Friday, July 02, 2010

Chamberlain, Lesley. Review of Daniel Maier-Katkin, STRANGER FROM ABROAD. THE INDEPENDENT July 2, 2010.

Maier-Katkin, Daniel. Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness. New York: Norton, 2010.

Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt have many enemies, Heidegger because of his Nazi flirtation and Arendt as a critic of the Jews. We have known for some time, from their letters, that Heidegger, who reinvented philosophy in the 1920s, and Hannah, his star pupil who went on to become a leading political philosopher in the US, were briefly lovers in her teens. The tendency, which Daniel Maier-Katkin, an American human-rights professor magnificently resists, has been to use their early relationship further to indict what came later. In fact, their correspondence tells an exemplary tale of friendship and forgiveness in which the banality of human nature is redeemed. . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/stranger-from-abroad-by-daniel-maierkatkin-2015874.html.

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