Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Günther Stern, Günther Anders and the first marriage

What Heidegger says about Günther Stern in the letter to Hannah Arendt of Oct 18, 1925, makes it hard to believe that she later becomes Hannah Stern.  As she says in her letter of 1929, Heidegger might understand least of anyone.  The letter is undated, and it is not clear to me if it is before or after the wedding.

In the next letter in 1930 she is placing Stern beside Heidegger - one can imagine the "Heideggerian" prattle that she must have been listening to from his sycophant.

But in the 1929 letter, already with Stern, she is telling Heidegger that her love for her Martin will always be the love of her life.

Once divorced, Stern would later help her to escape from France to America with her new husband, the political activist, Heinrich Blücher.

Stern would later be known as Günther Anders and would continue to write on the themes from the Marburg lectures.

The first marriage surely shows what harm has been done to the young student by the predatory professor whose wife was so often absent from Marburg.  And yet Blücher goes on to establish some sort of friendship with Heidegger in the post-war years.  Or was he just making things bearable - normalizing the bizarre -refusing to be bourgeois, possessive, jealous or protective.  So it had not been exploitation of an impressionable young woman, alone in Marburg.  Or had he not read the letters?

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