Lights! Camera! Being! by Simon Blackburn
Letters, 1925-1975, Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger Edited by Ursula Lutz Translated by Andrew Shields (Harcourt, 335 pp., $28) Click here to purchase the book.
When this book crossed my desk, it certainly jerked my memory. I remembered, rather dimly, that some time ago--it turns out to be nearly ten years--the historian Elzbieta Ettinger had written a good, sad, and unwittingly amusing book about Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger. It seemed that poor, deluded, and Jewish Arendt remained fixated all her life on her sometime teacher and lover Martin Heidegger, even after marrying, and even after realizing that he was an unrepentant anti-Semitic nightmare, pale in his sins only by comparison with his appalling wife Elfride, whose main claim to fame, apart from her marriage to the Nazi magus, seems to have been driving sick and pregnant women into laboring for the Reich.
I also remembered, rather vaguely, that this set the cat among the pigeons, producing subsequent squawks from many parties: Arendt groupies, Heidegger groupies, Zionists, anti-Zionists, Holocaust survivors, pretend Holocaust survivors, counselors, maybe the Elfride support group, historical revisionists, the whole enchilada. I quickly dismissed it all as New York Review of Books-sort of navel-gazing, a low-temperature conflagration in which no party came out badly in their own eyes, while the only possible explanation for the different perspective voiced by the other correspondents was their blind inhumanity and their twisted villainy.
The only scholarly question, it seemed to me, was whether Ettinger had accurately relayed the gist of the correspondence between Arendt and Heidegger. And since at that time virtually nobody had access to the archives--such is the reticence of those who themselves flutter around the flame of Being, or such, dare we think, is the possessiveness of those who scent a tenure or a royalty fluttering in the neighborhood of Being--no judgment on the fidelity of Ettinger's account was possible. But now it is.
Here, beautifully presented, and with immaculate scholarly notes, is the whole corpus of one hundred sixty-five letters from 1925, the beginning of the affair, to 1975, when Arendt died. The corpus is incomplete, in that letters, especially from Arendt to Heidegger, must have been lost, and it seems uncertain whether others were even sent; whether this is owed to the sin of epistolary onanism or to other causes remains unclear. But in advance of microscopic scrutiny it looks to me as though Ettinger was dead on. Arendt was stuck like the rabbit in the headlights, mesmerized in a girlish mystical way, for the same reasons as the followers of the Baghwan whosit or David Koresh or the Reverend Jones. Heidegger might have been stuck in turn in her headlights, and at least at the beginning he made a good shot at pretending to be. Connoisseurs of the windings of the human heart need not be surprised, although one does not have to be too fastidious to wonder why this quantity of laundry is on show.
The titanic quality of this passion depends, of course, on the ascendancy of the minds involved. Here I find myself a little nervous. Inevitably, perhaps, one has to admit that some of the testimonies in this book do not fully express the profundity of the ocean of thought that each participant took themselves alone to have plumbed. Some of the letters are indeed quite slight, or as disciples might say, exquisite. In my judgment, the minimalist number 107,
Dear Hannah Next Wednesday is good for me-- preferably in the afternoon--as I need the morning for work, As always Martin
has a pleasantly stark, almost haiku-like music, perhaps answering contrapuntally the warmth of number 105:
Dear Hannah, We will expect you tomorrow at 4 p.m. for tea and would like you to stay for supper. Like you, I am glad Martin
The Heidegger wife, or Elfride motif ("we"), is sounded only faintly here, but it is heard again in the austere 113, which carries us into a minor key:
Dear Hannah, We are looking forward to your visit and will expect you on Thursday, June 26, in the early afternoon. As always, Martin
But the answering, joyous 136 peals out:
All the best for the new house the new year hannah
showing, perhaps, how thinking, I mean real aristocratic elite thinking, a solemn preoccupation of both these individuals, elevates one above the mundane world that afflicts the masses, who are trapped in the Mit-zu-hand. Neither of them, I fear, give us much more of an example of how this authentic thinking takes place, even in the longer letters, perhaps because they seem to imagine it in terms of a simple event, a kind of emission of truth or secretion of profundity, as might happen during the night.
Not that all is sweetness and light. "The amount of publicity it received," sniffs the editor, Ursula Lutz, talking of Ettinger's book and finding it lacking in reverence, "is in stark contrast to its quality," and she goes on to lament its "striking lack of insight and tact." Oh dear. I didn't follow it myself. I think that people who mine these seams should stick together. If you want to enjoy the early, imperious "I would like to ask you to come see me Sunday evening after 9" (number 21), or the warmer and more affecting "if no light is on in my room, ring the bell" (number 26), then surely you should be able to do so, and should join hands with others fingering the laundry.
I have talked of Heidegger, his philosophy, before in these pages. Let us just say that there is more ambition than achievement in his work. He tells a primal story of loss: a story of exile from the shelter of Being, of loneliness and journeying and the possibility of redemption as we try to regain it. He captured the imagination of many intellectuals in the twentieth century because of this prospectus and the sacerdotal self-confidence with which he issued it, not because of any specific insight into the way it is to be realized. Indeed, specific insight is exactly what has to be avoided in his doctrine, so that we can have an orgy of emotion about the fallenness of ordinary people and the soullessness of their mechanical worldview, and the loss of meaning, and the regaining of Being in ancient Greece, and all the other tropes of Romanticism, without ever pausing to think of the different, detailed reality that often contradicts the reflexive and shallow sentiments thereby triggered.
I have read some Arendt, and with the best of intentions, but her judgments seem so perverse that, despite the genuinely illuminating and beautifully written defenses by Margaret Canovan, I find it difficult to take her seriously. There may sometimes be some use in the Hegelian idea of a concrete universal such as totalitarianism, a kind of abstract force or pattern always ready to re-emerge in human history, but then there may not be any use in it at all; details crowd in and differences require attention. Arendt has the same problem as Heidegger, and she may have learned the trick of sky-high generality from him. As someone who mistrusts airy abstractions--such as her sweeping brainchild that the Greek agora was some kind of preeminent domain of freedom, whereas the Greek household was not--I tend to find these generalizations at best irritating, and more often wrongheaded beyond redemption. This is doubtless not the end of the matter, although the secondary literature on Arendt suggests that other readers of her work are experiencing the same problem.
But to paraphrase the great Samuel Johnson, we are not here to sell a parcel of potboilers, but to open the possibility of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice. So think of the box office potential! Think of the collision and the collusion of these giants! There are models to follow:
Voiceover: And now for the very first time on the silver screen comes the film from two books that once shocked a generation. From Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and from the International Guide to Semaphore Code, Twentieth-Century Vole presents The Semaphore Version of Wuthering Heights.
Imagine the film! Martin and Hannah, using language indeed, with much the same sweep and actually the same awkwardness as Heathcliff and Cathy and the baby in the pram, using semaphore flags. The screenplay leaps off the page, warmed by the lovers' own molten words, except for short linking passages that the story arc requires. So now, again for the very first time on the silver screen--a story of forbidden love between two heroes of thought, of star-crossed passion that survived a war-torn world, a love that spanned half a century and two continents, a guilt that dared not speak its name and shocked a generation....
Autumn, 1925
Wide shot: the little university town of Marburg an der Lahn. November. Gables, students, frothy steins of beer, oompah band. Julie Andrews, mountains in the background, Marty Feldman, peasants. Cut to a book-lined, wood-paneled, dimly lit room:
Martin (Russell Crowe, professorial, mustachioed, monocled, wedding ring, looking up from an old volume of Hölderlin, pulling up his lederhosen): You have lost your "disquiet," which means you have found the way to your innermost, purest feminine essence. Someday you will understand and be grateful--not to me--that this visit to my "office hour" was the decisive step back from the path toward the terrible solitude of academic research, which only man can endure--and then only when he has been given the burden, as well as the frenzy, of being productive.
Hannah (Scarlett Johansson, in braids, fiery, intense, ready for more): Perhaps this change from longing to fear brought about by the destructive desire for power, this slavish-tyrannical self-violation, might seem clearer, more comprehensible when one considers that, at least in part, an age that was so depraved and hopeless also created opportunities for monstro usness, all the more as a naturally fastidious and cultivated taste more fiercely and consciously resisted the loud, extreme, and desperate efforts of an art, literature, and culture that were basely and mindlessly pursuing their illusory existence in extravagance that verged on shamelessness.
(Then softly, to herself: I can do it, too!)
Martin: The demonic struck me! The silent prayer of your beloved hands and your shining brow enveloped it in womanly transfiguration. Nothing like it has ever happened to me.... You saucy wood-nymph!
Hannah: Whooeee!
Dissolve to gathering war clouds. Hannah flees to New York. Martin in uniform makes Nazi speeches. Stock footage: kaleidoscope of Hitler, tanks, bombs, concentration camps, D-Day, ruined cities. Hannah's wedding (to the one person in the story who comes out of it with decency intact).
1949
Hannah's study in New York, swirling in cigarette smoke:
Hannah (to Karl Jaspers, who is Ralph Fiennes, off camera): He really was the most atrocious liar, and a potential murderer.
1950-1952
The Heidegger house, austere, postwar, lonely, cold. The wood creaks and moans.
Hannah: Schatzie, I'm back!
Martin: I am delighted to have the chance to acknowledge our early encounter as something lasting, and to take it up now in the later part of life. It would be wonderful if you came out to see me this evening around eight o'clock. My wife, who knows about everything, would also like to welcome you. Unfortunately she is unable to do so this evening.
(He winks to the camera, returns to an old volume of Hölderlin.)
Elfride (Cloris Leachman, in Nazi uniform, with incipient mustache): Take that, you Jewish, Gypsy, Chinese Other!
(She hurls china at Hannah.)
China: Crash!
Hannah: There is a guilt that comes from reserve; it has little to do with lack of trust. In this sense, it seems to me, Martin and I have probably sinned just as much against each other as against you. This is not an excuse. You did not expect one, after all, and I could not provide one either....We will see each other again soon.
China: Crash!
Martin: It is best if you do not write now and do not come visit either. Everything is painful and difficult. But we must bear it.
China: Crash!
Martin (to himself): Read hermeneutically, it is the abyss of longing.
1967-1975
Freiburg. Elegiac autumn mists. The philosopher's study. On his desk Anaximander is buried in bills. Through the open window comes the din of a technology-crazed society, which drowns out the strains of Bruckner's Quintet.
Martin: Proofs ... Royalties ... Translation rights ... Sales ... Auctioning manuscripts.... Can you manage it all for me? Especially in America, where the punters are, although that has nothing to do with it. I am so incompetent with money, which lies far beneath the high pure Alpine air of thought, although I do believe that I can offer you 0 percent agency fees, but the interest on the 4.5 percent debentures should be discounted against the escrowed accumulated tax offset. May thanks remain more creative than poetry, more basic than thinking. Elfride sends best wishes.
(And then more gently:) Being is still afire, dear Hannah, philosopher princess, except where are concerned other people, commerce, the modern world, science, and common sense, all of which suck. O, origin! O, presence!
Hannah: Again I melt. Still I melt.
Crowd of students, priests, po-mos, and others hermeneutically challenged: Hooray for Heidegger! Being rules!
Hannah (in voiceover, her whisper breaking beneath the human condition): This escapade, which is mostly called the "mistake" today--after the bitterness has subsided and, above all, the numerous false reports have been revised somewhat--has multiple aspects, including, among others, that of the period of the Weimar Republic, which, to those then alive, did not, by any means, appear in the rosy light in which it is seen today.... Of course Heidegger recognized this "mistake" after a short time and then risked considerably more than was common at German universities back then.
Dissolve. The students, the priests, the po-mos disperse. Hannah's Sorge-lined face fades. The only sound left is Bruckner. The camera lingers on Elfride, who is stroking a sausage and remembering the escapade. There is an enigmatic smile on her face. The credits roll.
I don't see how it can fail, especially as there are yards and yards of dialogue in this volume ready to be picked up by a crafty screenwriter. The only difficulty is knowing whether the thing should be in black and white or in color.