Tawdry Bits and Pieces

...The affair was carried on intermittently over a four-year span with great ardor and much backstairs maneuvering...

...The two renewed their correspondence and continued seeing each other whenever she came to Europe until her death in 1975...

...In a recently discovered letter dated "2 October 1929," however, he wrote: "Nothing less is at stake: we stand before the choice either to replenish our German intellectual life with genuine native resources and educators or have it taken over, in the broader and narrower sense, by the Jewish element...

...Their meetings became sporadic and ludicrously cloaked in secrecy...

...Thus we learn that on leaving for France, Hannah severed all ties with her mentor...

...at least in part, it seems, to protect him, to salvage the Geist her teacher had helped her attain in youth...

...But his "ambivalent letter to her" regarding allegations of anti-Semitism she had heard about him, "along with news of his pro-Hitler Rectorial Address and his joining of the Nazi Party," may have "sealed Arendt's decision to leave Germany in 1933...

...Casting all scholarly principles to the wind, and before completing her full portrait, she decided to stitch together the tawdry bits and pieces of the romance between the married professor, "the magician from Messkirch," and the exotic-looking "Jewess" who was his prize pupil...

...Ettinger is best at demonstrating the enduring nature of the Heidegger-Arendt bond...

...She quotes from a letter to Jaspers in which Arendt calls Adorno "a half-Jew and one of the most repugnant people I know...

...If readers were persuaded that her judgments were overly colored by her own emotional deficiencies, the moral authority of her work would be diminished...

...out of her own need to save her pride and dignity...

...contributor New York "Times Book Review" It is no surprise that after publishing a forceful and readable, if slightly overwrought, biography of Rosa Luxemburg in 1986, Elzbieta Ettinger set to work on a life of Hannah Arendt...

...You wouldn't know from this book that there were other instances where Arendt let her emotions, sympathies or antipathies cloudher judgment...

...The Heidegger attachment reasserted itself in 1950, when she met him in Germany...

...Moreover, says Ettinger, "There was already another woman in the wings...!' In 1929, out of pique, Arendt entered a short-lived marriage with one of his students, Gunther Stern...

...His later letters disclose conventional sentimentality if not lowbrow taste...

...What the letters re-vealedEttinger thought sojuicy, she could not contain herself...

...He left Germany in 1934...

...Three years later, in Paris, she took up with Heinrich Bliicher, a former Communist and future teacher at Bard College and the New School...

...The footnote itself is a small gem of half-truth, since Adorno used the hyphenated surname Wiesengrund-Adomo and hardly ingratiated himself with the Nazi regime...

...Analyzing Heidegger's letters to Arendt, she writes without blinking an eyelash that "the lyrical stanzas bordering on kitsch, the lines trembling with passion, must have kept her uncertain and alert to his desire for her...

...Questions, clearly, for another book...

...Previously it had been asserted that Arendt "absolved him of any wrongdoing...

...Not Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus, then, but Giinter Grass' Oskar, the stunted narrator of The Tin Drum, is the prototype of Nazism...

...Some still maintain that he joined the party out of opportunism, not because he sympathized with its ideology...

...He indulged a curious penchant for pornography that Arendt dismissed as unrepresentative of the real man...

...For example, Ettinger writes: "Regardless of the perceived irrationality of her emotions for Heidegger, [Arendt] could not love a man she did not respect...

...Throughout, Heidegger was a monster of wily manipulation and hypocrisy...

...Paul Tillich is a case in point...

...She left Germany in August 1933...

...Ettinger's book is further weakened by prose that is inexact, unidiomatic and perilously close to being purple...

...Adorno was his mother's maiden name...

...It doesn't help, either, that the author's translations from the German are frequently infelicitous...

...In attempting to assess the effect of Heidegger's personal and political behavior on Arendt during the years 1929-33, the author resorts to less than satisfying informed speculation...

...Whatever that means...

...That year Heidegger was named rector of the University of Freiburg, joined the National Socialist German Workers' Party, and delivered his infamous pro-Nazi Rectorial Address...

...She exculpated him...

...Even when she does deal with one of Arendt's more visceral biases, namely her deep-seated loathing of Theodor W. Ador-no, Ettinger fails to present the full picture...

...Later her "bondage" is attributed to "insecurity and a need to be loved, which had once led her to bargain away her independence," and now caused her "to maintain the role of [Heidegger's] confidante, to disavow her mind and her accomplishments...

...Then 35, he was just completing his major opus Being and Time, and was known as a brilliant teacher who held his students in thrall...

...In both cases the fragments are truncated and lifted out of context...

...Left out is the bracketed "by Law" that Arendt correctly added after "half-Jew" an omission compounded by the following footnote: "Arendt always referred to Adorno as Wiesengrund, his real name, to emphasize his attempt to conceal his Jewish origins...

...The result is a slim volume consisting of narrative text interwoven with snippets and snatches of letters—actual quotes from Arendt, and paraphrases of Heidegger's words...

...In other words, her campaign to whitewash Heidegger's Nazi past began at approximately the time she published The Origins of Totalitarianism...

...In 1926, for reasons of his own, Heidegger whisked Arendt off to Heidelberg to study with Karl Jaspers...

...Since Hannah "idealized Heidegger beyond measure," we are told, she may have "brushed away" any thought that he "might be involved in unsavory practices...

...The tale of the "star crossed" lovers (Arendt's designation) begins in 1924-25, when 18-year-old Hannah enrolled in Heidegger's philosophy class at Marburg University...

...The author sheds little light on Arendt's subsequent bizarre actions, because the book's many explanations of her behavior are often contradictory...

...In a 1946 issue of Partisan Review, Arendt wrote: "He is, in fact, the last (we hope) romantic...

...After the 1950 visits," Ettinger notes, "Arendt—who had only one year earlier vehemently opposed the publication of Heidegger's work—became his devoted if unpaid agent in the United States...

...One possible effect would be the tarnishing of Arendt's reputation as a serious political thinker...

...They married in 1940 and came to New York the following year...

...The married theologian, who staked out a lofty moral position for himself, was the lover of Hannah's closest friend, Hilde Frankel...

...Another possible effect would be to raise the issue of whether she arrived at the "banality of evil" theory in a late unconscious effort to clear Heidegger, the incarnation of German Romantic Innigkeit at its most radical and demonic...

...Its failings aside, what kind of resonance can this little book be expected to have...

...With the help of an aunt on his father's side, a Weisengrund, he provided financial assistance and publishing advice to Walter Benjamin, who was having a difficult time in Paris after fleeing there in 1933...

...Arendt, his worshipful creature, was compliant and submissive...

...Was Sylvia Plath right after all when she wrote in her poem, "Daddy," "every woman adores a fascist...

...And what of Arendt, the fearless independent woman...

...they possess the uninhibited language of unbridled emotion...

...In addition, the concentration on a single motif produces distortion...

...As part of her research Ettinger got permission to peruse the Arendt-Heidegger correspondence—previously inaccessible because of strictures imposed by his estate—on condition that she not quote from him directly...

...How is one to account for the fact that women as different as Simone de Beau-voir, Isak Dinesen and Hannah Arendt?all proud, indomitable presences in public life—succumbed to men who were autocratic, exploitative, and ultimately destructive...

...The whole undertaking has about it the unfortunate air of indecent haste...

...The two subjects invite comparison in many areas, not least in their emotional involvements: Rosa's life-long relationship with Leo Jogiches provided a focal point in Ettin-ger's earliernarrative, and Arendt's lengthy entanglement with Martin Heidegger will probably play a central role in the coming biography...