Hannah and Martin Book

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.