Take, for instance, the letter Ginsberg wrote to Gregory Corso from Benares, India, in 1963. It was a moment in the Cold War when cultural diplomacy was in vogue, and the State Department regularly sent American writers on missions to the Third World. Ginsberg, however, had nothing to do with official patronage; he was not in India as a spokesman but as a seeker. And so he was free to see and do things that American professors couldn’t. One day, Ginsberg and Peter Orlovsky, his longtime companion, noticed a dying beggar on the street:

hideous skeleton-like Buchenwald covered with brown loose feces and flies on huge yellow sores on hips and elbows, crouched in fetal position, naked in curve of urinal wall nearby, obviously dying. . . . I couldn’t stand seeing like that and cheerfully gave him some milk.

Over the next days, Ginsberg personally bathed the man in the Ganges; tended to his ear, which was infested with maggots; fed him, took him to a doctor, showed him how to take penicillin. When the man started to recover, Ginsberg and Orlovsky took him to a hospital, where his family finally reclaimed him.

“Anyway, that’s my soap opera for the month,” Ginsberg wrote self-deprecatingly. But there is no mistaking the genuine compassion and selflessness of his actions. He was not afraid of the sick and wretched, the way most of us are. And he could not have been so fearless if he himself had not embraced wretchedness, in his life and in his work. Around the same time Ginsberg was writing “Kaddish,” his shockingly direct account of his mother’s insanity and death, Robert Lowell was treating his own mental illness in the pioneering poems of Life Studies. Yet just as it is impossible to imagine Lowell ministering to a beggar by the Ganges, so one cannot mistake the brilliant artfulness of Life Studies for the sacred abjection of “Kaddish”:

One time I thought she was trying to make me come lay her—flirting to herself at sink—lay back on huge bed that filled most of the room, dress up round her hips, big slash of hair, scars of operations, pancreas, belly wounds, abortions, appendix, stitching of incisions pulling down in the fat like hideous thick zippers—ragged long lips between her legs—What, even, smell of asshole? I was cold—later revolted a little, not much—seemed perhaps a good idea to try—know the Monster of the Beginning-World. Perhaps—that way. Would she care? She needs a lover.

Yisborach, v’yistabach, v’yispoar, v’yisroman, v’yisnaseh, v’yishador, v’yishalleh, v’yishallol, sh’meh d’kudsho, b’rich hu.

This is blasphemy, but not the calculating, cynical blasphemy of, say, Andres Serrano immersing a crucifix in urine. It is, rather, the obscenity of true suffering, which violates all the boundaries that usually order our lives.

Ginsberg was much more polarizing than most poets, even most avant-garde poets, because he did not see himself as simply an artist. While he was very learned about English literature—not for nothing was he a favorite student of Lionel Trilling and Mark Van Doren at Columbia in the 1940s—he did not want his writing to be approached with the discriminating, hypothetical intelligence we ordinarily bring to literature. His writing was, instead, a kind of speech, directed not to the “poetry reader” but to the whole mind and soul. He was a prophet who used verse to chastise and exhort his people, as in the famous lines from “Howl”:

Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the mind!

When he chose to call 1950s America by the name of the evil god to whom the Canaanites sacrificed their children, Ginsberg deliberately claimed for himself the mantle of the Hebrew prophets. The message he delivered to his Cold War generation is exactly the one that Amos gave the Israelites:

I hate, I despise your feast days, and I will not smell in your solemn assemblies. Though ye offer me burnt offerings and your meat offerings, I will not accept them: neither will I regard the peace offerings of your fat beasts. Take thou away from me the noise of thy songs; for I will not hear the melody of thy viols. But let judgment run down as waters, and righteousness as a mighty stream. Have ye offered unto me sacrifices and offerings in the wilderness forty years, O house of Israel?
But ye have borne the tabernacle of your Moloch and Chiun your images, the star of your god, which ye made to yourselves.

Hardly a middle schooler in America is unfamiliar with the line about judgment and righteousness, because Martin Luther King Jr. quoted it in his “I Have a Dream” speech. But for obvious reasons, King did not draw out the implication of Amos’s metaphor, which is that the waters of judgment are about to drown a sinful people.

Ginsberg could afford to dwell on the prophet’s threat, as well as his promise, because he was not a political leader and had no constituency to answer to. It would not be fair to say that Ginsberg was unpractical—on the contrary, one of the surprises of The Letters is how thoroughly he researched matters like the drug laws and the Vietnam War, so that he could berate journalists and politicians for not doing the same. Writing to the New York Times columnist C.L. Sulzberger in 1970, Ginsberg cited numerous sources on the CIA’s involvement in the Laotian heroin trade, urging the Times to explore the subject further: “A little professionalism, please!” he demands. Similarly, he refers Ed Koch, then a congressman, to detailed studies of British drug laws: “I enclose a little documentation…please Xerox and return this to me rapidly.”

Yet while Ginsberg could be practical, even canny, when it came to arguing politics—and still more so when it came to earning publication and prizes for the work of his fellow Beats—the essence of his moral vision was not pragmatic. He did not want poetry to do the painstaking, unglamorous work of making the world better, but to confront the world with its evil, to shame and shock it into good. That is why he could write, absurdly but entirely sincerely, to Time in 1959, “You are an instrument of the Devil and crucify America with your lies.” The editors of Time, of course, threw the letter in the trash. But a prophet does not have to get results to deserve honor.

“My dear little Ingeborg, you won’t have forgotten me and your visit to Bologna in spite of the beauties of Venice.” So begins the collection of letters that Reinhard Kaiser bid on at a Frankfurt stamp auction in 1991. The story they told would consume him for nearly a decade.

Written by Rudolf Kaufmann, a German geologist, and addressed to Ingeborg Magnusson, a young Swedish woman, they tell of a love thwarted by history. Rudolf was Jewish. Ingeborg was not. Alternately playful, mundane, romantic, and grave, the letters cover a four-year span, ending abruptly in 1939. Who were these people and what happened to them? Kaiser, a writer and translator, wanted to find out.

His curiosity led him to German villages, university archives, and ultimately to a Stockholm apartment building. In his 1996 book, Paper Kisses, newly translated into English, Kaiser reconstructs their romance, through the letters, photographs, and other documents.

Excerpts from the letters are read by Pejk Malinovski.

Image from Paper Kisses, Other Press, 2006.

Martin Heidegger

The correspondence between Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt was a rumor long before it was a book. In 1982, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of Arendt, For Love of the World, revealed publicly what Arendt’s friends had long known: that in the 1920s, Arendt and Heidegger had been lovers. But it was only in 1995 that their relationship, which ended only with Arendt’s death, became a subject of urgent debate in the world press. The reason—one might say, the culprit—was a slim book by Elzbieta Ettinger, Martin Heidegger/Hannah Arendt, which revealed the existence of the unpublished correspondence, and used it to draw a lurid, judgmental portrait of their relationship. Ettinger did not have permission to quote the original letters, but her paraphrases were calculated to excite readers who might not have previously devoted much attention to Heidegger’s Being and Time. “He needed her in order to breathe fully and deeply, to enjoy being alive”; “Arendt gave her love freely, happily, defying convention”: in such cliched phrases was the Arendt-Heidegger correspondence first reported to the world.

But for all its flaws, the publication of Ettinger’s book had two good results. First, it convinced the Heidegger and Arendt estates to authorize a complete edition of their letters; it appeared in Germany in 1998, and now arrives for the first time in English as Letters 1925-75. Second, in addition to all the gossipy speculation, it set off a significant debate about the intellectual legacies of both thinkers. A leading figure in this discussion has been Richard Wolin, whose book Heidegger’s Children argued that Heidegger’s philosophical influence on Arendt was negative, even sinister. In his New Republic review of Ettinger’s book—tellingly entitled “Hannah and the Magician,” after Thomas Mann’s parable of fascist demagoguery, “Mario and the Magician”—Wolin argued that Arendt’s loyalty to Heidegger may have “led her to purvey…calumnies about the Jews” in her controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem. For Seyla Benhabib, writing in Boston Review, on the other hand, the German publication of the letters was an occasion to argue that, for Arendt, “the personal is not the political,” and to insist that “politics should not…force individuals to make public the shadowy and obscure recesses of the human heart.” Now that the Letters are no longer just a rumor to readers of English, this debate can be, if not finally settled, at least easier to understand.

Hannah Arendt

As the Letters show, the Arendt-Heidegger story is really three stories, each of considerable human and symbolic interest. First, it is a story of lovers separated by the disasters of the 20th century, only to be reunited decades later. When they first met, in 1924, Arendt was an 18-year-old student at the University of Marburg, Heidegger her charismatic (and married) 35-year-old professor. The first group of letters in the book, written between 1925 to 1928, show their official relationship giving way to an intimate one. “You are my pupil and I your teacher,” Heidegger wrote, “but that is only the occasion for what has happened to us.” A few weeks later, he describes “what has happened” in the poetic language typical of his philosophical writing: “The demonic struck me”; “This is the homeland of pure joy.”

However, throughout the book, Heidegger’s testimony is not balanced by Arendt’s. In fact, of the 166 letters that survive, about three-quarters are from Heidegger; what’s more, the majority of Arendt’s date from the 1960s and 1970s, when their relationship had become more sedate and professional. It is hard to know, then, what the ambitious young woman made of Heidegger’s warning against “the terrible solitude of academic research, which only man can endure.” Here, as throughout the early letters, we see the commanding position Heidegger enjoyed—as a professor, an older man, and of course a genius. When Arendt left Marburg in 1926 to continue her studies in Heidelberg, Heidegger encouraged her to go, but the affair continued. The letters chronicle their clandestine meetings (“If the light is on in my room, then I am home”) and Arendt’s half-hearted attempts to escape into other relationships, to which Heidegger responded with ostentatious generosity (“You will not know how joyous I am about your happiness.”) Not until 1928 did Heidegger finally break off the affair, provoking one of Arendt’s few surviving letters of the period. “I would lose my right to live if I lost my love for you,” she writes in farewell, “but I would lose this love and its reality if I shirked the responsibility it forces on me.” The next year she married Gunther Stern, another pupil of the Master’s, but the marriage quickly failed. “I married,” Arendt was to confess years later (oddly enough, in a letter to Heidegger’s wife, Elfriede), “somehow indifferent as to whom I was marrying, without being in love.” Not until she met her second husband, Heinrich Blucher, in 1936, did Arendt leave her romance with Heidegger behind.

The correspondence trails off, before coming to a grinding halt in a letter dated “Winter 1932/33.” And here we see the emergence of the second great Arendt-Heidegger story: that of a Jew and a German turned from lovers to something like enemies by the rise of Nazism. Responding to a lost letter of Arendt’s, Heidegger indignantly defends himself against the charge of anti-Semitism: “That I supposedly don’t say hello to Jews is such a malicious piece of gossip that…I will have to take note of it for the future.” But the ensuing 17-year gap in the correspondence tells a more troubling story. For in 1933, after Hitler took power in Germany, Heidegger became the rector of Freiburg University, where he eagerly participated in its Gleichschaltung, or “alignment” with Nazi principles. Arendt, meanwhile, fled the country; she would spend the next eight years in France before escaping to New York in 1941.

Heidegger’s behavior during the Nazi period has attracted a huge amount of scholarly attention in recent years. Books by Hugo Ott, Victor Farias, and Rudiger Safranski have helped to fill in the stark gap in the correspondence. Heidegger’s rectorship lasted only a year, but his eager embrace of Nazism has large implications for his whole philosophical achievement. Though he never endorsed the Party’s biological racism, he carried out its anti-Semitic edicts and counted the vilest propagandists among his colleagues. Perhaps even more troublingly, in his Rectorial Address he fused his own philosophical language with the rhetoric of Nazism: “Our nation realizes its own fate by risking its history in the arena of world power in which all human existence is affected and by continually fighting for its own spiritual world.” The very ease of this fusion has led recent critics to explore the fascist affinities of Heidegger’s thought. Heidegger’s Roots, an excellent study by Charles Bambach published last year, showed that many of Heidegger’s philosophical themes—the overcoming of nihilism, the importance of rootedness, the need for decisive action—found vulgar echoes in Nazi “thought.”

When the Arendt-Heidegger correspondence resumes in 1950, the shadows of Nazism, war, and the Holocaust are unavoidably present. Yet the letters demonstrate a remarkable evasion of the subject, by both parties. Just after the war, Arendt had written in public and private blaming Heidegger for his conduct. But when they met in person for the first time in two decades, during Arendt’s trip to Germany on behalf of the Commission on European Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, her reservations seemed to fall away. On February 9, she wrote: “This evening and this morning are the confirmation of an entire life.” Heidegger, too, dwells on the continuity, not the rupture: “I am delighted to have the chance to acknowledge our early encounter as something lasting.”

Yet over the next two years, as Heidegger sends Arendt romantic-philosophical poems and attempts, rather comically, to include Elfriede in their friendship, the evasions only continue. At times, the reader is even angered by Arendt’s refusal to engage with Heidegger’s provocations. His self-pitying references to the Soviet threat (“I, with my ideas, am among the most threatened, the ones who would be wiped out first”) echo Nazi apologetics about defending the West against Communism. Incredibly, in the whole correspondence, he makes only a single oblique reference to the Holocaust: “the fate of the Jews and the Germans has its own truth, for which our historical calculation is no match.” This evasive fatalism, this refusal of concrete politics and moral judgment, surely infuriated the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism. Yet Arendt, whose voice is again missing much of the time, seems never to have argued back. Heidegger’s absolute control of the terms of their relationship is never so damaging as here.

What brought the letters to another halt was, instead, an entirely personal matter—evidently, an explosion of jealousy by Elfriede. The correspondence does not resume until 1966, when for the first time it becomes something like an equal dialogue. Equal in terms of space, at least—for the first time, Arendt was keeping copies of her letters. But in practical terms, Arendt remained subordinate, advising Heidegger on translations and the sale of manuscripts, responding eagerly to his new work. Heidegger’s resolute silence about her work—by then world famous—is all the more glaring by contrast. Writing to Karl Jaspers, the philosopher who was her mentor and Heidegger’s rival, Arendt explained:

I know that he can’t bear to see my name appear in public, that I write books, etc. All my life I have, as it were, pretended to him, always acting as if all this didn’t exist, that, in a manner of speaking, I couldn’t count up to three, except of course in interpreting his own writings; in that respect he was always very pleased to find that I could count up to three and sometimes perhaps up to four.

Arendt’s submissiveness is what allowed the relationship to continue, but it is very damaging to the correspondence as an intellectual document. Worse, Arendt extended it to her public discussions of Heidegger. In her celebrated broadcast on Heidegger’s 80th birthday—helpfully included in the Letters—Arendt spoke indulgently of his Nazi involvement. He “once succumbed to the temptation…to ‘intervene’ in the world of human affairs,” but after “ten short, hectic months,” she declares, “Heidegger recognized this ‘mistake’…and then risked considerably more than was common at German universities back then.”

This parrots the self-serving account Heidegger had given her, which subsequent historians have shown to be false: Heidegger remained a party member to the end, and never came into serious conflict with the regime. But coming from a Jewish intellectual like Arendt, it was a powerful absolution. Arendt never takes Heidegger to task for his long, deliberate silence about Nazism and the Holocaust, and she never even conceives of interrogating his thought for the sources of his politics. The problem with the speech, in fact, is the problem with the Letters as a whole. What Heidegger called “our encounter” was built on a failure to encounter the most urgent questions. To understand what matters most about Arendt and Heidegger—their thought—we have to look elsewhere.

Adam Kirsch is the book critic of the New York Sun.

Letters © Vittorio Klostermann GmbH: Frankfurt am Main 1998 English translation copyright © 2004 by Andrew Shields. Courtesy of Harcourt Books. Photos: Dr. Hermann Heidegger; Hannah Arendt Literary Trust.