As with most public intellectuals, even those distinguished in their day, the achievement of Hannah Arendt (1906–1975) has been largely forgotten two generations after her death. She is remembered instead for the scandalous love affair of her youth and a striking if unfortunate turn of phrase from her best-known book — the phrase living on in common parlance, while the book has receded into insignificance.
The mutual erotic bedazzlement of Arendt and Martin Heidegger — respectively, student and professor at the University of Marburg, he 17 years older than she, married with two sons, and at work on the masterpiece that would establish him as the foremost philosopher of the 20th century — has become a staple of the higher gossip since the publication of their correspondence some 30 years ago. “The demonic struck me,” Heidegger exclaimed in one of his first letters to her in 1925, while Arendt told him three years later that their love was “the blessing of [her] life.” He would of course become notorious as a demonic adept, far and away the most eminent intellectual among Hitler’s followers in the 1930s, and she would have to re-count her blessings. In 1933 the young Jewish woman, no longer an innocent girl, demanded that Heidegger explain himself, for she had heard tell of his ugly antisemitism. Although he dismissed the allegations as slanderous rumors, he would certify his allegiance to the Nazi cause later that year with his flagrant blackhearted address as newly appointed rector of the University of Freiburg. Arendt left Germany soon afterward. They would not write each other again until 1947, with Heidegger in academic disgrace and Arendt beginning to make her name in her adoptive United States.
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