Letters to Felice

"It’s unlike the correspondence of Lowell and Bishop or Heidegger and Arendt. It’s not balanced. It’s uni-directional. At the same time that I was reading these letters to understand his psychology, and in particular the famous letter to his father—perhaps the single most important non-fictive document that Kafka wrote—at around this time I was being introduced to Heidegger by a professor named Karsten Harries. A wonderful philosopher aesthetician. He taught Being and Time in German, which is sort of hard to believe. We’re talking not that long ago at an American university, that I had the opportunity to study Being and Time in German. I happened to drop into Harries’ office on Valentine’s Day. “Oh, Valentine’s Day”, he remarked, “you should really read Heidegger’s letters to Hannah Arendt.” I thought he was making a joke. What I discovered was that there is an intense amount of real affection in the letters between the two of them, very emotionally charged. Made all the more so by their circumstances. There was a very real initial intimacy when Heidegger was a professor and married man of 36, and Arendt his 18-year-old student. Then came years following a dramatic separation as Heidegger rose to academic prominence in Germany during the Nazi regime, while Arendt fled to America. In the postwar years, they reached the height of their popularity as thinkers, and kept up the correspondence. There is much profound philosophical thinking here, but also an incredible space of almost poetic intimacy. I mean, there was the break, which had to do with their mutual friend Karl Jaspers and Heidegger not defending him, but prior to the break, Hannah and Heidegger did have this kind of quite intense relationship on many levels. I would group Kafka and Alice James on one side as almost solipsistic correspondents, and Lowell and Bishop and Heidegger and Arendt on the other side as letters that express love and closeness. Lowell and Bishop’s letters I came across later, and I hadn’t been as moved reading letters since I’d read Heidegger and Hannah Arendt. Less for their psychological insight, and more simply for being emotionally powerful."