I love history and political science but couldn't quite make my way through this one. Make sure you have the option of returning this one if you buy it.

I started reading Origins of Totalitarianism as a high-school drop-out dish-washer in a Pizza Hut from roughly when the old USSR invaded Afghanistan to the now-catastrophic Reagan election.

As they clear away the rubble in New York I'm looking for my old copy, to see what Arendt said about the pan-Arab movements (not to mention the pan-slav and pan-germanic movements) in the first part. And to recall what she said about the consequences introduced by covert 'secret agency.' Ironically she illustrates her point with the example of T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia).

As I hear about Osama bin Laden's vision of a restored Caliphate I struggle to recall her insights into the problems of statehood.

And all this as prelude to the stark horrors of totalitarian government and the nature of the gulag and concentration camp.

After all this time so much remains clear. I wonder how much I missed. So now, a long-ago college graduate contemplating grad school, I find I must read Arendt again. If I can't find it in my old book collection I'll have to seek a copy here.

Hannah Arendt's _The Origins of Totalitarianism_ is a book that takes a hard look at two rival totalitarian movements in the twentieth century, Soviet Communism and Nazism, and traces their historical roots. The book is divided into three volumes focusing on Antisemitism, Imperialism, and Totalitarianism. The first of these volumes is concerned with the historical origins of Antisemitism. Arendt examines some of the ways historians have dealt with the historical roots of Antisemitism. For example, some historians have argued based on a "scapegoat theory" that the Jews were used as an innocent scapegoat for the world's ills. Arendt concludes that such approaches are flawed because they fail to take into account the full historical situation of the Jews. Arendt explores the rise of Antisemitism in the birth of the nation-state, the emancipation of the Jews, the rise of the Jewish financiers, the roles of Jews within society, and the infamous Dreyfus affair. Of particular interest here is the role of conpiracy theories concerning such individuals as Benjamin Disraeli or the infamous forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The idea that the Jews constitute a race or are members of secret societies or clubs played an important role in the historical development of Antisemitism. The second of the volumes in this book is concerned with the rise of Imperialism. Here, a discussion of racism and racial thinking is examined involving such racial theorists as Count Arthur de Gobineau and various forms of Social Darwinism. The role of the Boers in South Africa is looked at and a thorough examination of the lives of such individuals as Cecil Rhodes, who called for the creation of a secret society of aristocratic Nordic elite, is made. The great Pan Movements, Pan-Slavism, Pan-Germanism, and the Pan-Arabism of T. E. Lawrence are dealt with and their subsequent roles in the creation of the totalitarian states is explored. The final volume of this book is concerned with Totalitarianism proper. Here, the role of propaganda and the secret police, as well as terror and the concentration camps are dealt with in their place in Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. Arendt explores each of these issues and shows why they are so particularly disturbing. Arendt contends that totalitarianism sought to annihilate the nature of man completely. Repression and terror abound within the totalitarian state and freedom is virtually nonexistent. Written during the Cold War period and just after the Second World War, this book takes an important look into the minds of such totalitarian leaders as Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin. Their movements of Nazism and Soviet Communism continue to haunt the modern world even though they have been largely extinguished. The book is important today not only for historical reasons, but also because it gives a unique view of the world within a totalitarian society and the unique political danger that such totalitarian movements and institutions causes for the modern world.

I have to write a paper on this book, and there are no customer reviews for it? Bleh, that is not very helpful at all. I'm disappointed in all of you.

The guy/girl who wrote the 'I'm doing an essay...' review needs a slap

This book is yet another deep, original and controversial contribution of Hannah Arendt to twentieth century political theory. In this book, Arendt analyzes the phenomenon of revolution by focusing almost exclusively on the great XVIIIth century revolutions, the American and the French. Arendt's deep insights allow her to compare, both on a theoretical and a practical level, the similarities and differences between the two and on how and why the American Revolution allowed the foundation of freedom while the French failed miserably in this attempt almost from the beginning. The great themes in this book are the social question (necessity) in its relation to politics (the realm of freedom) and the ever-present distinction between liberation and freedom properly speaking. Thus, constitutions and their significance, the problem of secular law in relation to its need for an Absolute with which to provide a foundation for it, the problem of hypocrisy and Robespierre's Terror, and insightful interpretations of some of the Founding Fathers' political thought (though in my opinion a bit too far reaching in her inferences thereof), are all issues with which she deals with in this book and which are rounded up in a great closing chapter. Deep, powerful, perceptive, intense: like most of Arendt's writings, a must read for anyone interested in political thought and theory.

I am no philosopher, but have read the works of the three women who are the subjects of the book.
I was hoping to put the three lives into the context of the intellectual and social world they lived in, and how and why they made their individual decisions on philosophy, religion, and their approach to the questions posed by both Nazism and the feminist movement.
But little detail is given about the intellectual life. We are told the names of their mentors: but not any details of what these mentors taught (a major flaw for the non philosophy student who is not familiar with Heddiger etc.).
At the same time, except for some fine passages on Simone Weil, there is little detail on the inner lives of the women: we see only the outline of their parallel lives, often mixed together in a confusing manner. Arendt's affair with her professor, a subject recently treated in detail in a recent Atlantic magazine article, is given one sentence. Stein converts, with no more detail on her inner life than one could read in a blurb in the Catholic encyclopedia.
In summary, the author fails to provide details for the novice to understand the lives of these women, but does not go into sufficient depth for a philosophy student to learn anything new.
However, the passages on Simone Weil are an exception to my criticism. I did learn a lot about both her writings and why she thought and wrote her famous letters.

This is not an easy book. It is a glance into the lives of 3 women, Hanna Arendt, Simone Weil, and Edith Stein, each of Jewish descent and, in particular, at the response each one made to Nazism. There is a review of each woman's life and her career. A lot of space is given to the education of these women, which is especially interesting since each studied under some of the biggest names in philosophy in the 20th century. It is not easy to follow, however, unless you have some basic knowledge of Heidegger, Jaspers, Alain, Husserl. But it is still interesting. Each of these women chose a different response (not just to nazism, but to the world, actually). Arendt became strongly Zionist, and an author of wonderful books; Simone Weil, strangely at odds with her heritage, but whose essays are marvels of clarity, chose a strange path of starvation (whatever the philosophical underpinnings, one wonders about anorexia); Edith Stein converted to Catholicism and became a Carmelite nun, devoting her life to prayer (though still writing). Each of these responses is fascinating in its own right. I highly recommend this difficult, but rewarding book.

Men in Dark Times is a collection of biographical essays Arendt wrote over a period of 15 years (1955-1968), all of which were published elsewhere, and collected here under this title. She has choosen to collct her portraits of cultural and political figures who worked and were caught up in world affairs in the first half of the twentieth-century, figures such as Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Jaspers, Isak Dinesen, Walter Benjamin, and Bertolt Brecht. The oppening essay, "On Humanity in Dark Times: Thoughts about Lessing," focuses on the thought of the eighteenth-century German philosopher, and she uses his thoughts on friendship, on the political and civic aspects of friendship, the ways in which philosophical and political works are formed through civic friendship, to tie all of the personae discussed in the book together. She sees them all as struggling to produce in an era racked by political upheavel. As always, she writes with a highly astute critical eye and a sharp tongue. It is one of her more polemical works, and is sure to make one re-evaulate how we look not only at the lives and works of those she tells us about, but also about ourselves.

Intertwining Identities

Hannah Arendt's Rachel Varnhagen: The Life of a Jewess is the biography of Varnhagen that simultaneously attempts to define Rahel Varnhagen's gender and national identity as a resident in early 19th century Germany in Varnhagen's own terms, while Arendt refines her political theory. Rachel Varnhagen is portrayed throughout the book as a complex character; a Jewish woman in a German society at the dawn and immediate following years of the Napoleonic Revolution. Arendt is an accomplished political-philosopher who despised being called a philosopher. Arendt's rise to academic prominence came when she wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem; Eichmann was where she coined the phrase "banality of evil" in reference to the famous trial of the Nazi Adolph Eichmann. Arendt was on assignment in Jerusalem for the Eichmann trial as a reporter for Harper's because she could not attain a university teaching position. Arendt had not successfully completed the monograph that was to be her Ph.D. dissertation. During the National Socialist ascension to power in 1933 Arendt was forced into exile, therefore hindering the completion of the biography of Varnhagen and her doctoral dissertation.

Arendt studied under Karl Jaspers and Martin Heidegger the later of which she had an affair. She is most known in political philosophy circles for her study of totalitarian regimes in Origins of Totalitarianism. Arendt collected the published and unpublished letters of the famous salon, bourgeoisie-oriented Varnhagen to map Varnhagen's identity through the inner voice she reveals in her letters. Through reading the letters it is evident that Varnhagen is practically apolitical, but she struggles with her German-Jewish identity and her life as a woman. Arendt explores the complexities of this dynamic through attempting to slip into Varnhagen and convey to the reader Varnhagen's existence. While in the process of amalgamating the various stories of Varnhagen, Arendt also devises her political theory.

Varhagen was at the center of an aristocratic salon where literature and culture were often discussed and she was viewed as a Jewish exception to anti-Semitism. It was believed at the beginning of the nineteenth century that all anti-Semites had their exceptional Jew, and for the many attendees of Varnhagen's salon it was Rahel. In adding her political theory into the construction of Varnhagen's biography Arendt spares Varnhagen no sympathy, often thinking that these very exceptions furthered the anti-Semitic cause.

In essence what Arendt has done is constructed a philosophical-psychological biography delving into the subject's mind, breaking the barrier between subject and observer by using the letters as a background to reconstruct the thoughts of Varnhagen. Varnhagen wrote her letters as a narrative, waiting and watching for life to unfold, unwilling to participate in introspection. Fearing that contemplation of the past might lead to her rejecting her identity and denial of her self-asserted uniqueness.

Varnhagen befriended many of the most prominent novelists and poets; her salon suggested a milieu of sophistication. However, Varnhagen's letters allowed Arendt intense introspection on the feeling of being a Jew in a largely anti-Semitic culture and being a woman in a misogynist culture. Arendt's political theory is never more evident then when she wears the skin of Varnhagen and talks about the Jewish question. Arendt believes that the common Jew attempted to escape their Jewishness (Varnhagen was baptized) only to allow other Jews to flounder in their Jewishness; each individual sought to break from the community at the cost of leaving the others to be victims of virulent anti-Semitism. Arendt is at her sharpest when she philosophizes on the impact of the Napoleonic Revolution on Jews, "it would be incomparably more difficult to escape from a reformed Judaism than from orthodox Judaism; that association for the assimilation of the Jews could lead ultimately to nothing but the preservation of Judaism in a form more suited to the times (179)."

In the preface to the book Arendt says, "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 outside; nor about her position in Romanticism and the effect of the Goethe culture in Berlin, of which she was actually the originator; nor about the significance of her salon for the social history of the period; nor about her ideas and her "weltanschauung," in so far as these can be constructed from her letters. What interests me solely was to narrate the story of Rahel's life as she herself might have told it. (81)

Rahel believed she let life happen to her and simply observed and recorded her situations. She was, "letting life rain upon her." She was an prophetic individual that simply aspired to convey what happened to her as destiny. But in this role as intermediary recorder of the past she observed and her unknown, but unconscionable future destiny she thought she was an exception; one that must succumb to destiny, but not attempt to influence it. An individual that was so shortsighted that she failed to consider the fact that the destiny that awaited her, the history that was being revealed and shaped her life was less important than her own life. She was romanticized by contemplation of the past and its unraveling into the future of which she only thought she was a part. Varnhagen was a paradox; waiting like everyone else for history and life to happen but yet she continued to assert her uniqueness. Varnhagen attempts to solve the paradox by waiting for history to unveil, but not discover who she was-only what she could be. In the physical world Varnhagen could not deny her Jewishness, but she aspired to be malleable, devoid of shape and identity, traveling on the waves of history as they splashed on the shores of her continuously unfolding destiny. Arendt best summarizes Varnhagen by saying, "she wished to stand outside reality, to merely take pleasure in the real, to provide the soil for the history and the destinies of many people without having any ground of her own to stand on (145)."

I read this book because I had heard the name "Norman Podhoretz" bruited about in the odd book review here and there. He is, or at any rate was, the editor of a journal called "Commentary", which I have only ever heard of in the context of the Woody Allen joke: "I heard that 'Commentary' and 'Dissent' have merged, and now they're called 'Dysentery'". It seems that the author once knew some people who are now way more famous than him, and he wants to tell us all about how he believes they went wrong.

It is not easy for a non-American reader to care more than two shakes of a lamb's tail about what this apparently well-known person thinks. He starts the book with what he obviously regards as a priceless witticism ("If I want to drop names, I just list my ex-friends"). If I had fallen out with the likes of Lillian Hellmann, Norman Mailer and Allen Ginsberg, I would be inclined to think that there was something wrong with me, but... He goes on to quote some not-terribly-interesting gossip about various writers, and seems to feel that he has said something extraordinarily important and significant by doing so. Who is this guy? What, exactly, is the sum total of his contribution to human joyfulness? I've never heard of him, outside the context of the odd book review (of somebody else's work), and I still don't understand why a presumably solvent publisher sees fit to print his dull grumbling about people who are obviously more talented than him.

What is this book for? I am as much a fan of literary chat as the next person, but this book is almost entirely about the private whinges of somebody I've never heard of. It doesn't tell me anything about American cultural life, except that the author is not interested in the subject. He's not even funny. Can somebody explain how this thing got published?

The book is interesting in that it deals with famous members of mid-century intelligencia, but it also explores the nuances of political thought happening among members of the left in that time period. Also interesting is the fact that Podhoretz had his falling out with people sometimes for reasons other than his right-wing conversion in the 1970s and 1980s.

The book is quite good at explaining the subtle differences in opinion among left-wing American intellectuals of the time. Almost everyone had trifled with Communism or fellow travelerism, but out of that start grew many different points of view that Norman and his Ex-Friends would argue about again and again. Being philosophical writers, they would tend to explore many different avenues from one another. It's a wonder that any two writers remain life-long friends.

I grew less interested in these characters as the book progressed though. The pattern gave me the "heard it once, heard it a thousand times" feeling. By Hannah Arendt, I was tired from a long journey. But not because Mr. Podhoretz isn't a fine writer, he most certainly is. Only, I'll be ready for another subject matter from him next time around.

Norman Podhoretz's Ex-Friends is a fascinating look into the Culture Wars that have rumbled across our intellectual landscape for the past 50 or 60 years. Podhoretz has been in the trenches throughout, though his alliances changed radically as he came to see, with more and more acuity, the destructiveness of leftist thought. He reveals a great deal about the characters he called friends--and then ex-friends--as he made his own journey from the left to the right. "Rigid ideologue" he may be, but only someone reading this book with the "left side" of his brain would claim that the subjects of his study are enlightened and tolerant. How else to explain the vitriolic attacks on Podhoretz for having honest questions about the motives and tactics of the liberal establishment? Is Norman Podhoretz a "paranoid little bigot" as one (no doubt open minded) reviewer claims? Only if love of country and the desire to see true democracy flourish are malignant ideas. As it stands, Ex-Friends is a brilliant expose of the lunacy of the left, an often thinly veiled totalitarianism passing itself off as progressivism. (The chapters on Ginsberg and Mailer are sufficient to illustrate this point.) Podhoretz's contribution to this discussion is invaluable, and only a recalcitrant liberal would call it "amusing garbage." I only hope, Mr. Podhoretz, that there is more where this came from.

Wolin appears to be a decent philospher and researcher, but
he needs to learn how to write. Herky jerky style and skewed syntax make this one an almost impossible read. Sorry folks, but
I have to rate this one as unintelligable garble.

You have to give Wolin credit for choosing a very deserving topic, and the relationship of Heidegger to his many disciples, and especially his Jewish disciples, is worthy of a big fat book. This is not that book. First, he leaves out Leo Strauss, arguably the most interesting case among Heidegger's Jewish students, and the one with the most critical stance towards his teacher. Second, Wolin's ignores the basic fact that the antimodern views of "Heidegger's children" were shared by many in Weimar Germany who never studied with Heidegger. Marcuse, Arendt, etc. were more children of their time and place than of Heidegger.

Wolin also attributes to Heidegger an antimodernism that his philosophy itself dismantles. The real story of Heidegger's Nazism is not how much his philosophy accomodated Nazism but how little mind the opportunistic philosopher paid his own philosophy when the party called. Wolin gives Heidegger more credit for being principled than he deserves. Wolin also pays too much attention to deciphering Heidegger's opinions from his biography and too little time actually reading Heidegger. In fact, at no point in the book does Wolin betray ever having read Being and Time.

Let us take one example of Wolin's woeful prosecutorial method. He refers to some pamphlets that Heidegger wrote as a student for a Catholic, antimodern publisher. In the pamphlets, Wolin reports, Heidegger valorizes reason and strict rationality above the modern devotion to the self, an unsurprising argument coming from a seminary student. Wolin then draws a straight line from that antimodern Catholic upbringing to Heidegger's later devotion for the Fuhrer. This is perhaps the first time that Thomas Aquinas has ever being accused of encouraging Nazism.

One of the most interesting things about Heidegger's students is that they reached such a broad audience in America. Marcuse and friends were the stars of a worldwide youth movement despite having thick German accents. The commanded such a large audience in part because they were so much more impressive than their colleagues. Wolin does not give sufficient weight to the possibility that Heidegger's students may have learned something worthwhile from their teacher. Wolin is too busy contorting himself into fits of indignant censure.

Considering the current emphasis on Martin Heidegger and his thought during the last decade, it is more than a bit surprising this book wasn't written sooner. Besides being one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, Heidegger was also a university professor, and quite a charismatic one at that. Living and teaching in Weimar Germany, it is not surprising, then, that many of his best students were Jews. And if we were to, say, pick a 'cream-of-the-crop' among those Jews, the names of Hannah Arendt, Karl Lowith, Hans Jonas and Herbert Marcuse would easily spring to mind.

It is interesting to note that none of the above were practising Jews; rather they saw themselves as assimilated and cosmopolitan in outlook. Ironically it would be their teacher, one of the greatest existentialist philosophers, who drove home to them the inauthenticity of their position when he dedicated himself to National Socialism. By abandoning them he turned his back on them and forced them to face their Jewishness, no longer as a metaphysical question, but in the harsh light of ontological reality, as an important component of their social being. Despite religious assimilation, they were still outcasts, only this time by basis of their racial identity - their very being.

Though abandoned by their mentor, each of Heidegger's students would go on to make a mark in the field of philosophy. In the chapters concerning their careers Wolin takes the time to carefully not their contribution to phliosophy and their attachments to their former teacher. Each discourse is concise and to the point, often giving the reader important insights into the relationship between student and teacher in ways not directly observable. With Arendt, this is easy due to the mass of scholarship, some excellent, some on the level of a supermarket tabloid. With a thinker such as Jonas, whose public career is not so well known, such insights are most welcome. I remember Jonas as a teacher and remember quite well his relationship with Heidegger. Although he would criticize his mentor in the strongest possible terms, when traveling to Europe he would still be careful to make the pilgrimage to the Black Forest to pay homage to the old man. Jonas made his mark both as an expert on Gnostic philosophy and as a philosopher of the environment, his works helping to build the basis of Germany's Green Party.

Lowith developed a love-hate relationship with his former teacher, becoming one of Heidegger's most insightful critics, and yet refusing to pull the trigger. One should not stop reading Heidegger; but one should refrain from reading him so naively. Perheps it was Heidegger's own latent, and naive, romanticism that led him from a critique of nihilism into the arms of totalitarian philosophy.

Marcuse is the strrangest case yet, if we view he and his teacher merely from the outside. It would appear Marcuse made the strongest reaction of all to his former teacher, by Msarcuse incorporated more of his teacher's thought into his own than any of the others. Compare Marcuse's "One Dimensional Man" with Heidegger's "Letter on Technology." Marcuse's retreat into the pseudo-rationalism of Marx to escape the demons of nihilism strangely mirrors Heidegger's own retreat into National Socialism for the same reason. Taking Spengler at his word, Marcuse accepted the decline and retreated into a new world order of sorts while Heidegger fought Spengler's prognosis by adopting the standards of what he saw as the defence of civilization in the Swatstika.

Wolin wraps all this into 269 tightly constructed pages. Not a wasted word or thought. In other words, an excellent and entertaining introduction into a world of thought not usually considered. Highly recommended.

The story of Arendt and Heidigger's love affair is an interesting one, and this book is interesting because it tells that story, but for no other reason. The author seems to have chosen this subject becuase she had access to the material in the archive, and not because she had anything to say about the subject. It left me feeling that, aside from a a few gossipy details, I knew no more about either person than before. Not only do Arendt and Heidigger remain elusive, Ettinger does not even seem to want to go after them! Their relationship is primerily of interest becuase of what they thought and wrote: Ettinger presents the few enough facts about their relationship in a readable style, but has no grasp of the thought of either one.

I find it impossible to agree with reviewer quoted on the back of the jacket, that this is "a most valuble book, an important record". It isn't: it's an evening's light reading. I can imagine a biographer of either figure (or a playwright or novelist, for that matter), immersed and *interested* in their work, who will really show us why their relartionship was important. (And why was a book that must of necessity include German names and words set in a typeface without umlauts? Bizarre!)

The German tradition in philosophy has been so notoriously wrong about the nature of women so often that it is only fair that I, who usually appears as nobody in the world of philosophy as often as I am wrongly genedered in any attempt to belong to the world of women, have to read this book occasionally to remind myself how unfair this whole question must be in any context. That philosophy, as a love of wisdom, might be compared to a love of women, as the kind of passion that Mozart might attempt to display in operatic splendor in "Don Giovanni" (I think this is the most reasonable opera that I have ever heard) faces grave danger in a book in which the man who has embraced most totally the greatness of philosophy (who but Heidegger might want this distinction?), is slammed for having an unreasonable love life. For all I know, this might have been the story of a philosopher who might as well have thought that all was fair in love and war, but it is really the story of the woman. The perfection in this book, for me, was the idea that Heidegger might have been offended when Arendt triumphantly returned to Germany as the author of a book on totalitarianism in which the style of the Nazi regime, which Heidegger supported in certain official capacities, was treated like communism under Stalin, the kind of enemy of freedom that modern people ought to be able to understand in a negative light much better than anything positive that I could say at this point. I doubt if I would have had much interest in Hannah Arendt, if not for this book. It made me wish that I could be that smart.

Just to be fair: The book is not exhaustive but nor is it "tabloid" as one reviewer put it. And it is certainly not "soft porn". There is nothing "lurid" in these pages. The writing is, as the more fair-minded reviewer suggested, restrained in a respectful way, to all parties concerned.
This brief account does not set out to describe the impact the affair had on the two individuals' respective work. For anyone to demand such an account seems to me totally unreasonable: That a private passion of the heart always impacts one's intellectual work is by no means a given.
What this book shows you, regardless of the subjective tinge the author may have imposed on the characters in question, is the mystery of the workings of the heart. Ettinger sketches a portrait of a woman in love but not just any woman, but a woman of exceptional intelligence, expansive soul, and loyalty -- to her own ideals of friendship. Cloying speculations concerning the psychological causes -- childhood traumas, etc -- that may have led these two individuals to live and love the way they did are left out and the book is the more elegant and tactful for it.
To call Arendt a naif for the way she allowed herself to be "abused over and over again" would be to admit to total lack of understanding of the very nature of love. Arendt shows over and over her desire, need, psychosis -- choose your favorite term -- to forgive a man who in many ways was unforgiveable. Love does that.
In this double portrait of two people who happened to be academic thinkers, some 50 years is rendered as if it were a day. Heidegger comes off here as a man not above the sort of pettiness and calculation you and I lapse into occasionally, while Arendt is portrayed, without forcing any evidence to this purpose, as the kind of woman who could leave behind a legacy of not only of thinking but also of loving in the grand style. Great and important as Heidegger may be in the history of western philosophy, he may, alas, very well have been one of those gnomish professors we've all come across in our lives: brilliant and thus all the more annoying when they put their intelligence and intellect in the service of self-serving calculation. This book, written in clear prose and balance, confirms the disturbing (and disappointing) fact character and thought are not always equally winged.
Forget the names of the characters involved. Read it as a document of a love that would have made a great B&W movie as well, with the late Ingrid Bergman as Arendt, and Mickey Rooney as Heidegger.

This is a collection of essays from Arendt, a feminist and Zionist from the middle of the century. I am sure most political theorists love this kind of book, but for normal people the text is far too "scholarly". I could find nothing of a feminist nature in this book and little convicing of a Zionist nature. There are far more convincing books on both sets of thought than this.

What did Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger ever do to end up as the subjects of a poorly written example of the Roughly-He-Grabbed-Me school of typing?

That thought kept coming to mind as I slogged my way through this turgid tome - 304 pages that only seem like 800.

Based, according to the author, on a passage from Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's excellent biography of Arendt, the book covers Arendt's last meeting with Heidegger in 1975 and her reconciliation with Heidegger's wife Elfriede. Any resemblance with Young-Bruehl ends there as Clement remakes the Arendt-Heidegger love affair into something out of a soft-core romantic paperback. It still wouldn't be so bad if the writing didn't seem like a parody of a romantic paperback. Consider these passages:

"For it was obvious: Hannah loved Martin, as only Jewesses know how to love, with an ardor and determination . . . there were really no words to describe it."

Evidently.

"Hannah had a flash of fantasy: He was going to die right here, right now, and she would shout in Elfriede's face how Martin had enjoyed Hannah's body. Hannah shuddering under Martin's hand. Martin atop Hannah, his penetration, his pleasure. And hers, such as no other man had given her."

Wow. The thought of Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger making love is hard enough to even want to imagine. In the hands of a practitioner like Clement, however, it manages to reach the Olympic heights of sheer nausea.

If all that weren't enough, add a goodly amount of pop discussions of Heidegger's philosophy and you have a piece of writing awful enough to give Ed Wood, Jr. a real run for his money.

I have an idea of how the publisher can make money on the paperback edition: On the cover, have Fabio, as Martin Heidegger, ripping the bodice of a well-endowed comely dark haired Hannah Arendt, with the tag line, "Their love was anything but Platonic." Failing that, there's always the movie version. If it's to be true to the book, Jim Carrey should play Heidegger and Julie Kavner as Hannah Arendt with the vocal intonations of Marge Simpson. Altogether fitting in its own weird way.