Ménage à Trois

It is now well known that in their youth Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger were briefly lovers. Their affair was first reported in Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s absorbing biography, Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1984), though it received little popular attention at the time, thanks largely to Young-Bruehl’s discretion and sense of proportion. A few years ago, however, the affair became the subject of distasteful polemics following the publication of Elzåábieta Ettinger’s study Hannah Arendt/Martin Heidegger (1995). Professor Ettinger hoped to create a scandal with her little book and she succeeded. While working on a biography of Arendt she acquired permission to read the Arendt-Heidegger correspondence, which, under the terms set by the literary executors, few had seen and no one had been allowed to quote from. Having read the letters, Ettinger then rushed an account of the love affair into print, paraphrasing Heidegger’s letters at length and quoting directly from Arendt’s replies.

Ettinger portrayed the Arendt-Heidegger relationship as a deeply pathological one that stretched from their first encounter in 1924 until Arendt’s sudden death in 1975. In this account Heidegger was cast as the ruthless predator who bedded a naive and vulnerable young student, dropped her when it suited his purposes, ignored her plight when she fled Germany in 1933, and then cynically exploited her fame as a Jewish thinker after the war in order to rehabilitate himself and his thought, which had been deeply compromised by his Nazism. As for Arendt, Ettinger saw her as a victim who collaborated in her own humiliation, suffering slights and rejection from Heidegger the man and slaving away to promote Heidegger the thinker, despite his intellectual support of Hitler. Whether Arendt did this out of a deep psychological need for affection from a father figure, out of Jewish self-hatred, or out of a foolish wish to ingratiate herself with a charlatan she mistook for a genius, Ettinger could not decide. So she advanced all three hypotheses, on the basis of her private reading of an incomplete correspondence. From any standpoint, the book was, as a review in these pages concluded, “a disgrace.”¹

Still, the scandal was there, and during the months that followed Arendt’s critics seized on it as evidence that she was intellectually untrustworthy. Her defenders, who have made her into an object of passionate hagiography in recent years, were not slow to respond but did little to raise the tone. And, most importantly, few but Professor Ettinger had seen the letters. At this point the executors of the Heidegger and Arendt literary estates stepped in and agreed to publish all the correspondence they possessed in order to put the entire matter before the pub-lic. Since Heidegger destroyed all of Arendt’s early letters, copies of which she rarely made, this meant that the correspondence would be incomplete and that three quarters of it would come from Heidegger’s side. Nonetheless, the decision was made to proceed and we now have the letters in a carefully edited and helpfully annotated German edition.

The decision has proved wise, for the published volume does more than set the record straight. It puts the Heidegger-Arendt relationship in a new, and intellectually more significant, setting—the philosophical friendship they developed and shared with their mutual friend the existentialist thinker Karl Jaspers. Over the past fifteen years volumes of both Arendt’s and Heidegger’s correspondence with Jaspers have been published, and what they reveal, among much else, is how passionate all three were about philosophy and how that passion created bonds among them.² Jaspers and Arendt’s relationship was one of teacher to pupil, that of Jaspers and Heidegger one of colleagues. But in both cases the passion for thinking inevitably spilled over into every aspect of their lives, feeding their friendships and their loves.

What has philosophy to do with love? If Plato is to be believed, everything. While not all lovers are philosophers, all philosophers are, for him, lovers—indeed, they are the only true lovers because they alone understand what love blindly seeks. According to Plato, a philosophical life is an erotic quest of a disciplined sort, conducted in the company of others who wish to climb the ladder of love up to the Ideas. This passion can be maddening. Those who possess self-control mate intellectually and commune with the Ideas, while those who lack it purge their passions in the flesh, thereby failing in their philosophical quest.

The relations among Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Karl Jaspers had this Platonic character: they were the fruit of shared philosophical passion. That in their youth Heidegger and Arendt were briefly carnal lovers turns out to be a detail and not terribly revealing. That something far weightier grew up among them and Jaspers, in the midst of the most significant political upheaval of our time, is testimony to the power of the force that held them in its grip. And it raises troubling questions about the place of passion in the life of the mind and the world of politics.

1.

Martin Heidegger was born in the small town of Messkirch, Baden-Württemberg, in 1889. As a young boy he seemed destined for the priesthood, and in fact at the age of twenty he decided to become a novice in the Society of Jesus. But Heidegger’s career as a budding Jesuit lasted only two weeks before he was sent home complaining of chest pains. His interest in religion remained strong, however, and for the next two years he studied at the theological seminary of Freiburg University and contributed occasional articles to somewhat reactionary Catholic periodicals, attacking the cultural decadence of his time. In 1911 he suffered further heart problems and transferred out of the seminary to study mathematics, while devoting himself privately to philosophy.

Heidegger’s leave-taking from the intellectual tradition of the Church was extremely drawn out. As late as 1921 he could still write to his student Karl Löwith that he considered himself to be above all “a Christian theologian.”³ Ostensibly, Heidegger was studying with the great phenomenologist Edmund Husserl, who had arrived in Freiburg in 1916 to fulfill his program of scraping the metaphysical barnacles off the philosophical tradition. Husserl, who wished to bring a new rigor to bear on the philosophical examination of consciousness and return it “to the things themselves,” was at first reserved toward Heidegger, whom he considered a Catholic thinker. But he began to enjoy his long philosophical conversations with this student, and was disappointed when Heidegger’s war service interrupted them. On Heidegger’s return, Husserl made him his private assistant, a position he occupied until 1923. In those years the personal relationship between Husserl and Heidegger was a quasi-parental one, as the older scholar groomed his young disciple to replace him.

When Karl Jaspers first met him in 1920, Heidegger was introduced by Mrs. Husserl as her husband’s “phenomenological child.” It was an encounter fated to transform the lives of both men. Jaspers was six years Heidegger’s senior and already a well-known figure in German intellectual life. He had studied law and medicine as a young man and received his Habilitation in psychology, which he then taught in Freiburg. His fame rested on a book he published in 1919 called Psychology of Worldviews, an idiosyncratic and today virtually unreadable work mired in the technical vocabulary of Max Weber and Wilhelm Dilthey, but which also managed to address existential themes in the manner of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.

The book eventually earned Jaspers a chair in philosophy, though he, like Heidegger, felt a barely concealed contempt for the university philosophers of his time. The two thinkers soon discovered a common interest in what Jaspers in his book had called “limit situations”—situations in which the cloud of forgetting that normally envelops our Existenz evaporates and we are suddenly confronted with the fundamental questions of life and, especially, death. Jaspers described how these situations evoke in us states of anxiety and guilt, yet also open up the possibility of living authentically by confronting them freely and resolutely. Although he was emerging from the very different intellectual traditions of scholasticism and phenomenology, Heidegger was absorbed with these very same issues, which became central themes in his masterwork, Being and Time (1927).

Over the next few years the two men developed a deep philosophical friendship, as can been seen in their early exchange of letters. It was cemented in 1922 when Jaspers invited Heidegger to stay with him for a week in Heidelberg (where Jaspers now held his chair). It was an unforgettable experience for both, and thereafter they referred to themselves as a Kampfgemeinschaft, comrades in arms. Yet from the start it was also clear that, if the friendship were to survive, it would have to rest on the awkward fact that Heidegger was the superior thinker, and Jaspers, although older and better known than Heidegger, would have to recognize this.

When Heidegger met Jaspers it so happened that he was already drafting a long review of Psychology of Worldviews, which he obligingly sent his new friend in 1921.⁴ Outwardly, Jaspers was grateful for Heidegger’s attention and suggestions, though he professed not to grasp the position from which his friend leveled his criticisms. Inwardly, Jaspers was devastated. For this “review” was nothing less than a manifesto for a new way of thinking for which Jaspers was ill-prepared, and toward which he felt little inclination. After paying his respects to Jaspers’s psychological acuity, Heidegger objected in the strongest terms to his “aesthetic” approach to psychological experience, which treated it as an object that could be observed from without, rather than as something we live within. In order to reach what is “primordial” in human existence, Heidegger wrote, philosophy must begin by recognizing that consciousness necessarily exists in time, that it is “historical.” Human existence is a certain kind of “being,” different from the “being” of mere objects, Heidegger claimed: to say “I am” is to assert something altogether different from asserting “it is.” That is because I “am” through a process of historical self-enactment in which I experience “anxious care” about my existence, which I must take over and possess for myself if I am to live authentically. All these concepts first articulated in the review of Jaspers—“primordiality,” “being,” “historicity,” “anxiety,” and “care”—soon found their way into Being and Time.

The friendship survived Heidegger’s crushing review and even deepened over the next few years, despite a few rocky patches. Yet Jaspers was haunted by the sense that Heidegger, and only Heidegger, had seen through him and understood “what I failed to achieve,” as he once wrote in a private notebook. From that point on Heidegger served as the standard by which Jaspers judged his own philosophical seriousness, and the stimulus for moody reflections about the advantages and disadvantages of philosophy for life. That we know because we have this notebook, an extraordinary three-hundred-page manuscript of assembled reflections on Heidegger which Jaspers collected from 1928 until at least 1964, and which was found on his desk after his death.⁵ These notes oscillate between expressions of wonder (“he seems to notice what no one else saw”), frustration (“communicationless, worldless, godless”), and loyalty (“none of the other living philosophers can interest me”). Jaspers even records a dream in which, during a tense conversation with some of Heidegger’s critics, his friend suddenly approached and addressed him for the first time with the familiar du. The two then set off together, alone.

2.

In 1923 Heidegger moved to Marburg to take up his first independent academic position, and there drew a following of students who traveled from the four corners of Europe to study with him. One of those was Hannah Arendt, who years later in her commemorative essay “Martin Heidegger at Eighty” (1969) described in these pages the excitement her entire generation felt about him, in sentences that have now become famous.

There was hardly more than a name, but the name traveled all over Germany like the rumor of the hidden king…. The rumor about Heidegger put it quite simply: Thinking has come to life again; the cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different from the familiar, worn-out trivialities they had been presumed to say. There exists a teacher; one can perhaps learn to think.⁶

Hannah Arendt was born in Königsberg, East Prussia, in 1906 and was only eighteen years old when she arrived in Marburg. As a young woman she had read some Kant but much more Kierkegaard, who was the thinker young Germans turned to after the disaster of World War I. What made Kierkegaard so attractive was his passion, which stood in such stark contrast to the bourgeois self-satisfaction of the Wilhelmine era and the arid speculations of the philosophical schools then dominant in Germany. It was this passion that Arendt, like Jaspers, immediately remarked in Heidegger, and which she could still recall in 1969.

What was experienced was that thinking as pure activity—and this means impelled neither by the thirst for knowledge nor by the drive for cognition—can become a passion which not so much rules and oppresses all other capacities and gifts, as it orders them and prevails through them. We are so accustomed to the old opposition of reason versus passion, spirit versus life, that the idea of a passionate thinking, in which thinking and aliveness become one, takes us somewhat aback.

She then added, in a very Platonic turn of phrase:

Also, the passion of thinking, like the other passions, seizes the person—seizes those qualities of the individual of which the sum, when ordered by the will, amounts to what we commonly call “character”—takes possession of him and, as it were, annihilates his “character” which cannot hold its own against this onslaught.

We get a sense of the intellectual passion Heidegger generated by reading the lectures he gave when Arendt first arrived in Marburg.⁷ The ostensible aim of the lecture course was to develop a commentary on Plato’s dialogue concerning philosophy and pseudophilosophy, the Sophist. In Heidegger’s hands, however, the craft of commentary became a means of recovering what he took to be the dialogue’s deepest problems and confronting them directly. In the Sophist, Heidegger saw two overriding issues. The first was ontological: the problem of Being—a term sometimes capitalized in English to indicate that Heidegger does not mean the fact that there are particular entities or beings, but rather what might be called their “beingness,” or Being. “Why is there beingness/Being rather than nothingness?” is a question the Sophist makes us ask. The second problem in the dialogue was the correct definition of truth, which Heidegger interpreted to be a process of “disclosure” or “uncovering” of what entities are rather than a correspondence between concept and object, as philosophers from Plato onward held. His commentary on the dialogue then turns into a masterful explication of these problems and how a new approach, deriving from phenomenology, might reveal novel answers to them. It was this audacity that made Plato and Aristotle seem suddenly alive and vital to Arendt and her classmates—and, more subtly, also made Heidegger appear as their only legitimate heir.

Heidegger’s and Arendt’s passion for each other bloomed sometime during the course of this semester, and by the time their published correspondence begins in February 1925 it was clear that some sort of step had been taken.

10.II.25

Dear Miss Arendt,

I must return to you tonight and speak to your heart.

Everything should be simple, clear, and pure between us. Only then will we be worthy of an encounter. That you were my student and I your teacher only provided the occasion for what happened between us.

I will never be able to possess you, but from now on you will belong to my life, which shall increase through you….

The path your young life will take is hidden. We will submit to it. And my faithfulness should only help you be true to yourself….

The gift of our friendship becomes a duty, through which we will grow. A duty that permits me to ask forgiveness for having forgotten myself for a moment during our walk.

Still, I must thank you and, in a kiss on your pure forehead, take the integrity of your essence into my work.

Be happy, good one!

    Your
    M. H.

Within the month another threshold had been passed.

27.II.25

Dear Hannah,

The demonic has seized me. The still, prayerlike folding of your loving hands and your gleaming forehead guarded it through womanly transfiguration.

The like has never happened to me before.

In the rainstorm on the way home you were even more beautiful and great. And I would have liked to walk with you for nights on end.

As a symbol of my thanks, take this little book. It will also serve as a symbol of this semester.

Please, Hannah, give me just a few words. I can’t just let you leave like that.

You must be in a rush before your trip, but just a few words, not “beautifully” written.

Just as you write. Only that you have written them.

    Your
    M.

The correspondence continues in this vein for many passion-filled months. Heidegger’s letters to Arendt are filled with romantic commonplaces—fields of flowers, ruined towers, professions of guilt and self-renunciation—mixed with philosophical ruminations and sensible professional advice. Although we have none of her earliest letters, we have a copy of a short, and very melancholy, autobiographical text called “Shadows” which she sent to him that April. It describes a young woman who had already suffered through many unsatisfactory moods in her short life, passing from the conviction that Sehnsucht—yearning—could be an end in itself to a growing anxiety about the meaning of life. Now she had finally arrived at the stage where she could offer “unbending devotion” to one person alone—a bittersweet devotion, however, fully aware that “all things come to an end.” Heidegger responded to this cri de coeur like the mature lover he was, assuring Arendt that “from now on you live wrapped up in my work,” and reminding her that “there are only ‘shadows’ where there is sun.”

Was Heidegger the predator and Arendt the victim in this romance, as Professor Ettinger would have us believe? Was this high-minded philosophical cooing merely a cover for sexual domination? On the contrary, the mature reader of these letters will be struck by the touching authenticity they express, in what was, after all, a rather conventional drama heading for its predictable end. The married older professor and his younger student write to each other about the nature of love and about what she should study. They exchange poems and pictures, listen to music when they are alone, and even decide to read The Magic Mountain together, speculating about the doomed love of Madame Chauchat and Hans Castorp. Heidegger also writes touchingly of his love of nature and how it merges with his love for Arendt.

Todtnauberg, 21.III.25

Dear Hannah,

It is a marvelous winter up here, so I’ve had some wonderful, refreshing trips….

I often hope that you are doing as well as I am here. The solitude of the mountains, the quiet life of the mountain people, the elemental nearness of sun, storm, and heavens, the simplicity of an abandoned trail on a wide and deeply snow-covered slope—all this keeps the soul far, far removed from all unfocused and moody existence….

When the storm is howling outside the cabin, then I remember “our storm”—or I take a quiet walk along the Lahn River—or I dream about a young girl in a raincoat, her hat pulled down over her large, quiet eyes, who entered my office for the first time, shy and reserved, giving every question a short reply—and then I transpose the picture to the last day of the semester—and then I know for sure, that life is history.

    I hold you dear,
    Your
    Martin

Inevitably, Arendt rebels against the constraints of their forbidden love and complains that she is being ignored; Heidegger pleads guilty but tries to make her understand his need for isolation to work on the project that eventually became Being and Time. Then, in a coup de force, Arendt announces in early 1926 her decision to leave Marburg for Heidelberg, where she will finish her studies with none other than Karl Jaspers, a decision Heidegger approves of. Yet six months later Arendt’s will breaks and she writes to him again, and he responds by suggesting another meeting. For the next two years they stage rendezvous in hotels or small towns whenever he is traveling, thereby avoiding detection. More letters, pictures, and poems pass between them, along with suggestions from Heidegger for further reading (especially Knut Hamsun).

In 1927 Heidegger published Being and Time to great acclaim and the following year received the call to Husserl’s chair in philosophy in Freiburg. At this point Arendt decided to make what turned out to be the final break, which she announces in the first letter we have in her hand. “I love you as on the first day—that you know,” she writes, and she assures him that her decision has only been made to protect that love from the reality of the situation. Within a year she would enter into an ill-advised marriage to Günther Stern, a former Husserl student, and move with him to Frankfurt. How Heidegger reacted to this news we do not know. What we do know, from a letter Arendt sent him in 1930, is that she and Stern eventually visited Heidegger together and that this encounter brought back a flood of painful emotions. “The sight of you aroused my knowledge of the clearest and most important continuity of my life, and—let me please say it—of the continuity of our love.” Yet when, for some reason, Heidegger departs with Stern by train, and fails to recognize Arendt standing on the platform, she is left heartbroken and alone. “As always,” she writes, “there is nothing for me but resignation, and waiting, waiting, waiting.” She would wait another two decades before seeing Heidegger again.

3.

Over the next few years the lives of the three friends and lovers advanced independently without major incident. In 1929 Hannah Arendt published a doctoral thesis under Jaspers, Love and Saint Augustine, a work inspired in more than one sense by her encounter with Heidegger. She then set to work on a biography of Rahel Varnhagen, a book that would not see the light of day until the 1950s. ⁸ Karl Jaspers wrote and published prolifically on everything from psychology to religion to Nietzsche, though with decreasing philosophical ambition since receiving Heidegger’s review. As for Heidegger himself, the late Weimar years saw him at the peak of his intellectual power and influence. In 1929 he was invited to Davos, Switzerland, to debate the respected neo-Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer, and so successfully trounced him in the eyes of young people in the audience that the mantle of leading German philosopher was unofficially bestowed upon him there. He received it officially shortly thereafter in 1930 when the German government made him the first of two offers of the philosophy chair at Berlin, the most prestigious in the country, which he turned down.

Although Heidegger had given up his plan to write a second volume of Being and Time, he did publish fragments from it, beginning with a substantial and still essential work, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, that had already appeared in 1929. And in his lectures he continued to go ever deeper into “the question of Being.”

The letters Jaspers and Heidegger exchanged during these years reflect a genuine friendship, if a less intense one now that both were busy, established professors. In his short Philosophical Autobiography Jaspers described his feelings as a mix of wonder and nagging concern.

Through Heidegger I saw in a contemporary that “something” that normally can be found only in the past, and that is essential to philosophizing…. I saw his depth, yet also found something else that I couldn’t quite put my finger on, something difficult to take…. It could sometimes seem that a demon had crept into him…. Over the decades there grew up a tension between affection and alienation, wonder at his abilities and rejection of his incomprehensible foolishness, a feeling of sharing a foundation of philosophizing and a trace of a completely different attitude toward me.⁹

Whatever his doubts, Jaspers still had confidence in Heidegger’s character and in the promise of his philosophical work, at least enough to have encouraged Heidegger to seize the moment of his fame and to play a more active part in reforming the university. In 1931 he wrote to him that “it appears that, in the long run, the philosophy of the German universities is in your hands,” an assessment Heidegger obviously shared.

As is now well known, in April 1933 Martin Heidegger left his Black Forest cabin to became rector of Freiburg University, joining the Nazi Party in May, and held the position until the following April. For many years Heidegger’s air-brushed account of this period was widely accepted; many were convinced that he had accepted the post unwillingly, had tried to limit the damage done to scholarship, protected Jews, was relieved to give up the office—and, most importantly, quickly lost his illusion of national renewal through Nazism. But during the past two decades enough has been uncovered to establish a well-documented and generally accepted account of what really happened.¹⁰ It is now clear that Heidegger had voiced support for the Nazis at least since the end of 1931; that he campaigned actively for the rectorship; that, once appointed, he threw all his energies into “revolutionizing” the university and gave propaganda lectures across Germany, ending them with the standard “Heil Hitler!”

His personal behavior was no less despicable. He cut off relations with all his Jewish colleagues, including his mentor Edmund Husserl. (In the early Forties he even removed the dedication to Husserl in Being and Time and later just as silently restored it.) Heidegger also used his considerable powers to denounce on political grounds, in secret letters to Nazi officials, a colleague, the future Nobel chemist Hermann Staudinger, and a former student, Edward Baumgarten. And even after resigning his post, Heidegger signed petitions in support of Hitler and lobbied the regime to allow him to establish a philosophical academy in Berlin. In 1936, two years after his resignation, Karl Löwith saw him in Rome, where he wore a Nazi lapel pin and explained to his former student how concepts in Being and Time had inspired his political engagement.

To his later chagrin, Jaspers reacted lethargically to Heidegger’s political turn, even though Hannah Arendt had warned him of its significance. In 1933 she fled to Paris with her husband and began working for various Jewish relief agencies. Just before leaving she evidently sent Heidegger a scathing letter confronting him with rumors that he was in the grip of a “raging anti-Semitism” and was excluding Jewish students from his seminars—charges that were inexact but prophetic.¹¹ He testily denied all these charges, yet within months he was in the rector’s chair.

Arendt spent the next seven years living hand-to-mouth in France before being forced to flee yet again, this time to the United States. She arrived in New York City in 1941 as the war spread across Europe and then she lost touch completely with both Heidegger and Jaspers. Jaspers, however, stayed in contact with Heidegger for a while. In March 1933, shortly after the Nazis took power, Heidegger visited Jaspers in Heidelberg and they spent the visit amiably enough, listening to recordings of Gregorian chant and discussing philosophy. When the conversation turned, inevitably, to politics, Heidegger would only say, “One must get involved.”

In May he was back in Heidelberg, now as the Freiburg rector, delivering a harangue to students about the Nazis’ plans for the university. Jaspers sat in the front row scowling, his hands in his pockets. After they returned to Jaspers’s house Jaspers tried to draw Heidegger out, remarking that surely his friend could not agree with the Nazis on the Jewish question. Heidegger: “But there is a dangerous international network of Jews.” Jaspers: “How can such an uncultivated man like Adolf Hitler govern Germany?” Heidegger: “Culture doesn’t matter. Just look at his marvelous hands.” Heidegger left early and never saw his old friend again.

Jaspers was stunned. Nothing Heidegger ever said to him before had prepared him for this rapid political engagement with Nazism, and in his Philosophical Autobiography Jaspers blames himself for failing to keep his friend from “sliding off the rails.” For the next three years he continued to write occasionally to Heidegger, both during and after the rectorship. Shortly before his last visit to Jaspers, Heidegger had delivered his infamous Rektoratsrede (Rectoral Address), in which he explicitly placed his technical philosophical vocabulary in the service of the Nazi takeover of the university. The published address was enormously popular, despite its obscurity. (On receiving a copy, Karl Löwith later reported, he wondered whether it meant he was supposed to study the pre-Socratics or march with the storm troopers.) But Jaspers tried to find good things to say about it, writing that “my trust in your philosophy, which I have more strongly since our conversations earlier this year, is not destroyed through qualities of this address that only reflect the times.” The two estranged friends continued to exchange books and notes until 1937, when Jaspers was removed from his post and forced into the terrifying position of surviving until the war’s end as an anti-Nazi married to a Jewish woman and barred from leaving the country. He and his wife carried poison capsules with them at all times, just in case.

—This is the first of two articles.