THE STRANGE LOVE STORY OF HEIDEGGER AND HANNAH ARENDT.

THE STRANGE LOVE STORY OF HEIDEGGER AND HANNAH ARENDT. As Adam Kirsch tells the story in the article I linked to yesterday, Martin Heidegger was Hannah Arendt’s teacher in the twenties and they became lovers. Arendt, who was Jewish, escaped from Germany in 1933 after Hitler took power. Later in 1933, Heidegger joined the Nazi party. In 1950, Arendt returned to Germany and met with Heidegger, the unapologetic Nazi. Kirsch says: “’This evening and this morning are the confirmation of an entire life,’ she wrote to him after their meeting. For the next two years, their love enjoyed a brief afterlife….” Kirsch points out that “Arendt’s unqualified support of Heidegger was important in establishing the convenient myth that his Nazi involvement had been, as she put it, a case of an unworldly man getting carried away by politics’, and thus ‘finally a matter of indifference.’” I really don’t understand this love story.