Hannah And Martin

by Kate Fodor

Book by Kate Fodor

Genres: Plays, Drama, Contemporary

56 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2004

Reviews

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm in the middle of reading Ken Krimstein's comics biography, The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt, and stopped to re-read this acting edition of the brilliant play I saw at Chicago's Timeline Theatre in 2004 written by Kate Fodor focused on the complicated (and what relationship isn't complicated, but this one surely was) relationship between one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century, Martin Heidegger, author of Being and Time (that I read some of in the late eighties) and Poetry, Language and Thought (which I read and liked a lot also during this time) and Hannah Arendt, (an also great philosopher though she didn't like being called that), the author of The Origins of Totalitarianism, and The Human Condition, which were very important for me.

Fodor's play focuses on their relationship, which began at the University of Marlburg when she was 17 and he was a 35 year old professor, and continued in secret for several years. This was complicated because Heidegger supported the Nazi party for a time and Arendt was a Jew. The play includes brilliant exchanges between the two great thinkers where thought and language turn erotic. Heidegger was justifiably castigated for his Nazi sympathizing, though Arendt wrote a letter in defense of him at one point. The idea for the play seems to have begun with trying to understand how she could have defended him on any level in that letter. Love, damn it, is the answer, basically.

I now associate this play and this romantic obsession--this problematic love--with other stories of women in love with "complicated men" such as of the brilliant architect Frank Lloyd Wright, T.C. Boyle's The Women, or The Paris Wife by Paula Maclain about Hemingway and his first wife, Hadley Richardson. Love exists in these works as a mystery, rich at its best, tied up as it is with passion's relationship to the creative life, and fraught with betrayal and pain, at its worst.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

My first encounter with Martin Heidegger was in John Bannan's Philosophy of the Emotions class when I was a junior as an undergraduate. The next year, I would take Tom Sheehan for Contemporary European Philosophy, and read him more in-depthly. I like the personal stories that Tom would tell, like when he went to meet Heidegger and ask him about his affiliation with the Nazi party, but Heidegger would respond by telling Tom that he had come to Germany to talk about Artistotle. The way I understand it, all the attention about Heidegger's affiliation with the Nazi party first came when Victor Farias started writing about it. However, Farias wrote in Portuguese, so most people paid it little attention. Sheehan was well-versed in many languages, so he read it and started writing about it in English, thus drawing attention to the issue for people in the United States. He also gained quite a reputation as a Heidegger scholar, though I don't know if it were mainly for this or for other reasons.

Hannah and Martin was a play I saw with Renee-Engeln Maddox at the Timeline Theatre in Chicago in the fall of 2004. It's a play about the love affair of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, two famous philosophers (although Hannah Arendt would reject that title). Arendt did her undergraduate work with Heidegger at the University of Marburg, and they began a romantic relationship. This was complicated because Heidegger supported the Nazi party and Arendt was a jew. Eventually, Arnedt moved to Heidelberg, to do her graduate work with Karl Jaspers, a friend of Heidegger and influential philosophical/psychological figure as well. In the play, we see Jaspers chastising Heidegger. I really enjoyed the play a lot -- it had very witty dialogue, and the feelings of what I imagined would be expressed by the individuals really came through.