Starting with his own several memoirs, Martin Heidegger’s biography has been inscribed in a large number of unreliable texts—fitting, it has been suggested, for his objections to the more stable traditional conception of truth. Elżbieta Ettinger now adds to these accounts her elusive rehearsal of the affair between Heidegger and Hannah Arendt—a relationship generally known as having occurred but with its features heavily veiled, and now, even with the correspondence between the two that Ettinger brings to light, not much clearer in detail or less perplexing in character.[1]

The ingredients for high drama in that relationship are unmistakable: passion, intellect, and a half-century of unusual historical crisis. Heidegger and Arendt would die only months apart (1975–76), but it is the beginning of the relationship that has been more difficult to get at, and it’s from there that Ettinger’s account sets out. The renowned thinkers-to-be first met, in the fall of 1924, at the University of Marburg: Heidegger the rising star of German philosophy, only a few years from succeeding to Edmund Husserl’s chair at the University of Freiburg (thirty-five, married, two children, philosophy having displaced his earlier studies for the priesthood); Arendt a first-year student (eighteen, Jewish, unmarried). At the time, the likelihood of anyone’s challenging an affair between professor and student was remote, as the distance conventionally honored between the two ranks was great—although the distance in this case seems to have been quickly bridged, spurred on by Heidegger’s opening letter to “Miss Arendt,” in which