Volume 43, Number 1 · January 11, 1996
Dangerous Liaison
By Alan Ryan
Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger
by Elzbieta Ettinger
Yale University Press, 139 pp., $16.00
Since Elisabeth Young-Bruehl first revealed it, admirers of Hannah Arendt have been troubled by the fact that she was for four years—from 1924 to 1928—the mistress of Martin Heidegger.[1] She was a Jew who fled Germany in August 1933, a few months after Hitler's assumption of power. He was elected Rector of the University of Freiburg in the spring of 1933, and in a notorious inaugural address hailed the presence of the brown-shirted storm-troopers in his audience, claimed that Hitler would restore the German people to spiritual health, and ended by giving the familiar stiff-armed Nazi salute to cries of 'Sieg Heil.' The thought that these two were ever soulmates is hard to swallow.
Review, 5419 words
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