Hannah Arendt’s American Education
Beginning in 1949, Arendt returned repeatedly to Germany, but, in an extraordinary 1964 interview on German TV, she said that she thought of herself not as a German but as a Jew. The young interviewer, Günter Gaus, asked what remained of Europe for her, and she answered, “What remains is the language. . . . It is not the German language that went mad.” She could not be exiled from the poetry and prose of Goethe and Lessing, or from modern writers like Brecht, Benjamin, and Hermann Broch.
The not so hidden intent of a new German biography, Thomas Meyer’s “Hannah Arendt: A Life of the Mind” (Penguin Press; translated by Shelley Frisch), is to reclaim her as a German woman, writer, thinker, and publishing and academic phenomenon, not just an American one. Meyer, who teaches philosophy at the University of Munich and is a widely published writer, has assembled an enormous amount of information about Arendt’s family, education, German publishing career, and postwar celebrity. Arendt comes most fully alive, though, when Meyer lets her own extravagant, commanding voice carry the story forward.
“They say the test of a true chef is to make the perfect omelette and charge twenty-eight dollars for it.”
Cartoon by Christopher Weyant
“For me the question was somehow: Either I study philosophy or I drown myself,” Arendt said once, recalling herself at fourteen. The claim is believable. Growing up in Königsberg, the city of Kant, she always feared failing to understand something. Kant’s works stood in the library at home, and she read them in search of relief. At Königin-Luise-Schule, she studied Latin, Greek, and French but left before graduating. She later said that after a teacher had offended her—was it an antisemitic remark?—she led her classmates in boycotting the teacher’s classes, and was expelled. Still, in 1924 she enrolled at the University of Marburg, where students were flocking to Martin Heidegger’s lectures.
Heidegger was building on, and breaking with, his teacher Edmund Husserl, in an audacious attempt to push aside the customary problems of academic philosophy and return to “things themselves,” to existence as it is actually lived. Heidegger described human existence as Dasein, literally “being there.” We find ourselves thrust into a world already under way, surrounded by objects and people, carried irreversibly through time toward death. The danger was surrendering to convention and commonplace opinion, becoming what others expected. “Everyone is the other, and no one is himself,” Heidegger wrote. Authentic existence required confronting one’s own death without evasion. Arendt, evidently depressed and convinced of life’s meaninglessness, found his teaching electrifying. He dug into Plato and other classical texts and pulled out vital new meanings. As she later wrote, “Heidegger never thinks ‘about’ something; he thinks something.”
He was thirty-five, married, and the father of two sons, a handsome man with a trim, slightly curled mustache and a piercing stare. Arendt was eighteen, with a gently molded chin and beautiful, yearning eyes. They began an affair. His letters to her were moony in a traditional German style. “The demonic has seized me,” he wrote. “The still, prayerlike folding of your loving hands and your gleaming forehead guarded it through womanly transfiguration.” (Heidegger could have written librettos for Wagner.) In a confessional sketch that she had written for Heidegger, she expressed an “unbending devotion to a single one.” Nevertheless, with Heidegger’s tender encouragement—had his wife become suspicious?—Arendt left Marburg for Heidelberg, where she wrote a dissertation on St. Augustine under Karl Jaspers. She continued meeting Heidegger during trips he made for another two years.
After completing her dissertation, she married a man she had met in one of Heidegger’s seminars in Marburg, Günther Stern, later known as Günther Anders. Her life had moved on, but her estimate of Heidegger had not: she never denied his intellectual power. In 1933, however, when Heidegger became rector of the University of Freiburg, he delivered a preposterous speech celebrating the new regime. Arendt was appalled by his embrace of the Hitler movement. When she later recalled the Nazi seizure of power, she said that the behavior of ordinary Germans had surprised her less than the “fantastische” ideas with which intellectuals greeted Hitler. Heidegger, the philosopher of authenticity and independent thought, had become one of them, surrendering to vicious political cant.
