Theory & Event

Imagine this: a man and a woman fall passionately in love, encounter difficulties due partly to circumstances and partly to conflicts within and between themselves, agree to part but don’t quite, are then separated for a long time but are often on one another’s minds, and form a relationship after many years pass that has the character more of abiding friendship and concern than romantic love — a friendship tinged, to be sure, with the sting and sadness of squandered opportunities and convictions that turned out to be illusions. If that sounds familiar, it isn’t only because, in all likelihood, the reader is already familiar with Elzbieta Ettinger’s book, or knows from the title of this review that the principals are Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. It is also because the description matches, as well as any set of cliches can, the life cycle of love in general, even as it afflicts or blesses the lives of lesser mortals.

The description given above is not, however, a paraphrase of Ettinger’s characterization of Arendt and Heidegger’s affair, although I believe it handles the facts as well as hers does. Ettinger’s book does contain some important and illuminating material that had not before come to light — for example, a valuable note by Arendt confirming the centrality of Heidegger’s thought to Arendt’s The Human Condition.¹ In the main, however, the account it presents is remarkable primarily for its moralism and relentless hostility towards Heidegger — a good many expressions of which directly contradict other accounts by those no less hostile to Heidegger but with far more reason to be.

According to Ettinger, for example, “Professor Heidegger was in a position of power. He enjoyed power, and he used it as he saw fit.” No evidence or substantiation is offered for this claim, which fits uneasily, to say the least, with Karl Löwith’s account of how uncomfortable Heidegger was made by exercising power.² (That Ettinger has read this book is suggested by the fact that she refers to it; presumably, she chose to ignore whatever in it failed to confirm her thesis.) Later we are treated to Ettinger’s judgment that Heidegger’s interest in Arendt “was based solely on sexual drive and the exercise of power.”³ In Ettinger’s view, Heidegger’s mysteriously magnetic personality exercised an influence over others that enabled him to manipulate them for his own purposes, including above all the impressionable eighteen-year-old Hannah Arendt. Heidegger’s victims, on Ettinger’s account, were utterly disabled, shorn of their own resources, and lacking in any ability to fend off Heidegger’s unceasing efforts to secure control, acclaim, and adulation — Arendt especially. As Ettinger tells the story, Arendt’s past as a “fatherless, searching youngster” and her “vulnerable, melancholic nature” rendered her incapable of resisting what Ettinger presents as Heidegger’s calculated “tactics” and “moves.”⁴ A Jewess uncertain of her place in society and driven by the desire to assimilate to it, Arendt was gratified by Heidegger’s interest in her; for his part, the provincial peasant was bowled over by Arendt’s “exotic looks” and “elegant comportment.”⁵ Heidegger’s willingness to pursue an affair with Arendt and thus “put his family and career at risk” reveals to Ettinger his “self-centered nature and capacity for ruthlessness and cunning,” not the extent to which his love for her might have overwhelmed or in some way disabled him.⁶

Of course, it is not necessary to take the obviously untenable position that Heidegger was a saint to find Ettinger’s caricature reductive and unsympathetic to the point of refusing to acknowledge how love and passion can delude. Of course, on Ettinger’s account, the only love was Arendt’s; Heidegger is presented as an unfeeling and coldly manipulative monster with an insatiable appetite for adulation (or, later, a pragmatic need to employ Arendt as a tool in rehabilitating his professional...