andie nachgeborenen:
But! But! That swastika would make a great big BUT!!!! for me; I couldn't get over that. And for whatever reason H joined the Party, and whatever the manner of his alliegance to it. As for justification, I'd never ask it -- love and justification don't go together. But explanation, I don't understand what she saw in him -- whats he continued to see in him. AFter '33. Maybe even before, when he did join? jks
---
Well, Arendt criticized Isreal; she was obviously a self-hating Jew! Seriously, I think, well, she hero-worshipped the guy. Martin Heidegger, the greatest philosopher since Kant, the "hidden king," had chosen HER. Also I think there was a certain amount of gloating Schadenfreude after they were reunited in 1949 and he came crawling to her to help him get out of the de-Nazification mess he was in; she now had the power over _him_. I think this comes out in one of the letters she wrote her husband about that time.
I also think that we should remember that how the NSDAP looks to us NOW in 2004, after the Holocaust and WWII, is a lot different than how it looked to a lot of people in 1933, especially if you thought that Mein Kampf was a lot of populist bullshit that didn't mean anything, were sick unto death of Weimar, and especially in the present case, you were waiting with bated breath for a "saving" moment to come around. Actually it's a damn shame that a symbol with as long a history as the swastika is now going to be forever tarnished for having been appropriated by the Nazis.