Showing posts with label Three Women in Dark Times. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Three Women in Dark Times. Show all posts

Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Taking Arendt at her word

In Sylvie Courtine-Denamy's Three Women in Dark Times we find this troubling quote:
The scholars first put to one side by the Nazis as of relatively little use to them were old-fashioned nationalists like Heidegger
G.M.Goshgarian may have meant "such as Heidegger" but the text bears a reference in footnote 88 of the English version to Arendt, "The Image of Hell".

Nothing in this matches Hugo Ott's documentation of the facts: but then again, Arendt was not there to know.

What is at issue is not an "image". In 1946, Arendt is speaking as a journalist.  Having been briefly in Gurs Camp, she may have believed that she understood what a Vernichtungslager was: but she did not.

The Goshgarian translation dates from 2000, Cornel University Press, long after it was known that Heidegger was no "old-fashioned nationalist" blabbing at a Bavarian Stammtisch and hankering for the days of Bismarck.