John A Walker ‘Two German Philosophers in Love’ (2010) Oil on linen.

Blurb below describes a book about the philosophers.

STRANGER FROM ABROAD

 Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger,
Friendship and Forgiveness
by Daniel Maier-Katkin
An illicit romance fomented by shared intellectual passions, an enduring
friendship based on mutual admiration, a tumultuous correspondence that see-sawed
between playfulness and estrangement, and, above all, divergent life paths and ideas
about some of the most important political, philosophical, and moral questions of the
twentieth century: all of these describe, yet none of them quite define, Hannah Arendt and
Martin Heidegger’s extraordinary relationship. STRANGER FROM ABROAD:
Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (W. W. Norton &
Company; March 22, 2010; $26.95 cloth) explores the lives of two of the greatest
thinkers of the twentieth century, the profound influence of their work, and the puzzle of
their reconstructed friendship despite all that transpired between Germans and Jews in the
Third Reich.
Arendt was an eighteen-year-old college student at the University of Marburg in
1924 when she caught the eye of Heidegger, already a rising star in German philosophy.
Because Heidegger was not just Arendt’s professor—they met when she attended his
lectures on Plato’s Sophist—but also married and seventeen years her senior, they kept
their relationship a secret, meeting surreptitiously and corresponding heatedly. As their
brief affair ended, Arendt moved to Heidelburg to study under Heidegger’s closest friend,
Karl Jaspers. By the time Hitler came to power, their lives had diverged sharply:
Heidegger joined the Nazi Party and, as Rektor of the Freiburg University, brought an
intellectual legitimacy to Hitler’s regime, while the Jewish Arendt, married to another
man, fled Germany and was forced into exile, first in France and later in the United
States.
Heidegger would soon be cast out by the Nazis and subsequently relegated to
disgrace by the victorious Allies, while Arendt’s star rose—he was forced to resign his
position and was put under surveillance for the rest of the war, while she befriended a
vibrant circle of thinkers and writers in New York and became a writer, editor, and
scholar of renown. They did not write to each other for over two decades, but even in this
time, Heidegger’s influence on Arendt’s work, as Maier-Katkin reveals, was significant.
From her dissertation, Love and Saint Augustine, written at Heidelburg, through 1951’s
The Origins of Totalitarianism and beyond, he shows that Arendt was nearly always
thinking with, or against, Heidegger, even as she was repelled by his politics and by the
accusations of anti-Semitism that followed him from the time he joined the Nazi Party
until, and after, his death.
Heidegger refuted vehemently, in personal correspondence with Arendt and
others, and publicly, charges of anti-Semitism and deep Nazi sympathies. Yet even as he
denied his culpability in Hitler’s rise to power and the violence that followed, he never
apologized or asked for forgiveness, even from Arendt. Maier-Katkin’s investigation of
Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazis is brilliantly nuanced and sensitive; it shows
how Heidegger’s betrayal, and Arendt’s eventual forgiveness, helped shape Arendt’s
most important work.
Their reconciliation in 1950, after seventeen years without an exchange, was
sudden and unexpected, and marked the beginning of a new stage in the relationship: a
vibrant correspondence and a warm, even loving friendship. It was this friendship that—
although there were long periods of silence on both sides—would influence Arendt’s
1958 The Human Condition and 1963’s Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she reported on
Eichmann’s 1961 trial for crimes against humanity in Israel, and sought to figure out how
so many apparently “average” Germans, like Eichmann, could participate in the murder
of millions. Maier-Katkin views this seminal, work and the notorious reaction to it—
including allegations that Arendt was a self-hating, anti-Semitic Jew—through the prism
of her relationship with Heidegger.
The debates provoked by Arendt’s advocacy of peace politics in Israel and the
Middle East, and the controversies surrounding Heidegger’s Nazism and the friendship
between the two of them are still very much alive nearly four decades after their deaths.
STRANGER FROM ABROAD illuminates these questions anew, and provides an
incisive, fascinating analysis of a pair of exceptional minds and the influential ideas that
they produced.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Daniel Maier-Katkin is a professor of criminology and criminal justice and a Fellow of
the Center for the Advancement of Human Rights at Florida State University. He lives in
Tallahassee, Florida.

TITLE: STRANGER FROM ABROAD: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger,

Friendship and Forgiveness
AUTHOR: Daniel Maier-Katkin
PUBLICATION DATE: March 22, 2010
PRICE: $26.95 cloth
ISBN: 978-0-393-06833-7