Hannah Maxine Arendt and Martin Horst Windust Heidegger Loeffler

[Joseph Tracy]

Watched Von Trotta's  Hannah Arendt last week and it got me thinking about her affair with  then future Nazi , her philosophy professor Martin  Heidegger.  Futures are as hard to predict as pasts are to understand. Anyway, there was a line in the film  that made me do a double take and I had to look it up because I didn't know the reference. Hannah Arendt is in the library and her friend Hans comes up to her and tells her that Heidegger, just elected rector of Freiburg university, has affirmed support of the National Socialists and then he joined in the singing of the Horst Wessel Lied. The name Horst jumped out and did a small jig next to the provocative and unusual  theme that is a staple of Pynchon's writing : powerful  fascist joins aspiring woman in lustful union, often a devastating affair for both lives. In this case the parallels made me wonder if there was any meaningful connection to BE.   I looked up the Horst Wessel Lied and it is the Nazi national anthem praising distant war for the homeland, the swastika/flag, and the glorious war against the red commies. Horst is also a name for a high outcrop or specifically an eyrie, an image appearing in Nazism and John Ashcroftism. Horst Loeffler seems like a real nice guy who loves his kids and ice cream and has an odd gift and knows how to rock Maxine's boat. But he is emotionally flat and predictable and interested in formulaic TV movies and sports and there has to be something a little dishonest about all this hominess because his affair triggered the separation. He would make a better argument for the evil of banality than the banality of evil and Loeffler means maker or seller of spoons. He appears down to earth but the same sense that tells him where hog futures are headed allows him to pick out the unusual put-options on the airlines that lost planes( these are real and well reported and there is a pile of unclaimed money in Chicago).  The question for me is why is he attractive to Maxine who seems to have an appetite for adventure and passion and curiosity. His reaction to 9-11 is so laid back it is as though he has seen this  market future too, and is able to take it calmly. Windust is his emotional and mental opposite; he is ideologically driven to the point of cruelty  but has a compassionate side. Would a mashup of these 2 look a bit like Heideggar?  To me the Arendt connection is that both men serve large aggressive entities that are the 2 sides of fascism as Mussolini defined it :“Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power” .  These two represent the provision of  both personal and national security, and there is a huge sense in which the forces they serve are the reason for the blowback of 9-11. Whether mindless as Eichmann or intense as Horst Wessel, and no matter how well hidden in the black petrochemical underground, this version of security has a very bloody price tag and a neo colonial impact on the larger world.   


It is hard to find a more controversial  and unflattering political observer of history than Hannah Arendt or a human more willing to criticize what she loves  or to understand what she despises. She is also remarkable in her ability to live with the consequences of her pursuit of unflinching inquiry.  Her critics called her cold but what does that mean?  How many of them went to Germany after the war and worked with a Zionist group to find orphaned Jewish children homes in Palestine?  The diversity of her friends and lovers is full of truly remarkable people. But probably what she is most remembered for is the phrase the banality of evil. 

Maxine is surely working this turf, the banality of evil. she follows the numbers trail laid down by human zeroes in the pursuit of multiplied zeroes and ones. The deeper she goes the more she finds not a sinister individual master manipulator but an interlocking network of lies, government  and private complicity, fear, bribery and people along for the ride. She never really knows who is working for who or why. But if there is evil here it is very reliant on following orders, seeing only a small part of the whole, not asking too many questions, not being too scrupulous about what you will do. The people she is chasing are out to own the web, deep and shallow, setting up for Total Information Awareness whether it is "needed" yet or not.  At the heart of Arendt's observations about Eichmann and fascism is this very loss of individual conscience and  personal privacy at the demands of systems of organization that demand thoughtless compliance. 




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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l