An Impossible Relationship
Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger

Can you remain loyal to someone who aligned with the Nazis? Hannah Arendt did – and, in the process, wrote a quiet chapter of German postwar history. This was a relationship that tested the very boundaries of thought and morality.

By Berthold Franke

No one knew – not the deceived wife, the young Königsberg student’s closest friends, nor anyone else. The 18-year-old Hannah Arendt and 35-year-old philosophy professor Martin Heidegger went to great lengths to conceal their intimate secret in the small, tightly knit university town of Marburg, where they carried on a clandestine affair between 1924 and 1926. Carefully devised signals – lights switched on or off in a room – secret letters, messages and furtive meetings in different locations ensured that no one knew about them. And this was lucky, because had anyone found out, a full-blown scandal would have erupted. The true scandal grew all the greater when word spread much later, long after both had died, that the world-famous philosopher and Nazi university rector, and the internationally renowned Jewish political theorist, had once been lovers – before either of their international careers had even begun (his after 1927, hers after 1950).

In pursuit of radical thought at a time of turmoil

But let’s begin at the beginning. The young Hannah Arendt chose Marburg as a place to study after careful deliberation. At the time, the small town still looked much as it had in the 19th century, when the German “spirit” flourished in provincial university towns like Göttingen, Jena and Tübingen. But what drew her there was the presence of a young professor who, in academic circles, already enjoyed a reputation as a disruptive force and innovator in philosophy. “Little more than a name was known, but that name spread throughout Germany like the rumour of a secret king,” Arendt wrote of the young Martin Heidegger, about whom the most extraordinary things were being reported: “There is a teacher; perhaps one can learn to think.” This was exactly what the young academic generation craved – a generation searching for radical alternatives after the upheavals of World War I. Arendt and her friends were part of a group of promising young philosophers who received their intellectual baptism under this exciting young lecturer in Marburg, many of whom would go on to shape the course of German philosophy in the next generation.

The relationship evidently developed very quickly. In a lecture Heidegger gave in October 1924, the professor and the student’s eyes first met (a moment he recalled in a letter 25 years later). Shortly after, she appeared in his office and he began to court her with unmistakable intent. Heidegger’s fascination with the strikingly beautiful and captivating student is perhaps less surprising than her own immediate, unconditional devotion to the older, married man and father of two. An explanation for this is offered in reports from other students who describe the young Heidegger’s evidently overwhelming charisma. What struck them first was his unusual appearance: he was a strikingly small, wiry man who wore a custom-made outfit, a kind of folk-style suit with long overcoat that deliberately signalled his outsider status. This impression was reinforced in his lectures. Speaking in a soft voice, his gaze often fixed more on the window than the audience, he delivered nothing less than a fundamental critique of the prevailing university philosophy, which was then dominated in Marburg and across Germany by the neo-Kantian school. With great earnestness and determination, he positioned himself as a lone fighter, openly challenging the entire discipline. By engaging directly with ancient sources and categorically shunning modern European philosophy, he proclaimed the prospect of a radically new way of thinking, one that addressed the central questions of human existence.

It is almost impossible today to imagine the magnetic force of Heidegger’s presence and speech. His student Hans-Georg Gadamer referred to him as “an elemental event, not just for me, but for the town of Marburg at that time”, and for many students “an intoxicant”. The philosopher Hans Jonas recalled the secret of his impact: “One fell under his spell even before one understood him,” adding: “Here was a man who thought before his students. Rather than presenting finished ideas, he performed the very act of thinking in their presence. And that was unsettling.” Another student, Karl Löwith, described him as “half a man of science, the other, perhaps greater half, a contrarian character and a preacher”. Much of Heidegger’s fascination seems to have stemmed from his method: the deliberate obscurity and mystification of his thinking, combined with the promise of radical simplicity. This was less analytical and more like a mountain climb, taking students to new, ever higher intellectual spheres – so challenging that those following him often lost sight of their advancing master.

From intellectual awakening to political aberration

Arendt, like her fellow students, passionately embraced this seemingly irresistible intellectual world. She became the young prophet’s lover and complied unquestioningly to his demand for strict secrecy. However, she soon realised she could not sustain this emotional and intellectual adventure indefinitely. Although still deeply attached, she ended the relationship in the spring of 1926, moving to Heidelberg to work on a thesis on the concept of love in the writings of Sainte Augustine, under the guidance of philosopher Karl Jaspers, a close friend of Heidegger’s. The two kept up an intense and intimate correspondence and met on a few occasions, but the affair was never rekindled.

In 1927, Heidegger’s magnum opus Being and Time – which he assured Arendt in letters had been profoundly shaped by their encounter – exploded onto the philosophical scene, transforming him from a little-known Marburg lecturer into a world-renowned star. He chose to return to his home university in Freiburg rather than accept a professorship in Berlin, to observe from the provinces the efforts of the elite conservatives and National Socialists to dismantle the Weimar Republic. Yet, with Hitler’s rise to power, he abruptly abandoned this position and was elected rector of the university in April 1933. In May, he joined the NSDAP in a highly publicised move, and in the notorious “Rector’s Address” of 27 May 1933, presented himself as a devoted supporter of the Führer and executor of the ethno-nationalist alignment of Freiburg University. Heidegger’s brief period as university rector (until April 1934) and his enthusiasm for the breakthrough of National Socialism is a story in itself. Even if we accept his later, in many respects scarcely credible explanations – that after a few months of believing he could help shape the intellectual leadership of the new Germany, he recognised the regime’s true nature and withdrew in quiet resignation and inner opposition – the picture that remains is one of abject moral failure and a susceptibility to seduction. This casts a revealing light not only on Heidegger the man but also on his philosophy. The radical innovator of thought had become the ontological theorist of the Nazis’ seizure of power.

During the final, agonising years of the Weimar Republic, Arendt’s path led her to the Zionist movement – first in Germany, then in exile in Paris. After separating from her first husband, Günther Stern (who become known after the war as the philosophical writer Günther Anders), she fled with her new partner, Heinrich Blücher, to New York, where she built a new life as a political journalist and essayist. It was 17 years before she set foot on German soil again, during a trip to Europe in the winter of 1949. By that time, of course, all contact with Heidegger had ceased. She was, however, well informed about his Nazi activities, not least through her teacher Karl Jaspers, who – suspended from his professorship as the husband of a Jewish woman – through sheer luck had survived the Third Reich and resumed an intensive correspondence with Arendt immediately after the war. In a 1946 letter, she expressed her anger over her former lover, writing that she could do nothing other than “regard Heidegger as a potential murderer”.

Guilt and loyalty

But then the incredible happened: Arendt travelled to Freiburg and on the evening of 7 February 1950 met Heidegger for a first long conversation. They continued it the following day in the presence of Heidegger’s wife, a committed National Socialist, accustomed to enduring her husband’s many sexual escapades and by now fully aware of the old affair. How could this have happened? How could Arendt – so astute in her analysis of the German situation – place a personal relationship and its reconciliation (the two subsequently resumed their correspondence, reaffirmed their deep, enduring feelings for one another and met again in the following years) above all rational judgement after what had seemed an irreparable rupture?

Arendt provides the explanation in a letter she wrote to Heidegger immediately after their reunion, noting that it was a “gracious compulsion” that had prevented her from committing “the only truly unforgivable betrayal” and thus “ruining her life”. Her motivation is simple and profound: loyalty – loyalty to a person as an inner compulsion, one she cannot resist, even though she is fully aware of whom she is being loyal to. She understood the scandalous nature of the matter, for she held no illusions about Heidegger or the state of Germany. In her travel report Visiting Germany, which she wrote after returning to the United States, she casts an unsparing, incisive eye on the people of the devastated country, portraying a collective that is stubbornly oblivious, self-pitying and entirely evasive of responsibility – aggressively framing their own suffering as undeserved misfortune inflicted by higher powers, rather than confronting the German origins of their misery. This blend of deflecting guilt and wallowing in personal losses was – Arendt surely recognised – exactly the stance Heidegger himself had taken. Since the end of the war, he had retreated into the lofty realms of Friedrich Hölderlin’s classical poetry, refusing to face the reality of a defeated nation. From there, he sought to explain away the German catastrophe in fundamentally ontological terms, portraying it instead as an existential unfolding of fate. And there he remained – during the period of his teaching ban imposed by the French occupation until 1950, attempting to downplay his Nazi involvement with flimsy digressions and half-truths, even going so far as to present himself as an “actual” opponent, a stance he maintained until the end of his life. There was no confession, no word of regret or remorse. On the one side we have the fallen master thinker, whose transparent excuses make his “fall” all the more embarrassing by revealing a deep-seated moral weakness; on the other, we have the keenly analytical visitor, who, in an act of the simplest and most profound humanity, remains personally loyal to this man. In this image, the truly impossible relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger comes into full view.

Radicalism and jargon – the Heidegger case

The debate over the “Heidegger case” continued to preoccupy the public long after his death in 1976. Initially, voices like those of Gadamer dominated, and a whole generation of Heidegger students steadfastly defended the philosopher’s “genuine” thinking, supposedly untainted by the Nazi spirit, dismissing his Nazi involvement as a brief political mistake. Critical responses, such as those of Karl Löwith – himself shaped by Jewish heritage and exile – who early on identified structural parallels between Nazi ideology and Heidegger’s ideas, remained in the minority. However, these critiques were complemented by productive analyses of Heidegger’s language, most notably by Theodor W. Adorno, who in 1964 deconstructed it as the “jargon of authenticity” and a contribution to German ideology. Could it be that the immense impact of the “master from Germany” (Rüdiger Safranski) on generations of apparently more receptive followers rested largely on his erratic or – depending on perspective – convoluted language and style, which conveys profundity and radicalism more through invocation than reasoned argument?

Compared to Arendt’s radicalism, lived out in her personal and intellectual journey (as an energy that goes to the very root of things), Heidegger’s comes across as little more than pretension. After all the struggles she faced in her private and public life, after the fierce attacks she repeatedly endured – whether for her critical outsider analyses of Zionism or for her book on the Nazi mass murderer Eichmann and his personal “banality” (which her critics mistakenly portrayed as trivialisation rather than recognising the true monstrosity of the events) – she nonetheless gives the old man in Freiburg, who had once been her lover, her friendship.

Many shook their heads at this, but no one had forced her; it was her own deep-felt loyalty. One might even ask whether it was loyalty to Heidegger, or rather loyalty to herself – the adult woman honouring the version of herself she had been all those years ago in Marburg. The scandal in this story was not the one that never occurred in the small university town, nor the seemingly impossible postwar reunion. The true scandal lies in the cowardice and disloyalty of a careerist corrupted by power, against whose failure the unwavering courage and human greatness of Hannah Arendt stand out all the more starkly.