Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Bard, and Me

I can still remember the sound of Hannah Arendt's heeled boots as she walked down one of Bard College's paved paths on a visit to her husband, Heinrich Blücher, one of my professors there.

I also remember having given Arendt's book The Origins of Totalitarianism to my Soviet roommate in Moscow at the very end of 1961 on my way back home from Afghanistan. How foolish could I have been? But she took it and hid it in her suitcase. I've always wondered if she was searched or arrested? Back then, tourists were assigned both rooms and roommates in look-alike, nondescript buildings. A female post-NKVD Intourist floor attendant sat in the hallway day and night. If we left, we gave her our room keys. The KGB had demanded just such surveillance to prevent Soviet citizens from making contact with foreigners.

But, most of all, I remember my meeting with Prof Blücher after my return to Bard. I told him that I had no words to describe what I'd seen and experienced as a captive bride; that I saw the most heartbreaking poverty, varieties of human bondage, the cruel mistreatment of servants, the unsightly and haunting sight of ghostly women in burqas, the sadistic consequences of polygamy on both children and wives, the extraordinary but normalized brutalization of women. I had not yet coined the phrase for Islamic gender apartheid, but in my diary I had, somehow, found the word "patriarchy." I must have plucked it out of high heaven. I asked Heinrich Blücher, our resident philosopher-king, this:

"How can I make sense of this experience? When I try to talk to my classmates, they only ask if I was really a princess, had I met the king, how many servants did I have, had I met diplomats, what were the villas like, how were the parties?"

Prof. Blücher paused, and then he said: "Why not have an affair and forget all about it?"

I left his office, dazed. Puzzled. Deeply disappointed.

Today, a very good friend sent me an article about the limits of friendship, whom one can forgive for the most offensive views and whose views make a continued friendship impossible. The article, titled “The Limits of Friendship,” is up at Medium and was penned by Professor Roger Berkowitz.

Dr. Berkowitz, who is currently a Professor at Bard, the author of Thinking in Dark Times: Hannah Arendt on Ethics and Politics, and the founder of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities at Bard, views Arendt's defense of her professor-lover, Martin Heidegger, a married man at least seventeen years her senior, as entirely understandable. Their relationship merits a continued friendship. As Arendt wrote, Heidegger's flirtation with Nazism was "foolish," merely an "escapade." Arendt also viewed the monster mass-murderer, Jew-hater, and a hands-on Jew-killer Adolph Eichmann as a "banal" bureaucrat, a man who simply "forgot to think." (As if reason or logic will automatically lead such men away from committing evil.) However, according to Berkowitz, Arendt could never remain friends with someone like Eichmann as she could with Heidegger, who, in both Arendt and Berkowitz's opinion, had come to view his ties to the genocidal Nazi regime as "the greatest stupidity of my life."

What the hell? Alas, I knew too much. Long ago, my friend and colleague Abigail L. Rosenthal, an Emerita Professor of Philosophy, sent me her most excellent book titled A Good Look at Evil. She has a chapter on Arendt titled "Spoiling One's Story: The Case of Hannah Arendt."

I immediately sent Berkowitz's piece to her and asked her to please comment upon it. I specifically asked, "Whether it was true that Heidegger had left the Nazi party in 1933 or 1934? And was he in any way persecuted or punished for doing so thereafter?" Here's what she wrote:

“No, and no again.  In 1933, he became Rector of the U. of Freiburg as well as a card-carrying Nazi. One of his then students recalls his entering the classroom on one particular day with the announcement, ‘There’ll be no class today. The Fuhrer has spoken. Truth will not be the same for a thousand years!’ The student who was there (whose name I forget) told my philosophy prof, Stanley Rosen, who told me. On a different day, Heidegger told all Jewish students to leave his classroom. Everybody sat there in silence as they got up & left — & God knows what happened to them subsequently if they remained in Germany. In Heidegger's capacity as Rector of the University, he deprived Edmund Husserl of his academic rank & pension. (Husserl had been his teacher, who'd preceded him at Freiburg & got him the post as his successor.) Heidegger was, in short, a total shit.  In the whole history of philosophy, there’s been no example to match it. Although he claimed (& Arendt later wrote about him in the NY Review of Books) that his Nazi period had been an interval of temporary distraction when he had ‘forgotten to think’ — in fact late writings, published posthumously, indicate that Heidegger had been continuing to think like a Nazi for the rest of his godforsaken days.”

What Berkowitz has written is, apparently, not true. But how would his readers know that if they did not routinely bother to check almost everything and if one did not know whom to consult? Then, one easily believes lies, even internalizes them. We've all seen quite a lot of that, haven't we?

What do Arendt's clickety-clackety boots and the bizarre advice her distinguished husband gave me so long ago have to do with the subject of good versus evil? I have puzzled over that advice for more than sixty-four years. Perhaps Dr. Blücher was only being kind. He understood that what I'd experienced was something so momentous that it would take me many years to fully understand it. For now, German intellectual that he was, he suggested a merciful diversion--a love affair.

My college campus, which I loved, was also filled with a level of permissiveness, both sexual and political, representative of a left-wing, Euro-centric, and bohemian point of view that only became more intense over the decades. At the time I felt it freed me, sprung me loose from provincial values. Which it did, it surely did. Back then, I prized it. But now I am far more critical of that very culture as it evolved under the baton of Bard's former President Leon Botstein.

Unsurprisingly, both Arendt and Blücher are buried at Bard College. Bard also acquired Arendt's personal library, which consists of about 4,000 volumes. About 900 of the volumes contain her hand-written notes and many of the books are inscribed to her from Heidegger and others, including Gershom Scholem and W.H. Auden. And, as previously mentioned, Bard also hosts the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities under the leadership of Professor Berkowitz.

I wonder if they have the volume of love letters between Arendt and Heidegger? They wrote to each other from 1925-1975. Their correspondence is collected in Letters: 1925-1975. Surely, they must.

Just imagine! Heidegger was in love with a Jew--and the Jewish Arendt was in a love with a Nazi. Well, strange things can happen. According to Maria Popova, their correspondence was "emotionally intense." Heidegger's first letter to Arendt read like this:

“Dear Miss Arendt!

“I must come see you this evening and speak to your heart. Everything should be simple and clear and pure between us. Only then will we be worthy of having been allowed to meet. You are my pupil and I your teacher, but that is only the occasion for what has happened to us. I will never be able to call you mine, but from now on you will belong in my life, and it shall grow with you.

“Be happy! — that is now my wish for you. Only when you are happy will you become a woman who can give happiness, and around whom all is happiness, security, repose, reverence, and gratitude to life.”

Arendt has been glamorized. A feature film and at least several documentaries have appeared about her. She is in no way tainted by her girlish and life-long, once sexual but essentially an emotional and intellectual romance with Heidegger. He was viewed as a Great Man--she aspired to become one herself. According to Popova at Marginalia:

“And yet despite Arendt’s departure, the emotional intensity between the two magnetized them into continued correspondence and occasional meetings over the months that followed.” In April of 1928 Arendt wrote:

“I love you as I did on the first day — you know that, and I have always known it, even before this reunion. The path you showed me is longer and more difficult than I thought.”

A year later, after Arendt married a man she had met in Heidegger’s seminar (Henrich Blücher), she sent Heidegger one last romantic epistle:

“Do not forget me, and do not forget how much and how deeply I know that our love has become the blessing of my life. This knowledge cannot be shaken, not even today. I kiss your brow and your eyes,

Your Hannah.”

What to make of all this? Well, being brilliant does not necessarily spare one from common, vulgar prejudices. Arendt was wrong about the power of reason and logic. Being famous does not do so either. Just look at the Hollywood celebrities who apparently support and enable "globalizing the Intifada." Whether one is sane or insane--one still picks up the common virus of Jew hatred. Being Jewish does not exempt one from being a Jew-hater and/or an anti-Zionist. The rioters in France--left-wingers, disgruntled students, ragged looters, and Jihadists--all share the same conspiratorial view of Israel--not Iran, not Palestine--as genocidal criminals.

I feared that La Belle France was lost when the mob draped the Palestinian flag on a statue of Joan of Arc. But I understood that Jihadists are very literal and that they view treasured cultural or economic symbols as the soul or the essence of a civilization (the Twin Towers, The Buddhas of Bamiyan, now, in Italy, the Coliseum.

I think it is too late to save France or to save Europe, but I hope and pray that the West begins to finally understand and to beat back the Muslim Brotherhood's versions of Jihad.