He was the most prestigious philosopher of his generation: he exuded charisma and his ideas about existentialism (being in the world, ‘Dasein’) and his “pristine semantics & rdquor; They caused more than one student to commit suicide after listening to him in his famous seminars. His obsession with the renewal of the university as an institution and, for that matter, of all of Germany, led him to support national socialist ideas and to accept the position of rector in Freiburg with Hitler already in power.
She had read Kant at 14 and was his brightest student. Jew, narrowly escaped From the Nazi clutches in the Gurs camp, she managed to exile herself to New York and became one of the most groundbreaking philosophers of the 20th century. She wrote ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ and coined the concept of “banality of evil & rdquor; her while she covered for ‘The New Yorker’ the trial against Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalemwhich earned her the enmity of the Zionist community, which saw her as a traitor for uncovering the collaboration of some Jews during Nazism.
A forbidden and contradictory passion
She was 18, he was 34. and two children when they met. The clandestine love between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger is one of those chapters in European history that has almost everything: two of the most powerful intellectuals of the 20th century, Nazism, a tumultuous and forbidden passion, a world war, classes of inspired philosophy&mldr ; But perhaps because of how complex and contradictory what it is, or because Heidegger continues to be a sore in German public lifeits story is not one of the best known.
“No one has told it well,” says Miquel Esteve (Tarragona, 1969), who takes on the challenge of fictionalizing it – from when they met in 1924 until Heidegger’s death in 1976 – in ‘Love without a world’ which Navona has just published in Spanish and Catalan.
“Until now, what could bring us closest to their relationship is the epistolary published five years ago by Herder, although many letters from Heidegger are missing because his wife, Elfriede, was very jealous”, explains Esteve, who is passionate about European philosophy and very generous with the gallery of secondary characters in the novel, such as Karl Jaspers.
‘Love without a world’ recreates an idyll marked by the comings and goings for decades and, beyond the sensual beginnings at the Marburg faculty, Esteve is above all interested in the rapprochements that Heidegger and Arendt had in their mature years, after Nazism was defeated, after Auschwitz and Heidegger’s purge. The last time they saw each other was in 1975, shortly before a heart attack took Arendt. Six years earlier, she had written the public letter of congratulations ‘Martin Heidegger turns eighty’.
“How could it be?”
“Arendt is brilliant, her ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ is more current than ever and it was a very modern woman, above many current thinkers. That he devoted himself to a relationship of admiration with Heidegger, a man with a beastly academic, intellectual and personal magnetism, is understandable. But to forgive her for her support of National Socialism, since she was Jewish. who narrowly escaped death and was also a strong woman who did not tremble when it came to criticizing her own people… For me, writing this story was satisfying a brutal need to answer to myself: how could it be?”, explains Esteve.
Some biographers of Arendt have pointed out that being an orphan (her father died of syphilis when she was little) could have something to do with her falling in love with such a paternal figure, with whom there was great physical and intellectual connection. Although the novel serves to understand that this relationship was not exactly equal: Martin used Hannah as a reader and debated his ideas and manuscripts with her, while Arendt could never count on him as a reader and wrote ‘The Origins of Totalitarianism’ practically in secret.
He was a inveterate solipsist, an intellectual so absorbed in his ideas that he did not realize where the Nazi regime was headed. “His famous ‘Letter on humanism’ “It wanted to be a kind of public repentance, but it was so philosophical that three people understood it,” says Esteve, for whom the relationship between the two was “totally sexist”. “She realized that she had been very submissive. Over the years, when they got older, he was much more docile.” Esteve maintains that Heidegger was never an anti-Semite. In addition to Arendt, he had another lover, Elisabeth Blochmann, who was also Jewish.
Journey to the origins in Messkirch
“I have been a great reader of Heidegger. When you finish reading it, you are a different person, it dries you up“, Esteve confesses. “Reading Arendt causes another completely different experience, it is a pure hymn to hope in human beings, it revives you.”
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Esteve, a great European philosophy and history enthusiast, is an economist by training. He worked in Barcelona as a consultant until one day, stressed and disenchanted, he returned to his native Móra la Nova and took the reins of the family business. “I left everything 25 years ago, he was alienated.” He Today he works in the fields (he dedicates himself to the peaches, oranges and oil) and combines it with mathematics classes and his career as a writer.
Researching for ‘Love without a World’ he traveled to the university where Heidegger taught and also visited the famous retreat of the “Wizard of Messkirch”, next to the forests of the Black Forest, where his thinking hut still stands and his grave is located. . “Freiburg is the greenest and most left-wing city in Germany after Berlin, so the story between Heidegger and Arendt remains taboo. People talk about him with a small mouth but on an intellectual level he is greatly admired.”, he explains, while he impatiently awaits the unpublished works of the German thinker that remain to be published and that will see the light of day in the coming years, as his grandson and executor, Arnulf Heidegger, has commented on more than one occasion.