Sharp

by Michelle Dean

  The pieces are not Hurston’s best work but they had a certain vitality that suggested that in another life, under other circumstances, she would have been able to provide reportage of a trial that would have had all the hallmarks of what was later called New Journalism: fact, emotion, and personal experience all welded together. She also would have been able to use those tools in applications to cases like the Greenville trial West so imperfectly covered. As it was instead, the Courier stiffed Hurston out of eight hundred dollars it had promised her for the pieces. She died in obscurity eight years later, in 1961. It took a revival in the 1980s, chiefly led by the black feminist writer Alice Walker, to get her widely read again, though Hurston is mostly now thought of as a fiction writer.

  4

  Arendt

  Hannah Arendt did not become a public figure until she was over forty. The achievement that lifted her into the public consciousness was a nearly five-hundred-page political theory treatise on totalitarian politics, written in the thick prose by which great ideas must often be transmitted. It might therefore be easy to forget she began her thinking life as a dreamy young woman who wrote reams of poetry and floridly described herself as “overcome by fear of reality, the meaningless, baseless, empty fear whose blind gaze turns everything into nothing, the fear which is madness, joylessness, distress, annihilation.”

  But that is indeed what Hannah Arendt wrote to her professor, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, while home from university in the spring of 1925. They were sleeping together, an affair of great intensity and, as it turned out, historical consequence for both of them. When she wrote this autobiographical document, voiced in the “protective third person,” the affair was barely a year old. She called it “Die Schatten,” or “The Shadows,” a title plainly meant to signal depression. In her early twenties, Hannah Arendt was really very concerned that she might never amount to anything:

  More likely she will continue to pursue her life in idle experiments and a curiosity without rights or foundation, until finally the long and eagerly awaited end takes her unawares, putting an arbitrary stop to her useless activity.

  The pointlessness of life and the abruptness of ends were things that came up a lot in Arendt’s life—much as they had in West’s and Parker’s. Arendt was born to a bourgeois intellectual family in the Prussian city of Königsberg, her mother a strong-willed homemaker with a talent for the piano and her father an electrical engineer who also considered himself an amateur scholar of the Greeks and Romans, keeping his nose buried in books.

  Arendt did not know her father very long. Paul Arendt had contracted syphilis as a young man, before he married. By the time his daughter was three his condition was deteriorating rapidly. The details of his descent are awful: He’d collapse on family walks in the park, overcome by the ataxia associated with late-stage syphilis. By the time Arendt was five, he had to be institutionalized. He would die about two years later, in 1913, after growing so ill he no longer recognized his daughter when she visited. After he died, Arendt rarely spoke of him. The biographer Elisabeth Young-Bruehl wrote that Arendt told friends her memories of her father’s illness were limited to the sound of her mother playing piano, which had soothed her ailing father at night.

  Arendt’s mother simply had to get on with things. She would be remarried when Arendt was a teenager, to an established businessman. Materially, life was as good as it could be for a widowed Jewish woman and her daughter living in post–World War I Germany. The country was careening through its Weimar period, the era of severe inflation, artistic experimentation, and Hitler’s rise to power. But life at home was not difficult. Arendt always insisted her mother protected her from any anti-Semitism she encountered. If anti-Semitic remarks were ever made in the classroom, the young Arendt came home and told her mother. Martha Arendt would write the teachers a scolding letter, and the problem would cease. No doubt this explained why Arendt never believed that anti-Semitism was, as she put it in Origins of Totalitarianism, “eternal.”

  Notwithstanding what she’d report to Heidegger in “The Shadows,” to others the young Arendt was already relentlessly self-confident. She smart-mouthed teachers at school, because she could learn as much studying at home as she could under their tutelage, and it pleased her to let them know it. Once, insulted by one of her teacher’s remarks—the content of which is lost to history—she organized a boycott against him and got herself expelled. She ended up largely having to tutor herself through her qualifying exams for university.

  In her late adolescence, Arendt got interested in philosophy and specifically in the writings of the ruminative Danish existentialist Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard was one of the first great articulators of our concept of angst, of the sense that something is profoundly off-kilter with oneself and with the world. Arendt, in any event, picked up on it. It was during this period that she wrote a lot of poems, bad ones, the proof of a deeply romantic heart in someone who would later be accused of being too cold, too logical, by those who didn’t read her carefully:

  Ah, death is in life, I know, I know.

  So let me, floating days, give you my hand.

  You will not lose me. As a sign I leave behind,

  For you, this page and the flame.

  Hearing from an ex-boyfriend about the brilliant lectures given by a Professor Heidegger at the University of Marburg, Arendt enrolled there too, promptly signing up for Heidegger’s class. It was 1924. She was eighteen. Heidegger was thirty-five, and married, with two sons.

  It is difficult to do credit to Heidegger’s complex philosophical ideas in short order, but his approach to philosophy was marked by his shaking off of prior thinkers’ devotion to cold, hard logic. He was a man who thought, as Daniel Maier-Katkin once wrote, that “human experience and understanding both lie closer to the realm of feeling and mood that inheres in poetry (an idea with strong appeal to Arendt).” Heidegger took that attitude right into his pedagogical approach. By everyone’s account, his lectures were performances, soliloquies designed for more than the straight delivery of information. Of the talk around campus, Arendt would later write:

  The rumor about Heidegger put it quite simply: Thinking has come to life again; the cultural treasures of the past, believed to be dead, are being made to speak, in the course of which it turns out that they propose things altogether different from the familiar, worn-out trivialities they had been presumed to say. There exists a teacher; one can perhaps learn to think.

  After she spent several months learning to think, Heidegger approached Arendt after class one day in February 1925. He asked what she had been reading. She told him. Her answers were apparently so charming they elicited an immediate love note: “I will never be able to call you mine, but from now on you will belong in my life, and it shall grow with you.” It began there.

  Arendt and Heidegger often couched their affair in the abstract, as was to be expected of those who trafficked all their lives in ideas. Their manner of writing about loving each other lent them not just high drama, but the appearance of a kind of high-mindedness. Unlike the love letters West and Wells exchanged, theirs included little baby talk, no pet names. Instead, Heidegger, whose side of the correspondence was the only one that survived, would write things like:

  The demonic struck me. The silent prayer of your beloved hands and your shining brow enveloped it in womanly transfiguration. Nothing like it has ever happened to me.

  Womanly transfiguration notwithstanding, the demon was fickle. Just three months after the affair began, Heidegger backed off. Suddenly his tone in letters was remote. He pleads the demands of his work. He also makes florid claims of future commitment at a time when he can return his attentions to the world. In short, he behaved like any man who’d realized he’d made a mistake with a woman much his junior, but who in his guilt still didn’t want to foreclose the possibility of future sex.

  To be fair to Heidegger, he wasn’t exactly lying. In a small shed his wife had built for him on their country estat
e, he was indeed toiling away at what would become his breakthrough masterwork, Being and Time. But when he brushed off Arendt, he was two years from the end of the project, and still planned to teach that fall. In any event, the result was that Arendt spent the summer alone.

  When both teacher and student returned to Marburg in the fall of 1925, Heidegger kept avoiding Arendt. He had started to outright stand her up by the spring of 1926. Frustrated, Arendt then began the long process—it would last all her life—of giving Heidegger up. She left Marburg. She began to study with a different philosopher, Karl Jaspers. She did keep speaking to Heidegger, but she could mostly reach him only by letter, sending him mournful missives. There would be brief assignations in small-town train stations, but nothing that sustained itself beyond the time allotted for the visit.

  Brief and unsatisfying though it clearly was, the affair would be a signature event in both lives. Heidegger’s influence on Arendt was obviously formative, and in that sense it was enormous. But she took something more like inspiration than marching orders from him, carving her own path in the subject matter and scope of her work. He stayed in philosophy; she moved on to political theory. He stayed in Germany; she left. By the time they finally met again after World War II, she was on the verge of becoming a famous thinker in her own right, and the ideas that had made her reputation, particularly those concerning Germany’s actions in World War II, were developed outside his comment or control.

  Their experiences of Germany could not, in any event, have been more starkly different. Not long after his affair with Arendt ended, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. There have been many subsequent debates about how sincere Heidegger could possibly have been about this affiliation, but he undeniably had some amount of sympathy for the movement. The romanticism of the Nazi vision of the world—one in which races were locked in combat, in which good resided in the Volk—aligned, catastrophically, with his.

  He didn’t just quietly accept the Nazis; he actively worked with them. Almost as soon as he joined the party, Heidegger began leading an effort to remove Jews from the universities, even signing the letter that removed his own mentor, Edmund Husserl, from the ranks of the professorship. (For this, Arendt would call Heidegger a “potential murderer.”) This made him a leading figure of what the Nazis called the Gleichschaltung, sometimes translated as “collaboration,” the process by which most Germans, be they members of civic organizations or intellectuals, were brought in line with Nazi priorities.

  Later, speaking of the Gleichschaltung abstractly, Arendt simply said, “The problem, the personal problem, was not what our enemies did but what our friends did.” The depth of her relationship with Heidegger did not become public knowledge until after her death. But she must have been thinking of him. Under Karl Jaspers at the University of Heidelberg, Arendt wrote a dissertation titled Love and Saint Augustine. It may have been another sign of her frustration with Heidegger that what interested her there was not romantic love but neighborly love. She finished this dense and challenging piece of work in early 1929. It was a few months before the Wall Street stock market crashed, setting off the Great Depression and destabilizing the loans that had been holding Germany to the Treaty of Versailles. Hitler would earn his popularity from the spoils of economic disaster, but just then—the moment Arendt got her doctorate—he was not yet fully ascendant.

  Arendt was, by then, living in Berlin. The city was full of young graduates trying to figure out what to do with themselves in a country that was still reeling from what many considered the insult of the Treaty of Versailles. Like everyone else in Weimar, Arendt went to the glittering parties that belied the glum mood of the time. One fateful gathering was held at the Museum of Ethnology in Berlin. It was a leftist fund-raiser in the form of a masquerade ball. Arendt was dressed as an “Arab harem girl.” One longs for a description of what such a costume might have looked like in 1929, but evidently it did the trick. She saw a classmate with whom she’d long ago lost touch, a man named Gunther Stern. They reconnected.

  He seduced her, he later wrote in a memoir, by telling her that “loving is that act by which something a posteriori—the by-chance-encountered other—is transformed into an a priori of one’s own life.” For some other woman, this might have seemed pretentious. For Arendt, it was apparent proof that their connection could be intellectual as well as emotional. By September she’d marry Stern. Still, when she wrote to Heidegger to announce the marriage, it was in the key of defeat. She was settling, she reassured Heidegger, for the comfort, however imperfect, of a home:

  Do not forget how much and how deeply I know that our love has become the blessing of my life. This knowledge cannot be shaken, not even today.

  Heidegger hadn’t quite made his Nazi leanings public when she wrote that letter.

  The comfort of marriage did prove useful. It gave Arendt the space to work more intensely on a new project. It was a book that did not exactly take her inner life as its subject. Yet it was the closest she’d ever come to writing a memoir. A friend, finding the eighteenth-century letters and diaries of a Jewish salonnière at a rare bookseller’s, had passed them on to Arendt. The life of Rahel Varnhagen soon became an obsession for Arendt. She began work on a biography, a book that would ultimately become half a statement of personal philosophy and half an homage to a woman she considered a role model. In this, she was nearly unique among thinking women of her era. Most were afraid to admit any clear debt to women.

  Varnhagen was born in Berlin in 1771, the daughter of a prosperous merchant. Though she did not have much of a formal education, Varnhagen was interested in ideas from the time she was very young. As an adult she surrounded herself with the great artists and thinkers of her era, mostly the German romantics. Her salon made her a key figure in German intellectual history. Part of what drew Arendt to Varnhagen so passionately was that like her, Varnhagen was Jewish and deeply assimilated. But Varnhagen was somewhat ambivalent about being Jewish. In light of that, Arendt found Varnhagen’s alleged deathbed words, recorded by her husband, unforgettable:

  The thing which all my life seemed to me the greatest shame, which was the misery and misfortune of my life— having been born a Jewess—this I should on no account now wish to have missed.

  Arendt was so affected by that sentence she began her own book with it. The project had a mediumistic quality almost from the beginning. Arendt freely called Varnhagen her “best friend.” Her approach to the book, she wrote when she was finally able to publish it some twenty-five years later in 1958, was “an angle unusual in biographical literature.” In fact, Arendt described her aims as almost metaphysical:

  It was never my intention to write a book about Rahel; about her personality, which might lend itself to various interpretations according to the psychological standards and categories that the author introduces from the outside … What interested me solely was to narrate the story of Rahel’s life as she herself might have told it.

  The claim to be able to tell Varnhagen’s story “as she herself might have told it” is, as the Arendt scholar Seyla Benhabib once put it, “astonishing.” You can spend a whole life in someone’s archives, and yet find it impossible to get a full grasp of her inner life. Arendt must have known this and even experienced it as she tried to write Rahel’s life from her perspective. For one thing, it’s simply impossible to speak in the voice of someone who has been dead for a century or more. But the emotional attraction she felt to Varnhagen’s life eclipsed the rational considerations. She had found a mistress she wanted to apprentice herself to, and writing the book was a way of doing it.

  What Arendt found most intriguing about Varnhagen was that Varnhagen had found a way to make being different a kind of boon. This Arendt connected particularly to Varnhagen’s identity as a Jew. Varnhagen’s husband had tried to transcend his Jewishness by acquiring more and more social status. For Varnhagen, this had never worked. She could not, she thought, erase the mark. So she embraced it. If her Jewishness had set Varnh
agen apart from German society, Arendt concluded, it had also given her a certain individuality of perspective that ultimately proved to have its own kind of value. Seeing things differently was not just a matter of perspective; sometimes to see things differently was to see them more clearly.

  Varnhagen, Arendt tells us, was thus a kind of “pariah.” She didn’t mean this in the negative sense we now attach to it. That gets clearer when in her later work Arendt salts the term with an adjective: “conscious pariah.” A conscious pariah knows she is different, and knows she may never, at least in the eyes of others, properly escape it. But she is also aware of what her individuality gives her. Among those things is an instinctual sort of empathy, a sensitivity to the suffering of others that comes from having known it yourself:

  This sensitivity is a morbid exaggeration of the dignity of every human being, a passionate comprehension unknown to the privileged. It is this passionate empathy which constitutes the humaneness of the pariah. In a society based upon privilege, pride of birth and arrogance of title, the pariah instinctively discovers human dignity in general long before reason has made it the foundation of morality.

  While Arendt mostly limited her use of the term “pariah” to apply to the distinction of Jewishness, she hinted that she knew there was a wider application for the model. It seems no accident that Arendt chose a woman as a role model for the pariah here, though Arendt would have denied it made much difference. She would probably have said that Varnhagen’s status as a Jew was far stronger a connection than the woman thing. Yet a lot of what Arendt discovered about Varnhagen could extend by analogy, and on some level she knew it. In an introduction she penned when she finally published her life of Varnhagen in the 1950s, she wrote: