• Über-Jew Harold Bloom tackled Anthony Julius’s new tome on British anti-Semitism.

• As presaged Friday, Tablet Magazine books critic Adam Kirsch struggled with whether we must throw out the baby that is Martin Heidegger’s mainstream philosophical contribution with the bathwater that is his undeniable Nazism.

• Also as presaged Friday, Francine Prose reviewed a new biography of Irène Némirovsky as well a collection of the French-Jewish writer’s newly translated stories.

• And Francis Fukuyama, in the course of an essay on Friedrich Nietzsche, argues that the crazy/brilliant German philosopher transformed from a run-of-the-mill casual anti-Semite to “a principled anti-anti-Semite” and enemy of “German chauvinism.”

And a bonus! In the Week in Review section, film critic A.O. Scott declared that this is the year of Generation X’s midlife crisis in an essay whose central juxtaposition was the new Noah Baumbauch film Greenberg and the new Sam Lipsyte novel The Ask, which both feature similarly schlemiel-like protagonists. Wish we’d thought of that connection. Oh, wait, our very own Marissa Brostoff did.

Related: Look Out! [Tablet Magazine]
Earlier: Kirsch, Heidegger, and Némirovsky, Oh My!

Kirsch reviewed the correspondence between Heidegger and Hannah Arendt (his lover!) in 2004 for Nextbook.org, Tablet Magazine’s precursor.

Paul La Farge reviewed an earlier Irène Némirovsky biography for Nextbook.org in 2006.

And Francine Prose discussed Anne Frank on a Vox Tablet podcast last year.

This NYT podcast is really good by the way. Not, you know, National Magazine Award-winning good, but good.

Book Review Podcast: Heidegger, Irène Némirovsky and Anti-Semitism [Arts Beat]

Those two questions flashed through my mind as I listened to the alt-rock ensemble Barbez present Force of Light, a multimedia show built around Celan’s verse, at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust a couple of weeks ago. (The music was first released on John Zorn’s Tzadik label in 2007; the set-up at the museum included a video backdrop by director Josh Jesurun.)

Celan does not seem a likely candidate for musical celebration. His work can be dauntingly opaque. His language is by turns playful, somber, and enigmatic. And his personal story—he survived the camps in which both his parents were killed, only to drown himself in the Seine in 1970—can create an undercurrent of menace and despair even when the words themselves are ambiguous.

Yet Barbez was practically created with this material in mind. The band’s leader, guitarist Dan Kaufman, is a composer with a broad emotional palette and a gift for transforming difficult source material into eccentric rock songs. (He has also dedicated a tune to the philosopher and Nazi sympathizer Martin Heidegger.) His settings of Celan’s poetry, though often brooding, are also quite varied, beginning quietly before ramping up to raucous, thrashing climaxes.

Barbez at the Museum of Jewish Heritage

Such was the case with “Aspen Tree,” a poem that Celan wrote for his mother after the war. At first, violin and theremin floated dreamily over a repetitive guitar pattern. As the playwright and poet Fiona Templeton declaimed the line “My mother’s heart was ripped by lead” in her rich Scottish burr, the band launched itself into a gathering storm of ever-greater volume and dissonance, concluding with a weeping theremin melody over the phrase “My gentle mother cannot return.”

Kaufman named Barbez for the multiethnic Parisian neighborhood where he once lived. Initially based in Brooklyn, its members have since dispersed across the United States and Europe; they include percussionist Danny Tunick on marimba and vibes, as well as violinist Catherine McRae, clarinetist Peter Hess, and theremin player Pamelia Kurstin. The band is currently on an international tour.

theremin player Pamelia Kurstin

This array of instruments is itself enough to set the band apart; combined with Kaufman’s carefully structured arrangements, it allows Barbez to tread a fine line between progressive rock and modern chamber music. The band bounces from the kind of intricate, cyclical guitar parts found in African pop to delicate acoustic interludes and frenzied free improvisation, often within the confines of a single tune. The results are sometimes joyous, sometimes violent, and always appealing, which, given the setting of the Celan performance, made for a few awkward moments. Every time I found myself tapping my foot, bopping my head, or showing any other visible sign of pleasure, I couldn’t help feeling a twinge of guilt. Is it permissible to rock out at a Holocaust museum? How can something that sounds so good feel so wrong?

My sense of unease was amplified by the ambivalence I feel toward Holocaust memorials in general. As I walked through the museum’s gift shop, browsing the umbrellas and tote bags emblazoned with the Hebrew word zachor (“remember”), I wondered if the structures and institutions that we erect to memorialize the Shoah and its victims can unintentionally devalue it, diminishing its power to shock and appall. There’s a good argument to be made for taking every opportunity to remind people never to forget. But there’s also something unsettling about seeing the worst genocide of the 20th century marketed using the same tools as a PBS fundraiser or the souvenir shop at the Museum of Natural History.

left to right: Dan Kaufman (composer/guitar), Peter Lettre (guitar), and John Bollinger (drums)

Force of Light was itself mercifully free of such complications, in part because of its limited ambition”the project is meant specifically as an homage to Celan, and only treats the Holocaust by extension”and in part because Kaufman’s music is so perfectly suited to the task. (Less so the video component, which presents a series of rather puzzling images, from drifting smoke to snow falling around a street lamp. What these have to do with Celan’s verse, I have no idea.)

“Count the Almonds,” for example, provides an ideal musical complement to Celan’s ambivalent remembrance of the classic Eastern European Jewish snack of raisins and almonds. (“Render me bitter/Number me among the almonds.”) As is often the case with Kaufman’s music, the tune has a slightly ominous tinge (as does the song’s subject matter—Celan biographer John Felstiner noted that Zyklon B was said to have smelled of almonds). It begins as a dark tapestry of sinuous, interlocking melodies before breaking into light, chiming vibraphone tones, ringing guitar patterns and soaring theremin and violin lines, and concludes with a savage, churning free-for-all.

Here and elsewhere, the band’s volatility and naked emotionalism further sharpens the already unsettling quality of Celan’s words. By offering such focused and effective tribute to the life and work of a single human being, Kaufman also honors all the others who were consumed by the same darkness.

Listen to Nextbook’s interview with Dan Kaufman here.

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.