Love and Reconciliation: The Case of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger

Love and Reconciliation: The Case of Hannah Arendt and Martin HeideggerAuthor(s): Daniel Maier-Katkin and Birgit Maier-KatkinSource: Harvard Review, No. 32 (2007), pp. 34-48Published by: Harvard ReviewStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27569287 .

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DANIEL MAIER-KATKIN & BIRGIT MAIER-KATKIN

Love and Reconciliation: The Case of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger

It is by now well known that Hannah Arendt had a love affair with Martin

Heidegger. She was eighteen years old and his student at Marburg. He was

thirty-five, married, had two children, and although Sein und Zeit (Being and Time) had not yet been published, he already enjoyed a reputation as a

leading figure in German intellectual history.

Heidegger was a charismatic teacher, a brilliant man with jet black

hair and a dark complexion, famous for the intricacy of his thought and

the beauty of his language. He was energetic and youthful, an avid skier,

hiker, and swimmer. He attracted the brightest students, who struggled to

understand the subtlety of his thought and regarded him as a sort of magi cian. Hannah Arendt, who in maturity was one of the twentieth century's

greatest and most original political theorists, was equally extraordinary as a

young, emancipated, secular Jewish woman of exceptional intelligence. Her

contemporaries describe her as beautiful and shy, with an intensity, inner

direction, and determination that also created an aura of magic about her.

Arendt was already competent in Latin and Greek, well read in his

tory and the classics, and familiar with the world of ideas when she came

to study at Marburg University, which she chose because of a rumor that

Martin Heidegger was a teacher from whom thinking could be learned.

Heidegger quickly became aware of Arendt's presence in his lectures on

Plato's Sophist. Twenty-five years later he recalled the moment in a poem entitled "November 1924": "If only from withdrawn grace, she, the one,

would fall toward me!"

Interest in their romantic liaison turns on the fact that Heidegger joined the Nazi Party in 1933, was elected rector at the University of Freiburg,

implemented the dismissal of Jews from the faculty, and enthusiastically

put his considerable intellectual prestige at the service of the F?hrer, while

Arendt was driven into exile to escape the virulent anti-Semitism that was

about to culminate in the destruction of European Jewry, and that, despite

this, after Germany's total collapse in 1945, at a time when she had emerged as a major intellectual figure in her own right, Arendt took the lead in es

tablishing a reconciliation with Heidegger.

34 Harvard Review 32



The most interesting question presented by the relationship between

these two giants of twentieth century intellectual history is: How could she

have forgiven him?

After a lecture one day early in February 1925, Heidegger asked Arendt to

come to his office. He later described her as "wearing a raincoat, a hat pulled low over her face, now and then uttering a barely audible 'yes' or 'no.'"

On February 10 he wrote a note which begins: "Dear Miss Arendt! I must

come see you this evening and speak to your heart . . . 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." Four days later he wrote to her

again this time as "Dear Hannah." A letter written two weeks later suggests

growing intimacy and reveals Heidegger's mood: "In the rainstorm on the

way home, you were even more beautiful and great. I would have liked to

wander with you for nights on end."

Theirs was a hidden, adulterous love, conducted in strict secrecy. Elf ride,

Heidegger's wife, was not to know, and in a small university town this meant

that no one must know. Often the lovers met in Arendt's attic apartment; sometimes Heidegger sent cryptic notes in code specifying the place and

the time of their next rendezvous with a system of signals of lights to be

switched on and off to show if he was in his study. His letters during the

first months of their relationship express his longing: "Being allowed to

wait for the beloved?that is what is most wonderful?for it is in the wait

ing that the beloved is 'present,'" or "Dear Hannah! ... After the concert, I

was so moved by being near you that I could not bear it any longer?and

left, when I would much rather have wandered through the May night with

you?walking silently beside you and sensing your dear hand and your

great gaze?not asking what for and why but just 'being.'" A later letter

ends: "Thank you?even if I can not and may not do so?for your love."

Without diminishing the obvious power of physical attraction and the

excitement of their transgressive affair, it is nevertheless clear that part of

the exhilaration of the relationship derived from their shared intellectuality. Arendt was to Heidegger a young, beautiful woman who could follow the

complicated paths of his thought; he was to her an initiation into existential

philosophy and the life of the mind.

Heidegger was in the early stages of the work that came to fruition

two years later in Being and Time, and their talk was filled not only with

literature, poetry, and classic works of philosophy, but also with his awe in

Maier-Katkin 35



the face of Being?suspended over the abyss of nothingness into which it

must eventually fall. Arendt confessed that childhood fears of death passed as shadows across her heart, and he responded that there are shadows only

where there is also sun, and that he was "made helpless" by her elementary

joy and quiet, resolute persistence. From Heidegger Arendt learned that embracing the inevitability of

nothingness heightens appreciation of the present moment and of the

possibilities of freedom. In ordinary life, Heidegger taught, fear of death

is repressed; individuals seek distractions and forget their own Being in

day-to-day concerns. Work, family, politics, and the petty concerns of ev

eryday life, whatever else they may be, are all distractions from awareness

of Being in the moment?with its concomitant awareness of the impending

catastrophe awaiting each man. Having rejected the Catholic faith of his

childhood, Heidegger's challenge to Arendt and the world was to face the

finality of death head on with no retreat into spirituality, and to embrace

the possibilities inherent in limited existence without fear or illusions,

sustained only by one's joyful awareness of the possibilities of Being. Arendt absorbed Heidegger's existential fortitude, his determination to

ask difficult questions, and his non-negotiable position that serious human

thought must dwell persistently on first and last things, but a lifetime of

work reflects that she did not accept the centrality of death in his thought,

preferring instead to focus on birth and new beginnings. Where Heidegger's existential solipsism emphasized isolation as the way to escape man's help less addiction to the pettiness of the social world, Arendt replied with a

philosophy of plurality, amor mundi, which ennobled public life.

This explication of her thought, however, was far in the future; more im

mediately Arendt began to experience the alienating effects of a secret love

for which there was no place in the shared world of public life: "Why," she

wrote,

... do you give me your hand

Shyly, knowledge of it only mine?

Are you from such a distant land

That you do not know our wine?

By the end of 1925 their contact and correspondence had become less

frequent. Heidegger's letters attribute this to the demands of family life

and his need to withdraw from everything human in order to do creative




work, which he characterizes as "the most magnificent human experience I know . . . [but which is] with regard to concrete situations . . . the most

repugnant thing one can encounter." Perhaps there was in this an element

of deceit in the face of cooling ardor, or a renewed commitment to family life and respectability. The growing separation between them was painful for Arendt, who was, after all, still very young. A poem of that period about

distant love repeats the refrain: "The evening has enwrapped me, / Soft as

velvet, heavy as sorrow."

Heidegger encouraged Arendt to move to Heidelberg to study with

his distinguished friend, the philosopher and psychiatrist, Karl Jaspers.

She went, hurt and confused that he could send her away, but the break

between them was far from clean. Correspondence and secret meetings continued. In July 1926, when Heidegger was traveling to Switzerland,

he arranged to meet Arendt at a train station in a small town en route

where they could spend the night. But such meetings became more spo

radic and their correspondence less frequent. The exchanges were mostly initiated by Heidegger, who would send assurances of his abiding love

and longing for her, apologizing for his absence with excuses of ill health,

meetings, work, and forbidding her to respond except on specific occa

sions when he asked her to write. Perhaps this is how she first began to

recognize, as she put it twenty years later, that Heidegger was "always, at every opportunity

... a notorious liar." Nevertheless, as late as 1928,

when Arendt was vacationing in N?rnberg with friends, she received a

letter from Heidegger and without a moment's hesitation interrupted her

travel for a rendezvous with him.

Heidegger wrote to Arendt on April 2,1928, saying that he had accepted the offer to assume Husserl's chair in philosophy at Freiburg. Perhaps the visibility associated with this important promotion and the simul

taneous publication of Being and Time elevated his anxiety about being

compromised by an affair with a young woman about whom he was no

longer feeling so passionate. They met in mid-April, and a few days later

Arendt wrote to Heidegger: "That you will not come now?I think I have

understood ... I love you as I have [since] the very first day?you know

this, and I have always known this . . . And 'God willing/I will love you more after death,'" a rough paraphrase of the last lines of the Elizabeth

Barrett Browning poem which begins: "How do I love thee? Let me count

the ways," and ends, "I love thee with the breath, / Smiles, tears, of all my

life!?and, if God choose,/! shall but love thee better after death."

Maier-Katkin 37



There are letters over the next few years in which Arendt refers to con

tinuing love for Heidegger as one of the great blessings of her life and longs to kiss his eyes and brow. The intensity of love in youth leaves an indelible

and bittersweet impression, and this may help explain Arendt's readiness,

years later, to reconcile with Heidegger, but in the years just ahead there was

a complete and dramatic estrangement. The last letters before the Second

World War passed between them in the winter of 1932-33, just as the Nazis

were coming to power. In response to her concern about rumors that he

was becoming anti-Semitic, Heidegger declared that these were slanders,

and offered a presumably exculpatory but profoundly insensitive account

of his behavior towards Jews at a time when their destiny was turning towards disaster:

I am on sabbatical this . . . semester and . . . announced well in

advance that I wanted to be left alone and would not be accepting

projects and the like. This man who comes anyway and urgently wants to write a dissertation is a Jew. The man who comes to see

me every month to report on a

large work in progress ... is also a

Jew. The man who sent me a substantial text for an urgent reading a few weeks ago is a Jew. The two fellows whom I helped get ac

cepted in the last three semesters are Jews. The man who, with my

help, got a stipend to go to Rome is a Jew. Whoever wants to call this

'raging anti-Semitism' is welcome to do so. Beyond that, I am now

just as much an anti-Semite in University issues as I was ten years

ago in Marburg ... To say absolutely nothing about my personal

relationships with Jews [e.g., Husserl, Misch, Cassirer, and others]. And above all it cannot touch my relationship to you.

Shortly thereafter, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party, and in August 1933,

Arendt went into exile in France. For the next seventeen years there was

only silence between them.

For Arendt this was a period of danger and deprivation. She slipped out of

the hands of Nazi officials twice: first in 1933 when she persuaded a young

police officer in Berlin to dismiss charges against her of anti-state activity and then made her way without papers to Paris, where she worked for

Youth Aliyah, a Zionist organization helping children immigrate to Israel;

then after the fall of France in 1940 she escaped from the infamous detention

center at Gurs. Cleverness, timing, and daring conspired to mark Hannah




Arendt as a survivor, but survival in exile also involved great suffering and

was always, in part, a matter of uncertain fortune. Arendt had the good fortune in Paris to meet and marry Heinrich Bl?cher, a strong, articulate,

handsome, intelligent, courageous, even heroic figure, a German leftist

associated with the intellectual and theatrical circles surrounding Bertolt

Brecht. Through years of exile and statelessness Arendt said of Bl?cher that

she felt secure?as in her own four walls?wherever she was with him. It

was also a matter of good fortune (combined with thoughtful effort and

preparation) that Arendt and Bl?cher were among the last 250 people to

gain visas to enter the United States, where they eventually became citizens

and she a leading public intellectual.

For Heidegger, the Third Reich began with grandiose ambitions to lead

a historic spiritual and intellectual rejuvenation of the German nation, but

ended in disrepute and despair. The Nazis were pleased to have a leading

philosopher among their ranks and he was appointed to the position of

Rektor at Freiburg University, where he behaved atrociously: abolishing the faculty senate, instituting a F?hrer system of governance, firing Jew

ish faculty members, helping to align the university system with the Nazi

regime, and lending intellectual respectability to a band of thugs. In public addresses he called upon students to undertake labor service and military service on behalf of the Reich, honored the exceptionalism and excellence

of the German Volk and German language, thought, and tradition, often

ending his speeches "Heil Hitler," and on at least one occasion with this

salute: "To the man of unprecedented will, to our F?hrer Adolf Hitler?a

threefold Sieg Heil!"

On a personal level, Heidegger disrupted the career of his student Max

M?ller by writing a letter of reference praising him as a scholar and teacher

but criticizing his negative attitude towards the Nazi state, and he blocked

the promotion of his student, Eduard Baumgarten, characterizing him as

too closely associated with Jewish intellectuals and the liberal-democrat

circle surrounding Max Weber at Heidelberg. Heidegger recommended

that Hermann Staudinger (who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1953,

and was already in the 1930s one of the most famous faculty members at

Freiburg) be removed from his position as professor because of his pacifist and anti-nationalist inclinations. The Ministry of Culture concurred in this

judgment, but the higher authorities, concerned about worldwide repercus

sions, allowed Staudinger to retain his position.

Maier-Katkin 39



Perhaps most damning was Heidegger's treatment of his closest friends.

He betrayed Edmund Husserl, his teacher and steadfast champion, the

leading existential philosopher of his generation, a baptized Austrian Jew,

professing Lutheran, and German patriot whose enthusiastic support over

the years and especially at the time of his own retirement made possible

Heidegger's elevation to the chair in philosophy at Freiburg University. At

the time Husserl wrote to Heidegger:

you have begun to realize your own true being as a philosopher. From that beginning you will grow to new and greater stature. No

body has more faith in you than I?faith, too, that no ill feelings will

confuse or divert you from the work that is purely a consequence of

the talent entrusted to you, conferred upon you at birth.

Four years later, it was Rektor Heidegger who ^~ued the form letter

dismissing the Jewish faculty at the university, including Husserl from

his emeritus position. In a letter to Karl Jaspers, reflecting her own es

trangement from Heidegger, Arendt commented that this "would have

left Husserl indifferent if someone else had signed it... [but as] this letter

and this signature almost killed him, I can't but regard Heidegger as a

potential murderer."

In June, 1933, shortly after ascending to the rectorship, Heidegger vis

ited Karl Jaspers. To Jaspers' question "How can a man as coarse as Hitler

govern Germany?" Heidegger replied: "Culture is of no importance. Just

look at his marvelous hands." When Jaspers complained that his Jewish

wife, Gertrud, cried over the news she read in the newspaper, Heidegger

responded, "It makes one feel better to cry sometimes," and then left without

properly taking his leave of Mrs. Jaspers, in whose house he had visited

for long stretches dating back to the 1920s. Seventeen years later, in March

1950, Heidegger, having been told by Arendt that Jaspers interpreted this

affront as anti-Semitic, wrote to Jaspers saying, "I haven't come to your house since 1933 not because a Jewish woman lived there, but because I was

simply ashamed." Jaspers, who had written a masterful little book, On the

Question of German Guilt, concluded after a brief exchange of letters that

Heidegger was not as ashamed as he ought to have been and broke off the

correspondence; the two men never met or spoke again after 1933.

Heidegger resigned suddenly from his position as Rektor in May of 1934

and returned to professorial life. This seems to have been based less on

any repulsion he may have felt towards the Nazis than on their growing




disinterest in him. He had hoped to be placed in charge of the German

university system and to earn a place in history as the leading Nazi phi

losopher. These honors, as it happens, fell to Alfred Rosenberg, who was

executed by the Allies at N?rnberg. Heidegger's philosophy was too rari

fied and insufficiently racist to have much appeal for the Nazis, who were

increasingly suspicious of him. Over the next decade the SS maintained a

file on Heidegger; he was under surveillance and his rights to publish and

travel were somewhat restricted. Nevertheless, after the war he was not

immediately declared to be denazified, and he was not allowed to teach

again for many years. It was widely felt that Heidegger was unrepentant and that he had done too much damage to the university and to Germany

by throwing his prestige behind the Nazi regime in its formative stage.

In November 1949, Arendt, now celebrated as the author of Origins of To

talitarianism, and rising to a position of widespread visibility in America as

a scholar, writer, and public intellectual, undertook a mission as executive

director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction to recover 1.5 million volumes

of Hebraica and Judaica that had been appropriated by the Germans and to

which they now referred as abandoned or "ownerless" property. She visited

with Karl Jaspers in Switzerland and indicated that she did not think she

would contact Heidegger when she was in Freiburg. Once there, however,

she sent him a note which he received the next day. That afternoon he came

to her hotel to hand-deliver an invitation to visit at his home that evening. She was in the dining room, and the waiter, recognizing the famous local

philosopher, announced him. They talked until late in the night and again at his home the next morning, where Arendt and Elfride Heidegger were

introduced.

This initial act of reconciliation was accompanied by a tremendous

outpouring of feeling. Arendt wrote the next day, saying:

This evening and this morning are the confirmation of an entire

life . . . confirmation that, when it comes down to it, was never

expected. When the waiter spoke your name (I had not actually

expected you, had not received the letter, after all), it was as if time

suddenly stood still. Then all at once I became aware of something I would not have confessed before, neither to myself nor to you nor

to anyone . . . [that] the power of the impulse [to contact you] had

mercifully saved me from committing the only really inexcusable

act of infidelity and forfeiting my life. But one thing you should

Maier-Katkin 41



know (as we have had relatively little to do with each other, after

all, and that not as openly as we might have), if I had done it, then

it would only have been out of pride, that is, out of sheer crazy

stupidity. Not for reasons.

Within days Heidegger had written five poems to her, and he composed

many more over the following weeks. One was a reaction to her com

ment that she had never considered herself a German woman and had

long since stopped considering herself a Jewish woman, but felt as if she

were, "after all"?here borrowing a phrase from Schiller?"The Girl From

Abroad." "Mountain of joy," he wrote, "... Stranger: home of the solitary

gaze where world begins . . .

outglowing all the fires' ashes and igniting embers of charity."

At Heidegger's urging Arendt returned for a second visit a few weeks

later. We do not know how Heidegger characterized his role in the Third

Reich in those first conversations, but it is inconceivable that their talk

circumvented the world events that had transformed their relationship from a romance into a political and racial discourse involving perpetra tors and victims of heinous crimes?the subject at the center of Arendt's

life and work.

It can be assumed that Heidegger characterized himself to her mis

leadingly, the same way he had in his denazification application in 1945

and again, years later, in a final interview published posthumously in Der

Spiegel. Heidegger publicly denied culpability and unapologetically put forward an image of himself almost as a victim of the regime. He took on

the rectorship, he claimed, because the university needed him. He only

joined the party because it facilitated his efforts to protect the university, and because he believed that the participation of intellectuals would

deepen and transform National Socialism. He accepted the Jewish Proc

lamation reluctantly and only to keep the university from being closed.

If his public statements in 1933 and 1934 were filled with enthusiasm for

the F?hrer, it was because Hitler did indeed seem at the time to be the man

who would lead Germany out of crisis and towards its national destiny; and such sentiments, he pointed out, were widespread among leading

political, business, and religious leaders at the time. He never referred to

his ambitions for personal greatness within the National Socialist revival, never acknowledged responsibility for contributing to the legitimacy of the

Nazi revolution, never admitted that the thinking that led to his d?tente

with the Nazis was flawed or that he was mistaken to have behaved as he




did. His position was that in 1933 it was by no means yet clear that things would turn out as they did. If he did not foresee Auschwitz a decade before

it happened, few did.

Indeed, Heidegger maintained, he left the rectorship in 1934 because

he saw that there was an unbridgeable gap between himself and the Nazis,

because he rejected their materialist race-based explanation of the greatness of the Volk (in favor of a more cultural and spiritual explanation), and that

this separated him from Nazi anti-Semitism. But he never acknowledged

publicly that racial prejudice and brutality were already evident when he

cast his lot with the Nazis, or that the party, by elevating political hacks to

all the leadership positions in the national university system, had signaled that the movement did not want him on board and had no further use for

him.

In his post-factum construction of reality, Heidegger suggested that he

had entered an inner emigration of spiritual resistance. He did not abandon

his v?lkische ideology, nor his commitment to German rebirth, but the party had too little regard for his intellectual leadership and could not be counted

on to move events in the right direction. In his own mind, Heidegger was

in some ways more National Socialist than the Nazis; but it was a National

Socialism in which neither the national nor the social elements were intrin

sically connected to anti-Semitic, biological racist theory. Why then did he

not attend Husserl's funeral in 1938? Why did he continue to pay dues to

the party until May 1945? Perhaps he was afraid to be conspicuous; it was

known that those who fell into disfavor with the movement were at some

risk. There are no further allegations of serious Nazi collaboration after this

period, but questions about Heidegger's character attach not only to his

early Nazi enthusiasm but to his persistent, self-serving disingenuousness about his activities in 1933 and 1934.

It does not seem likely that Arendt was taken in by Heidegger's duplic

ity and that she forgave him because she believed his lies. She certainly knew about his behavior toward Husserl and Jaspers. Might her attitude

have hardened if she had known all the additional details that Heidegger

repressed? Letters from Arendt to Heinrich Bl?cher and Karl Jaspers writ

ten after her meeting with Heidegger in 1950 show that she viewed him

as a liar and as a man of flawed character whose reactions were "cautious

and evasive."

A July 1953 diary entry in the form of a parable is particularly illustra

tive. It begins with a declarative sentence, almost certainly something said

by Heidegger in one of their meetings in 1950 or 1952:

Maier-Katkin 43



Heidegger says proudly: "People say Heidegger is a fox." This is

the true story of Heidegger the fox: There was once a fox so utterly without cunning that he not only constantly fell into traps but could

not even distinguish

a trap from a

non-trap .. .

Arendt seems to have concluded that Heidegger was na?ve about the affairs

of men and oblivious to the transparency of his lies.

In a letter to Mary McCarthy dated June 7,1957, Arendt wrote about an

unhappy affair McCarthy had had with an Englishman, about whom she

still had tender feelings, but who turned out to have lied habitually about

himself and his background. Arendt cautioned her to remember that men

who lie about facts are better than those who lie about feelings because facts

"will come out and show them to be liars no matter what they do . . . [but as to lies about feelings] who can find out?" If men who lie about facts are

honest about their feelings, they can sometimes be redeemed by the love of a

woman, but what for?some form of respectability? Some of these men can

also "be redeemed by genius or a talent so compelling that it will overrule

everything else." Here, she offered as examples Brecht and Heidegger.

Consider again the question with which we began: How could Hannah

Arendt, approaching the zenith of her creative powers and public recognition and despite the dislocation and suffering of the Nazi period, have forgiven

Martin Heidegger, then still widely viewed as an unrepentant Nazi?

Although she did not trust him or hold his character in high regard, there was for Arendt both the memory of love and continuing admiration for

Heidegger's genius. For Arendt, neither Heidegger's disgraceful behavior in

the critical year 1933-34, nor the weakness of character that made duplicity rather than candor his principal defensive strategy in the postwar years,

were of such a magnitude as to place him outside of the human community within which, she believed, reconciliation is always a possibility.

Reconciliation was itself an early topic in the renewed discourse between

Arendt and Heidegger. A letter from Heidegger, in May 1950, addresses

Arendt as "Oh you! most trusted one" and recalls a conversation between

them on her second visit to Freiburg in March: "You are right," he wrote,

"about reconciliation and revenge."

We do not know what was said between them; but a lengthy entry in

Arendt's Denktagebuch observes that forgiveness (Verzeihung) destroys the

fundamental equality of human relations by setting the person who forgives




apart from and above the person who is forgiven. It destroys relationships because the person who forgives pretends to be a superior person, and

the one who asks to be forgiven (which in any event was not Heidegger's

position) seeks something which humans can neither give to one another

nor take from one another. Revenge (Rache), on the other hand, preserves

relationships because the person seeking vengeance always stays close (at

least in a psychological sense) to the other, with no pretense of superiority. Christian forgiveness and revenge have in common the solidarity of sin

ners?recognition that what the other did I might have done or could do.

Reconciliation (Vers?hnung) is a true alternative, rational rather than emo

tional or spiritual, abandoning revenge and substituting for forgiveness honest memory and hope for new and better beginnings.

Over time, at least in her English writing, Arendt came to include within

the meaning of "forgiveness" many of the attributes that she originally as

sociated with reconciliation. In the chapter on Action in her 1958 classic,

The Human Condition, Arendt noted that in an uncertain world people can

never predict the consequences of their behavior, but actions taken are ir

reversible: what was done or not done cannot be changed. Only forgiving can undo the deeds of the past, which otherwise "hang like Damocles'

sword over every new generation." Citing Jesus of Nazareth's disputation

against the scribes and Pharisees, Arendt argued that the power to forgive is not exclusively divine, but that men must forgive each other before they can hope to be forgiven by God.

Arendt does not assert a duty to forgive (or reconcile with) the extremi

ties of willed evil, but only (still following Jesus) human "trespasses," the

principal characteristic of which are not necessarily that they do less injury than willed evil, but that they arise from thoughtlessness, from men acting

when they "know not what they do." For practical rather than spiritual

reasons, trespass requires forgiveness if the web of relationships in which

life is enmeshed is to go on:

Only through this constant mutual release from what they do can

men remain free agents, only by constant willingness to change their

minds and start again can they be trusted with so great a power as

that to begin something new.

Arendt does not excoriate revenge, but denigrates it as the natural, expected, automatic reaction to transgression, while forgiveness (which, in her think

ing, now seems to incorporate reconciliation) can never be predicted:

Maier-Katkin 45



It is the only reaction that acts in an unexpected way, uncondi

tioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from

its consequences both the one who forgives and the one who is

forgiven.

Near the end of her life, Arendt commented that every thought had

been an afterthought for her, a reflection on experience. With this in mind

it is hard not to read Heidegger into these sentences:

Forgiving and the relationship it establishes is always an eminently

personal (though not necessarily individual or private) affair in

which what was done is forgiven for the sake of who did it. . . For

love, although it is one of the rarest occurrences in human lives

... is unconcerned to the point of total unworldliness with what

the loved person may be, with his qualities and shortcomings . . .

achievements, failings, and transgressions.

We must be careful to remember that the love of which Arendt speaks is not

romantic, but "regard for another person from the distance that the world

puts between us," based on awareness of shared humanity rather than on

admiration or esteem.

In response to her friend W. H. Auden, who argued for a more liberal

approach to forgiveness based on principles of universal charity and the

admonition to turn the other cheek, Arendt wrote that she did not approve of forgiving everything (?berhaupt), including betrayal in the person who

betrayed on the grounds of human sinfulness and solidarity with the sinner.

"I admit," she wrote, "that there is a great temptation to forgive in the spirit of Who am I to Judge? but I'd rather resist it." Better, she thought, to forgive in the spirit of friendship, which (unlike friendliness) cannot be universal,

requiring us to make distinctions among individuals.

Some years later, on the occasion of receiving the Lessing Prize of the

Free City of Hamburg, Arendt returned to the theme of forgiveness and

love, observing of Gotthold Lessing's play Nathan the Wise that in the end,

"Nathan's wisdom consists solely in his readiness to sacrifice truth to

friendship." This and her hope in the possibility of new beginnings explain Arendt's reconciliation with Heidegger; and Auden seems to concur in the

bases for her judgment. His poem "The Common Life" ends:




And always, though truth and love

can never really differ, when they seem to

The subaltern should be truth.

It is important in closing to observe the enduring effects of forgiveness and

reconciliation in the lives of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. The

flood of correspondence between them in 1950 and 1952 slowed substan

tially in 1953 and 1954 but remained affectionate. Then there were almost

no letters between them for ten years and no further visits. There is a warm

note in April 1965, from Heidegger, thanking Arendt for having sent greet

ings on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday; and then in October 1966

a letter from him to her on the occasion of her sixtieth birthday, recalling the

seminar on Plato's Sophist more than forty years earlier: "It often seems to

me as if what has been converges on a single moment that salvages what can

last." Arendt wrote back that his letter had given her the "greatest possible

joy" and, recalling their first meetings, wrote: "What endures ... is where

one can say [here quoting Goethe]?'Beginning and ending?always the

same.'" After this new beginning their correspondence grew active again. There were exchanges of books and other small gifts and then renewed

visits beginning in the summer of 1967.

In September 1969, Arendt delivered a radio address in honor of

Heidegger's eightieth birthday, recalling his lectures on Plato, noting that he exemplified the difference between discussing philosophy and

doing philosophy and that he made thinking come alive with passion. She lamented that Heidegger and Plato, when they became involved in

human affairs "resorted to tyrants and F?hrers," but this "escapade" in

Heidegger's life, she said, "is mostly called a 'mistake' today?after the

bitterness has subsided ..." and Heidegger "recognized this 'mistake'

after a short time and then risked considerably more than was common at

German universities back then." She sent a copy of this talk to Heidegger with an affectionate note that ended: "May those who come after us, when

they recall our century and its people and try to keep faith with them, not

forget the devastating sandstorms that swept us up, each in his own way, and in which something like this man and his work were still possible."

In the next years there were more visits and a very active correspon

dence discussing books, ideas, problems with publishers, here and there

planning further visits or commenting on how pleasant such visits had

been. One notices, especially in Heidegger's letters, the damping of life's

Maier-Katkin 47



fire, as when he apologizes for a delay in writing, saying: "I should have

written long ago, but I used the best hours for work."

Hannah Arendt died suddenly of a heart attack at dinner with friends

in her Manhattan apartment in December 1975. She was sixty-nine years old. Martin Heidegger, informed by telegram, wrote that he was in deep

mourning and that "only grief and remembrance are left to us." He died

a few months later at the age of eighty-six. In their last years an easy com

merce between old friends added warmth to autumn days, the sun fading towards winter's

night.

Forgiveness and reconciliation, which restore peace and friendship, are

manifestations of love as regard for another. Hannah Arendt's reconciliation

with Martin Heidegger honors the memory of young love and holds the

promise of a world reconstructed through new beginnings. Is "Being-in the-world" made better by this? Perhaps the best answer is Carl Sandburg's existential question:

tell me if any get more than the lovers . . .

in the dust. . .

in the cool tombs.

NOTES: This essay draws on the letters of Hannah Arendt and her closest corre

spondents, especially Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: Letters 1925-1975, edited

by Ursula Ludz and translated by Andrew Shields (Harcourt, 2004); Hannah Arendt Karl Jaspers Correspondence 1926-1969, edited by Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner and

translated by Robert and Rita Kimber (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992); The Hei

degger-Jaspers correspondence, 1920-1963, edited by Walter Biemel and Hans Saner

and translated by Gary E. Aylesworth (Humanity Books, 2003); Between Friends: The Correspondence of Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy, 1949-1975, edited by Carol Brightman (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1995); and Within Four Walls: The

Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Bl?cher, edited by Lotte Kohler

and translated by Peter Constantine (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1996). Richard

Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (MIT Press, 1998) provides the full text of Heidegger's speeches during 1933 and 1934. An excellent source on this

period in Heidegger's life is Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, translated

by Allan Blunden (Basic Books, 1993). The quotation from the Husserl-Heidegger correspondence is drawn from this source.




Documents

Love and Reconciliation: The Case of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger