Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger

341 Pages·2017·23.31 MB·English

by  Antonia Grunenberg

HannaH arendt and Martin
Heidegger
StudieS in Continental tHougHt
John Sallis, editor
Consulting Editors
robert Bernasconi James risser
John d. Caputo dennis J. Schmidt
david Carr Calvin o. Schrag
edward S. Casey Charles e. Scott
david Farrell Krell daniela Vallega-neu
lenore langsdorf david Wood
Han naH ar endt and
M artin Heidegger
History of a Love
antonia grunenberg
Translated by Peg Birmingham,
Kristina Lebedeva, and Elizabeth von
Witzke Birmingham
indiana university Press
Bloomington and indianapolis
This book is a publication of
indiana university Press
office of Scholarly Publishing
Herman B Wells library 350
1320 east 10th Street
Bloomington, indiana 47405 uSa
iupress.indiana.edu
Published in german as Hannah Arendt und Martin Heidegger:
Geschichte einer Liebe.
© 2006 by Piper Verlag gmbH, München.
english translation © 2017 by indiana university Press
all rights reserved
no part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or
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Cataloging information is available from the library of Congress.
iSBn 978-0-253-02523-4 (cloth)
iSBn 978-0-253-02537-1 (paperback)
iSBn 978-0-253-02718-4 (ebook)
1 2 3 4 5 22 21 20 19 18 17
Contents
Foreword by Peg Birmingham vii
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction to the English Translation xvii
Introduction 1
1 World Out of Joint, or How the Revolution in Philosophy Began 5
2 Life’s Transformation, or the Sudden Eruption of Love in Life 52
3 The Failure of the German-Jewish Symbiosis, or Friends Becoming
Enemies 92
4 Heidegger absconditus, or the Discovery of America 160
5 The Break in Tradition and a New Beginning, or Arendt and
Heidegger in Counterpoint 201
6 Amor Mundi, or Thinking the World after the Catastrophe 247
Chronology 293
Index 297
illustrations begin on page 145

Foreword
Arendt and Heidegger: Erotic Reversals,
Conflict, and Fissures
Peg Birmingham
o
ver the past several decades the question has often been raised: How could
Hannah arendt have reconciled with Martin Heidegger, whom she knew had
joined and actively participated in the nazi Party when taking over the rectorship
of Freiburg university? The same question, asked differently: How could arendt,
a Jewish-german refugee who had fled germany in 1931, have resumed her rela-
tionship with Heidegger, her former teacher, on her first trip back to germany in
1948, a trip undertaken on behalf of the Commission on european Jewish Cul-
tural reconstruction to recover stolen Jewish cultural artifacts? grunenberg’s
biography is remarkable in showing that this way of asking the question is too
stark and does not capture the ways in which the history of these two major
thinkers of the twentieth century is not simply one of a broken intimacy fol-
lowed by reconciliation; instead, it is a history marked as much by estrangement,
breaks, and distance as it is of proximity, reunion, and resumed friendship. The
biography reveals that the history of the love between arendt and Heidegger is
best captured in the english idiom “they have a history,” indicating an erotic
relationship that is complicated and fraught.
Perhaps the most striking example of the estrangement, distance, and rever-
sals that continued to mark the history between arendt and Heidegger is the long
silence between them that ensued only a few years after the reconciliation in 1948,
a silence due not to political or philosophical disagreements—on the contrary, it
was personal. The personal silence finds momentary philosophical voice in a note
that arendt sent to Heidegger via her publisher on the occasion of the 1960 publi-
cation of Vita Activa, the german edition of The Human Condition: “You will see
that the book does not contain a dedication. Had things worked out properly be-
tween us—and i mean between, that is, neither you nor me—i would have asked
you if i might dedicate it to you; it came directly out of the first Freiburg days
and hence owes practically everything to you in every respect.”1 arendt’s note
on an absent dedication should put to rest the pervasive assumption by many of
arendt’s readers that The Human Condition announced a break with Heidegger’s
thinking; it should also cast doubt on the often-repeated claim that Heidegger’s
vii
viii | Foreword
lack of response was due to a philosophical rejection of arendt’s account of the
vita activa.2 as the note indicates, this lack of dedication and of response is due
to the absence of a personal “between” that renders impossible any philosophical
engagement between them. More than a decade later in 1971 there is yet another
reversal as arendt dedicates Life of the Mind: Thinking to Heidegger, a dedica-
tion that cites several lines from his Discourse on Thinking. By this time, another
“between” has been established.
as grunenberg notes, the history between arendt and Heidegger, a his-
tory spanning fifty-one years, takes place against the background of the twen-
tieth century with its violence, catastrophes, wars, and mass migrations. Here,
too, grunenberg adds significantly to elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography. She
captures—as perhaps only someone who was born during the dresden firebomb-
ing in 1945, who spent her early childhood in east germany, who then escaped
with her family to West germany, and who as a Berliner participated in the 1989
reunification—the ways in which arendt lived in two worlds, the european and
the american, unwilling and unable to decide between the two. in fact, grunen-
berg’s biography emphasizes the ways in which arendt continued to be an exile
even after receiving her citizenship papers in 1948. Better, she captures the ways
in which arendt lived a transnational existence after 1941 and how this trans-
national existence influenced her thinking. arendt’s “fragmented history,” her
critique of history as process, her critique of the nation-state and a certain con-
ception of human rights and citizenship emerge first from her status as a refugee
and then as a nationalized uS citizen who never cut ties to europe generally and
to germany specifically. This experience of exile appears to mark the greatest dis-
tance between arendt and Heidegger, the latter living his entire life in germany
and for much of that life in one city: Freiburg.
Yet here, too, caution must be exercised as grunenberg’s biography shows
how Heidegger’s world, both personally and professionally, collapsed after the
Second World War. Her history of the relationship between these two thinkers
raises the difficult question of the difference between a collapsed world and a
world of exile and how this difference led Heidegger and arendt to different un-
derstandings of a new beginning, a central concern that runs through each of
their work.
grunenberg’s biography of these two thinkers stands between elzbieta et-
tinger’s pinched biography of arendt and Heidegger, in which arendt is reduced
to nothing more than a disciple of Heidegger, and elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s
biography of arendt, in which her relation to Heidegger is briefly discussed.
grunenberg does not reduce arendt to Heidegger’s disciple nor is she interested
in adding to Young-Bruehl’s account by claiming that Heidegger is more cen-
tral to arendt’s life than Young-Breuhl admits. instead, grunenberg’s notable
achievement is to show how arendt and Heidegger’s shared history, from their
Foreword | ix
initial meeting in Heidegger’s 1924 seminar on Plato’s Sophist, is the history of
a double, inseparable eros: the philosophical and the personal. (at the same
time she documents the ways in which this double eros of the philosophical and
the personal infuses each thinker’s relation with others.) This is not to reduce
the work of each thinker to his or her biography or even to a shared biography.
grunenberg is not arguing that arendt’s thinking can be read solely through the
lens of Heidegger’s thought. it cannot. as she writes in her preface to the english
translation, there are significant differences between arendt’s and Heidegger’s
thought. nor is she arguing that Heidegger was influenced by arendt’s insistence
on the philosophical importance of the vita activa. There is no evidence for this.
instead, at the center of grunenberg’s biography is how each thinker engaged
with the vita activa, how each became aware of its dangers, how one thinker, Hei-
degger, withdrew from this life, while the other, arendt, spent her life thinking
through its dangers as well as its possibilities for inaugurating the new.
Heidegger’s early years, including his involvement with national Socialism,
can be read as a cautionary tale of an overzealous commitment to the vita ac-
tiva or, more precisely, of thinking that the activity of thinking can be directly
transposed into political action. as grunenberg describes in detail, and here she
makes a significant contribution to the present debate and discussion surround-
ing the publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks, Heidegger was not alone in
thinking this. Her biography, especially chapter 3, goes beyond Heidegger to give
a detailed history of the time in germany between the two world wars. More
specifically, she describes the history of the academic community in the 1920s
and 1930s, showing that Heidegger was not alone in his commitment to a radical
transformation of the public space, particularly the space of the university. Major
intellectuals of his day—Paul tillich, Max Weber, georg lukács, and his then
“comrade-in-arms,” Karl Jaspers, a description both embraced to describe the
relationship between them in the years between the two wars—shared this com-
mitment. They all wrote essays on the subject; through newspaper articles and
public forums they publicly debated the ways that this radical transformation
should be achieved. Why Heidegger, nearly alone among this cast of intellectu-
als and certainly without his comrade-in-arms, went further in thinking that
national Socialism offered possibilities for this project is one of the questions
grunenberg explores in this biography.
at the same time grunenberg’s biography corrects the overly determined
reading of arendt as a theorist who celebrates the vita activa. While this reading
in not entirely incorrect, arendt, like Heidegger, is engaged in much larger proj-
ect: to rethink thinking, that is, the legacy of the Western tradition of thought.
Certainly her rethinking of thinking includes a rethinking of the vita activa: “to
think what we are doing,” as arendt puts it in The Human Condition. While in
the Life of the Mind: Thinking, arendt claims that thinking is a solitary activity