Hannah and Martin
–Martin Heidegger, from a letter to Hannah Arendt
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The play is based on fact: In the 1920s Martin Heidegger, perhaps the most important thinker of the 20th century, and Hannah Arendt, who would become famous for her coverage of the Nuremberg and Eichmann trials, met as professor and student. An intense affair ensued, which ended with Heidegger sending Arendt off to study with a colleague, Karl Jaspers. As Hitler rose to power, Heidegger, influenced by his wife and possessed by romantic notions of a German “revival,” lent his mind to the National Socialists, legitimizing their ideology by aligning it with his. Meanwhile Hannah, a Jew, fled the creeping police state, landing in New York in 1941 after an eight-year layover in a French labor camp. When she returned to Germany after the war, her disgraced Svengali prevailed upon her to rehabilitate his name.
Hannah and Martin, drawn largely from letters between the two, exists in a historical void: the moment when Arendt decided to begin a public defense of her former lover. Scenes in which Hannah’s horrified young protege demands an explanation bookend the show and repeat several times; Hannah sketches an abbreviated account of her involvement with Martin in flashbacks, beginning with their meeting in 1924 and ending with their postwar reunion. In many ways Hannah and Martin isn’t a play at all but a “representational” peek inside Arendt’s hypothetical mind.
In another bit of pillow talk, Hannah and Martin discuss his notion that we are most ourselves at the moment of death: “You are all of your possibilities, but you can’t yet know them and so you can’t yet know yourself. It isn’t until your death that it’s clear what you have been. So, you see: At the moment of dying, you are–completely–you.” Only later, as an exile, does Hannah come up with a response: “It is true that there is a defining event in each man’s life that makes him unique, that makes him free. But it isn’t his end, it’s his beginning….Each individual possesses at the moment of his birth infinite potential and uniqueness, the ability to introduce something into the world….There is no greatness in a herd, but nor is there greatness alone in a room….We keep the world alive each time we act or speak with purpose and originality.” The basic humanism differentiating Hannah from Martin couldn’t be more clear, nor the dangerous nihilism underpinning Heidegger’s phenomenology–and Fodor’s argument is all the more persuasive for being articulated in his terms.
As Martin, David Parkes is excellent; a trifle too smooth in the early sections, he plays his last scene to the hilt and in general makes the role troublingly accessible. Danica Ivancevic also shines as Heidegger’s wife; saddled with a handful of difficult cameos very different from one another, she seems a new actor in each. And as Hannah, Elizabeth Rich is divine, anchoring the evening with a winning mix of self-doubt, assertive intelligence, and existential anguish, embodying her character’s wary compassion.
