Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness

By Daniel Maier-Katkin

Book Overview

Hannah Arendt, his brilliant, beautiful student and young lover, sought to enable a decent society of human beings in relation to one other. She was courageous in the time of crisis. Years later, she was even able to meet Heidegger once again on common ground and to find in his past behavior an insight into Nazism that would influence her reflections on "the banality of evil"--a concept that remains bitterly controversial and profoundly influential to this day.

But how could Arendt have renewed her friendship with Heidegger? And how has this relationship affected her reputation as a cultural critic? In Stranger from Abroad, Daniel Maier-Katkin offers a compassionate portrait that provides much-needed insight into this relationship.

Maier-Katkin creates a detailed and riveting portrait of Arendt's rich intellectual and emotional life, shedding light on the unique bond she shared with her second husband, Heinrich Bl cher, and on her friendships with Mary McCarthy, W. H. Auden, Karl Jaspers, and Randall Jarrell--all fascinating figures in their own right. An elegant, accessible introduction to Arendt's life and work, Stranger from Abroad makes a powerful and hopeful case for the lasting relevance of Arendt's thought.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393068331
• ISBN13: 9780393068337
• Release Date: March 2010
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 386 Pages
• Weight: 1.09 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.4" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

mentions the epicenter of evil

It is unusual for any book to be clear on matters that created tremendous disagreements among intellectuals. I have been openly unprofessional long enough to realize how rarely scholars dare to write what only a fool would admit. That the major political struggles of the twentieth century produced a mixture of justifications for sides that thinkers ended up on rarely reached a point that makes clear how the interest of governments in punishing those who frighten their victims by getting away with crimes by the millions and organizations of victims that speak of their love for a group of people in conducting trials so that certain people can be considered monsters, as Eichmann's trial did in Jerusalem, produces such perverse brilliance when a book by Hannah Arendt revealed the awful truth about most people letting things slide until the millions of people in prisons can be confined with money launderers who thought breaking the law was the wave of the future. The complexity of modern society makes it unlikely that law will be able to criminalize the meaning of money completely, but creepy activities that can easily be blamed on the monetary mulch of America will probably slide right by most juries in the present state of confusion. It is possible to thoroughly understand the contents of this book. Most books are published with that in mind. When Hannah Arendt was writing, she ultimately trusted her personal feelings to communicate what she meant to people who were not subject to the common cultivations of stupidity formally recognized as the sociology of knowledge, and this book is clear in explaining how an individual with ethics could have the friendships that never come close to being peas in a pod. I am quite familiar with major characters in this book, and it is a joy to see them understood so well. It only mentions Walter Kaufmann once, on going to visit Martin Heidegger when translating something so Americans could learn about philosophy. I tried to read The Way Back Into the Ground of Metaphysics by Heidegger in the 1956 translation that had Heidegger's full approval without going over the entire text. The absurd results of social systems in a superpower with global ambitions ought to be understood by people who are concerned about what nature society will have when none of the schemes employed by people in this book match the activities of a nation of shoppers trying to grab money that has already been spent. As much as I like the book, my fear is how odd I am in all aspects of my understanding of its themes.

Zeitgeist and Atmosphere

I picked up this book without having any real depth of knowledge or undestanding of either Heidegger or Arendt. I do, however, have an interest in modern European history--particularly the years encompassing the World Wars. If you are similarly inclined, there is a very good sense of zeitgeist and atmosphere projected here, along with some relatively obscure historical facts and insights which are well worth perusing. Some intriguing parallels to current events and moral quandries in the Middle East are also evident. However, be forewarned that you will have to wade through (or skim over) extended treatments of abstract philosophical concepts (ie. the nature of "Being" and "Existence") for which I had little patience. The absence of photographs is also disappointing in a biographichal treatise of this type.

Amazing book

I ordered this book without knowing it was a new book in the market. I read a biography of Hanna Arendt in portuguese, my language, and was a bit suspicious if this book would bring me something new and what a surprise! Not only two biographies for the price of one - Arendt and Heidegger are very well described as persons and thinkers in their time, together and apart, with their respectives works and thoughts - but a great lesson of philosophy! I could finally understand the origins of phenomenology within a historical context. Congratulations to the author that made a beautiful, poetic and intelligent book. I deeply recommend.

Stranger among her people.

Stranger From Abroad by Daniel Maier-Katkin is a biography of Hannah Arendt - one of the twentieth century's sharpest minds. A political philosopher and renowned lecturer, she gained prominence for her erudite, but today obsolete, works The Origins of Totalitarianism, Human Condition, and by the report Eichmann in Jerusalem. Assessing Arendt thirty five years after her death, it appears that while her legacy in political sciences fades away, two stories in her life continue to draw attention. Her lifelong relationship with German philosopher Martin Heidegger, her teacher and lover (and member of Nazi party), is a story of friendship and forgiveness, particularly fascinating in the face of his duplicity and his lifelong arrogance toward her. The other story is of Arendt's insensitive to the victims of Holocaust reporting on the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, summarized by a catchy, but bizarre phrase - the Banality of Evil. Daniel Maier-Katkin, who's own political views appear to resonate with that of Arendt', has selected the story of friendship and forgiveness, dosing her biography with excessive amount of liberal political saccharine and grafting his own post-Zionist views onto her legacy. But what is glossed over in his book is not less important then what is praised. Politically and culturally a product of the Weimar republic, Hannah Arendt associated herself, after the Nazi victory, with German Zionism. It was a cultural movement of little practical consequence, whose main weapon was a pen, a speech, a political campaign, in contrast to East European Zionism - a liberation movement which did not shy away from a pickaxe, a shovel and, later, a rifle. Hannah Arendt identified herself with Martin Buber and Yehuda Magnes, German-Jewish luminaries she had sympathy for. The legendary David Ben-Gurion, Chaim Weitzman, Vladimir Zhabotinsky were the Russian-Jewish Zionist leaders Hanna Arendt never spoke kindly of. Conciliatory in nature and not able to handle the heat of the military solution to the Arab-Jewish clash in Palestine, she broke off with Zionism after the establishment of Israel and grumbled about Zionist politics ever since. That brings us to the reason why she gained notoriety for her reporting on the trial of Adolph Eichmann. The trial, which took place in Jerusalem in 1961, drew the attention of the world to the Holocaust - something the Nuremberg Trials in 1946 failed to do. Published in 1963 as the book Eichmann in Jerusalem, her reporting contained, among other things, a highly contested thesis summarized by famous catch phrase - "The Banality of Evil". Eichmann, according to her thesis, was not acting out of radical malevolence toward the Jews, but was merely carrying orders without consideration of their effects on the victims. The reports also pronounced the Jewish councils (Judenrat) culpable in cooperation with Nazi authorities. Adding insult to injury, Arendt criticized the Israeli PM Ben-Gurion for

The Personal and the Philosophical

Dan Maier-Katkin's new book on the relationship between Hannah Arendt, whose life experience was altered fundamentally by what took place in Nazi Germany, and philosopher Martin Heidegger, who banally participated in the regime, very effectively combines biography, philosophy and cultural history into a hybrid form that makes for quite fascinating reading. As a graduate student at the New School for Social Research in the mid-1970s, one frequently talked to students who were in Hannah Arendt's classes. Though she passed away before I arrived there, I have found several of her works quite useful in teaching aspects of criminology ( particularly The Origins of Totalitarianism and Eichmann in Jerusalem). Maier-Katkin's book helps fill in many of the gaps in my understanding of Arendt's attitude toward life and learning. By combining the personal and the philosophical, without allowing either to become the dominant story, the author has created an highly readable account of how the two are fundamentally related. At the core of the book is the story of how the relationship between these two great thinkers survived one of the major cataclysms of the 20th century.