Walter Benjamin and Hannah Arendt
Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger
I.
At a 6/20 talk the other day on Walter Benjamin [1], some clever clogs in the audience posed the following thought experiment:
Imagine that Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin were both hanging perilously from a cliff edge and she could save the life of only one man; whose hand would Hannah Arendt reach for?
This raised a few knowing laughs in the room, but it is, as a matter of fact, a perfectly serious question; one which obliges us to ponder where her ultimate loyalty lay: to her lover, or to a friend to whose cousin she was married?
Without guaranteeing that we'll arrive at a definitive answer, I thought it might be instructive nevertheless to examine the relationships between these three fascinating figures ...
II.
Let's begin with a few remarks on the woman at the centre of this philosophical threesome and her relationship with Heidegger, who was not only a married man seventeen years her senior, but also her university tutor.
Born in Germany in 1906, Hannah was a pretty and brilliantly precocious Jewish child raised in a secular and progressive family, mostly by her mother, Martha (her father having died from syphilis when she was just seven years old) along strict Goethean lines.
Fiercely independent, Hannah studied classical literature and founded a philosophy circle whilst still at school, having read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason before her fourteenth birthday. After completing her secondary education in Berlin, Arendt studied at the University of Marburg under newly appointed professor Heidegger, with whom she formed a romantic as well as a close intellectual relationship exchanging love letters and philosophical ideas.
Indeed, despite everything that was to happen, Heidegger remained one of the most profound influences on her own work and Arendt continued to acknowledge him as the secret king ruling over the realm of thought (just as he would later confess that she had been the inspiration for his work on thinking as a form of passion) [2].
They remaind friends until his death in 1976.
III.
In September 1929, Arendt married Günther Siegmund Stern (aka Günther Anders), who, like her, had been a student of Heidegger's (they had first met in 1925, although she took little notice of him at the time).
As mentioned, he also happened to be Benjamin's cousin and, during Arendt's exile in Paris from Hitler's Germany during the 1930s, she and Benjamin became close friends (but not, as far as I'm aware, lovers).
Walter Benjamin is something of an odd duck: as Arendt recognised in the long introduction she wrote in 1955 to a collection of essays by Benjamin known in English as Illuminations [3].
In this text, she attempts to explain Benjamin's fate as a posthumous individual - i.e. one who, as Nietzsche says, only comes into their own after they die - by referencing his incomparable genius and the fact that this made it difficult to classify his writing.
Not quite this and not quite that, Benjamin was someone who thought both poetically and philosophically, but without being either a poet or a philosopher.
But Benjamin was also, according to Arendt, cursed with bad luck; he himself used to speak of the 'little hunchback' [bucklicht Männlein] who bedeviled him from earliest childhood and caused him to appear as a bit of a bungler (or what our American friends refer to as a screw-up).
Who knows, perhaps this was one of the things Arendt found so attractive about him; hugely gifted, but, like Proust, unable to change a lightbulb, let alone the circumstances of his life; even when the latter threatened to crush him. Some women love winners; some women love losers.
At any rate, Arendt and Benjamin - shared a certain vision of modernity (and, indeed, an angelic concept of history) and they loved to converse and exchange ideas, or play chess together. She admired the older man's "gestures and the way he held his head when listening and talking; the way he moved, his manners, but especially his style of speaking, down to his choice of words and the shape of his syntax; finally, his downright idiosyncratic tastes" [4].
But did she care for Benjamin (her friend) with the same intensity and devotion with which she cared for Heidegger (her former lover)?
I doubt it.
In fact, I doubt she even cared for her husband with the same passion (whom she divorced in 1937) and it's arguable that what she liked about the cousins was that they each reminded her in some way of Heidegger (whom Benjamin always regarded as his nemesis) [5].
Thus, despite the 6/20 speaker, Anja Steinbauer, expressing her hope that it would be Benjamin's hand Arendt would grab in the imaginary clifftop scenario set out above, I strongly suspect it would in fact be the latter's.
Notes
[1] The paper, by Dr. Anja Steinbauer on Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project (1927-1940), was given at the 6/20 Club (London) on Sunday 20 October, 2024, hosted (as always) by Christian Michel, a French polymath who has graciously organised twice-monthly events at his west London home for twenty-odd years, during which time an impressive assortment of speakers have presented papers on a huge number of topics.
[2] As might be imagined, Arendt faced a good deal of criticism for her continued admiration of Heidegger due to his involvement with (and support for) the Nazi Party after his election as rector at Freiburg University in
1933. But good on her, I say; isn't this evidence that love ultimately triumphs over ideology?
For Arendt's description of Heidegger as the hidden king, see Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World (1982), p. 44. It was this work that first revealed their love affair, although it wasn't until 1995 that Elżbieta Ettinger published her controversial work on the relationship having gained access to their correspondence.
In 1998, all the letters between Hannah and Heidegger were finally published. See the English translation by Andrew Shields; Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger: Letters, 1925-1975, ed. Ursula Ludz (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004).
[3] Originally published in German as Schriften, this collection of essays, edited by Arendt, was translated into English by Harry Zorn and published as Illuminations by Jonathan Cape in 1970.
[4] Hannah Arendt, Introduction to Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zorn (The Bodley Head, 2015), pp. 24-25.
[5] See Andrew Benjamin and Dimitris Vardoulakis (eds.), Sparks Will Fly: Benjamin and Heidegger (SUNY Press, 2015), a collection of essays which considers points of affinity and friction between these two thinkers.
It's interesting that, despite being contemporaries, neither man directly engaged with the work of the other, even though Arendt was keen to point out that Benjamin actually shared more common philosophical ground with Heidegger than he did with his Marxist friends; see her introduction to Illuminations, p. 50.
