On Heidegger...

 

Heidegger… had encountered a new student by the name of Hannah Arendt and they had become lovers. She was only eighteen, beautiful, highly intelligent, Jewish and clearly mesmerized (as were many of his students) by his style. He was a thirty-five-year-old father of two, with a watchful and suspicious wife, and a reputation for attracting students. Theirs was not a relationship between equals, and he has been described by Elizabeta Ettinger as a ‘ruthless predator who bedded a naïve and vulnerable young student, dropped her when it suited his purposes,’ and Wolin says of the relationship that it was ‘profoundly exploitative.’ But their surviving letters to each other suggest something more profound, a passionate fusion of the erotic and the intellectual that Plato might have recognised.  On 27 February 1925 he wrote in typical ecstacy to her: ‘Dear Hannah, the demonic has seized me… The like has never happened to me before. In the rainstorm on the way home you were even more beautiful and wonderful, and I would like to have walked with you for nights on end’.

Had they ever dared to appear together in public, they would have looked an incongrous pair. Heidegger had already settled into his standard form of dress. In the summer he generally wore his loden suit and knickerbockers, looking very much the Black Forest peasant, or perhaps just the overgrown Boy Scout. In the winter he was likely to plod around in skiing kit. He was always solid, stocky and looked every bit a manual worker. She, by contrast, was young, stylish and cosmopolitan, with her hair cut short.

 

 

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