Goodnight, Frau Blucher!

From Mel Brooks, call your office by David P. Goldman.

But there’s nothing new about skanky Nazi-Jewish romance, in fact, nothing more distasteful than the decades-long affair between philosopher Martin Heidegger, an unrepentant Nazi and anti-Semite, and the secular Jewish philsosopher Hannah Arendt. Arendt made herself hated in the Jewish world by pooh-poohing Eichmann’s crimes in her famous New Yorker series on the Eichmann trial, as mere “mediocrity of evil.” The implication was that lofty minds like Heidegger’s couldn’t be implicated in such crimes.

 I always had the impression of Hannah Arendt as being a conservative philosopher in disgrace among other philosophers, even some conservative ones but had never looked into it.  Now I see the issue.

Arendt started sleeping with the married Heidegger as a graduate student in the 1920s, and bolstered his postwar reputation by appearing with him in public, although Heidegger had remained a Nazi Party member until 1945 and never offered  word of apology. Mel Brooks get Arendt back, though, by including her in “Young Frankenstein.” Her married name really was Frau Blucher, and her film incarnation–the aging spinster pining for the mad maker of monsters, the mention of whose name terrifies animals–suits her perfectly.

While I may not have read much by Arendt, I have seen a lot by Brooks.  Never knew that Frau Blucher was the model for Arendt.  Love the tendrils of culture and history.

 

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