The evil of banality

Aimez-vous Heidegger? According to his admirers, he was the most significant and influential philosopher of the 20th century. For Hannah Arendt, despite her claims eventually to have found the perfect husband in Heinrich Blucher, Heidegger was the love of her life. She was his precocious teenage pupil when he lectured on Plato’s Sophist at Marburg in 1924, and the Herr Doktor’s dark-eyed Jewish mistress not long afterwards. He was 35, married with two sons, only one of whom (it emerged much later) he had fathered. His wife Elfride was an eager anti-Semite; Heidegger’s eagerness was for his own advancement and fame. Hannah never got over the thrill of being his cookie.

When Hitler came to power, the proponent of ‘the truth of Being’ embraced the Führer-prinzip. In 1933 he took Mel Brooks’ advice: ‘Don’t be stupid, be a smarty/ Come and join the Nazi Party’. Even as he worked to destabilise the liberal rector of Freiburg university in order to replace him, as he soon did, he was still writing love letters to his little Jewess, who was now in exile in Paris. He was also dumping and betraying his Jewish friends, including Edmund Husserl, his maitre-à-penser. Making it takes many forms.

Hannah Arendt stands to Heidegger as Simone de Beauvoir to Jean-Paul Sartre, whose own Being and Nothingness was a tribute (sourly received) to the German master’s Being and Time. Both women had claims to fame of their own, but derived their glamour, if not notoriety, from the world-famous philosophers with whom, as Héloise with Abelard, they will always be associated. In Stranger from Abroad, Daniel Meier-Katkin, a professor of criminology at Florida State university, re-assesses the great romance in clerk-of-the-courtly style.