's New York Times Book Review -- a place of honor befitting these two intellectual giants, not to mention their very strange, and in terms of affection, enduring affair. After World War II, Arendt defended Heidegger and resumed the friendship.
The affair is easy enough to understand. She was a fetching young woman, and he was a robust man of great intellectual achievement, a celebrity of sorts before that entailed dancing or self-abasement on TV. It is harder, much harder, to either understand or excuse Arendt's determination -- or was it need? -- to continue the relationship after the war. After all, Heidegger was not a Nazi in some sort of passive sense. He heaped praise on Hitler and, as rector of Freiburg University, he helped purge the faculty of Jews -- his very colleagues.
As for Arendt, in the postwar years, she became downright famous. Her accounts of the Adolf Eichmann trial for the New Yorker -- and later in the book "Eichmann in Jerusalem" -- became both a sensation and a cause celebre. She formulated the phrase "the banality of evil," so apt that it has suffered the fate of all truisms, becoming a cliche. She was also celebrated and loathed for indicting some of her fellow Jews for alleged complicity in the Holocaust -- a harsh and malicious judgment....