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Arendt Arrogant, Catty and Loving in Letters to Husband Reviewed by Cynthia Haven |
Sunday, April 15, 2001
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WITHIN FOUR WALLSThe Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher, 1936-1968 Edited and with an introduction by Lotte Kohler Harcourt; 458 pages; $35
In the current stoking of the Hannah Arendt industry, in which every scrap from her wastebasket is being blown into print, the latest installment, "Within Four Walls: The Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blucher, 1936-1968," has barely raised a spark. Perhaps it's because it has so much company: Arendt's correspondence with Mary McCarthy was published in 1995, with existentialist philosopher and mentor Karl Jaspers in 1992, and her letters with Kurt Blumenfeld and Martin Heidegger found their way into German publication in the last decade or so. Their publication tailgates the scandal surrounding the revelation of Arendt's youthful affair with her professor and mentor, the philosopher Heidegger. Yet another student-professor passion is hardly earthshaking. However, Heidegger's Nazi affiliations made news of his fling with his Jewish student, the future author of "Origins of Totalitarianism" and "Eichmann in Jerusalem." Their wary friendship over the subsequent decades (Arendt remained convinced of "a fundamental goodness within him") roused the animosity of determined Arendt-debunkers. Hence, a rush to print anything that will clarify the mess. The letters to her husband, Heinrich Blucher (who died in 1970, five years before Arendt), published in German since 1996, will undoubtedly contribute to the scholarly factory and the gossip of aficionados. But for those of us with a more casual interest in the philosopher-political theorist, what are we likely to glean? In the 1950s, Arendt told Jaspers: "I won't stop being a German. I will forge for myself neither a humbug Jewish past nor a humbug American past." The newest installment of Arendt's letters reinforces that position, sometimes with startling ramifications. They hold in amber the rich spirit of Old World learning and philosophy, an ethos as dead today as the Third Reich, and perhaps as incomprehensible. "Berlin: rebuilt!" she writes deliriously in 1959, as if her 1940 internment at the hands of the Germans had never happened. "No trace of abject misery left. And, most important, it has suddenly dropped its provincial aspect again." Visiting Jerusalem for "Eichmann in Jerusalem," in what is perhaps the most remarkable section of this book, she notes, "What has been achieved, often quite impressive, basically goes back to the German Jews in the cities and their social work. What would have been possible in this pigsty that calls itself the Near East is incredible." She decries Israel's "oriental mob" and its "unlearnable" language. She notes, with unblinkered prescience, "they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel." In the same letter, she notes an imminent trip to Istanbul before returning to "civilized ground," Switzerland, the home of Jaspers, the purest hero of the letters: "He is filled like the sun with curiosity in his essential passion for fundamental illumination." The volume sheds some light on her decades-long preoccupation with her then- unpublished biography of Berlin's Rahel Varnhagen, Jewish woman of letters and progenitor of Germany's best-known literary salon around the time of Goethe. Arendt's deep identification with this conflicted Jew living among the goyim, who also married a non-Jew, brings into sharper relief Arendt's arguable status as the last descendant of this German Enlightenment. The letters make manifest the limitations of communiques between husband and wife, separated by long spells, but together for even longer ones. They "speak the language of unconditional partnership," writes editor Lotte Kohler in her guiding introduction. Says Arendt, simply, "for God sake, you are my four walls." After the eloquent sexual display of their early courtship letters, in which philosophy, romance and confession mingle like kisses, Arendt and Blucher yield to the inevitable marital shorthand, peppered with acquaintances and minor figures of the time. The notes don't always help: When Arendt comments on Jaspers, "He told me a few things about his relationship with me that I don't want to repeat; but it is what you always suspected, only he basically doesn't have a clue about it," well, what are we to assume? Is this characteristic Arendt self-flattery, or something more? It's not the role of editor, perhaps, to speculate, but readers without the lifeboat of pre-existing opinions are likely to flounder. Critics may find more fuel in Arendt and Blucher's unrockable sense of their own superiority, their cattiness toward colleagues and Blucher's bottomless self-pity ("I can't save this place [Bard College, where he was a philosophy professor] on my own, and will no longer try to." ). Frequently, one craves more greatness of spirit (surely humility is the hallmark of wisdom), and far less sniping at colleagues, fans and the institutions that often provided a livelihood for them both (Stanford, Berkeley and the Hoover Institute among them). Too often, the colleagues are professionally jealous, the women bitchy or menopausal. Of Heidegger's wife, Elfride: "The woman is half-crazed with jealousy, which has built up over the years, during which time it is obvious she constantly hoped he would simply forget me." Unjust? Certainly. If one can't kvetch with one's significant other, who can one crab with? Is it fair, even, to criticize letters intended only for one's most devoted fan, even if that's somewhat fictive for people who suspected posterity's laurels? After all, the words Arendt intentionally chose for the world she published in her lifetime. It's an argument for the traditional deathbed rite of burning one's papers. At least some of them. But don't hold your breath. Cynthia Haven has written most recently for Stanford magazine and Minnesota Monthly. |
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