Hannah Maxine Arendt and Martin Horst Windust Heidegger Loeffler

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

That HA and MH would've resumed their sexual relationship after the war
- this is news to me too. Tell us more, Mark.

I've been under the impression that when they made friends again in 1950,
their relationship was nonphysical, she remaining a defender of his
philosophy until her death in 1975.


On Mon, 2 Dec 2013, Mark Kohut wrote:

> I read it in a book...and in reviews of other books........
 
 

From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
To: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, December 2, 2013 10:30 AM
Subject: Re: Hannah Maxine Arendt and Martin Horst Windust Heidegger Loeffler


I don't believe that is accurate about H Arendt and Heidegger. You should not put out such things without a reference.
On Dec 2, 2013, at 5:10 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> I wrote: Hannah kept fucking fascists....after the war.....see Charisma, that disease......
> 
> Just an observation on what I know of Hannah Arendt: she kept fucking Martin after the war, and other powerful men....
> and I was alluding to P's line in Gravity's Rainbow about the terrible disease of Charisma which near the postwar
> riff in that masterpiece.
> 
> Even Hannah could not resist a charismatic thinker.....love is strange as TP always quotes.....
>
> From: Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net>
> To: P-list List <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Monday, December 2, 2013 12:53 AM
> Subject: Re: Hannah Maxine Arendt and Martin Horst Windust Heidegger Loeffler
>
> T P's  names often have different angles.  I  am not saying Horst is an evil Nazi, but trying to understand what P is doing with the fascist male( Windust) fucks  lefty female sex riff. It's clearly here again and the Horst Wessel Lied is not that big of a leap in this case. I think Pynchon is trying to get at dual attractions that are dividing the country and have marked our history.  I get that Maxine is physically attracted to Horst  and said so by saying he rocked her boat.  Horst is a handsome provider who loves his boys and Maxine, and he also spends a lot of time mindlessly zoned out. He provides by tapping into the "magic of the market" with his own magic. Maxine loves his stability and security but also is clearly questioning the reality of it all and is a bit bored by the whole setup.  Unfortunately these dual attractions  in the American psyche are about more than kinky sex or movie star looks. They are in fact about the darkest
>  tendencies  and seductions both of individuals and the empire and that is a big part of the reason P comes back to the same trope so often.  This indulgence of fascism  has consequences and there are many indications  that one of the themes  of BE is payback or blowback, as David Morris suggested quoting key passages from a key paragraph.
>
> p.340    "terrible black ash billowing [...] that was the moment [...] When everything was revealed [...] a rush of blackness and death. Showing us what we've become, what we've been all the time. [...] living on borrowed time". [...] and meantime the only help we get from the media is boo hoo the innocent dead.  Boo fucking hoo. You know what? All the dead are innocent. There's no uninnocent dead."[...]
> "it's a koan."    This koan mean its opposite.  None of our dead are innocent. We all are due a payback. We all share a mountain of collective guilt.
>
> To me this points to a thoughtlessness and violence in the American Empire  that is shrugged off when the bombs are falling elsewhere. It is very comfortable here to turn instead to the latest stock market returns or spy movie( to choose some loaded possibilities). Pg 340 and the falling towers  is the place where this mindless acceptance of violence suddenly becomes shocked outrage when it blows back on innocent little us . But innocence is a dubious claim for humans and soon the dead become new tools of violence and propaganda as we all have seen.
>
> The whole cycle is personal too. He/She loves the person who is "in charge", "powerful", even predatory, uniformed with some expression of state power and prestige. Or she/he is challenged by  wild and untameable beauty. So first they couple and then  have to live with all of it  and continue to live with the self. The inequality,  the difference first supplies a powerful attractive charge, but the shock of that pleasure is not a practical bond, is not love.
>
> I agree that the evil we engage in is unprecedented, nothing is ever the same as it was before, but Arendt also looks for and describes with powerful insight the recognizable patterns and qualities of political movements aspiring to and achieving totalitarian control. She particularly grapples with  the way violence becomes the pervasive characteristic of  social control, a habit of thought,commerce, duty,entertainment political and personal speech. It becomes pervasive but also a numbingly distant, disturbing but also reassuring. She also focuses on the way racism or other expressions of scapegoating saturate people until they cannot see the humanity of the victims.  These are also  themes Pynchon frequents. 
>
>
> What I have written  are riffs on  commonly available material and I don't claim these riffs line up with P's intentions but I think it unlikely that he has never considered the life and thought of Hanna Arendt or her affair with Heideggar.
>
>
>
> Mark I don't really get what you are saying and especially I don't get  the following sentence:
> Hannah kept fucking fascists....after the war.....see Charisma, that disease......
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Dec 1, 2013, at 9:52 PM, Fiona Shnapple wrote:
>
> > Why is Maxine attracted to Horst? For starters, once you get past the
> > Nazi Name (BE 114-115), he looks like Sterling Hayden. And, as Maxine
> > tells us, her career choice and her marriage (and this goes for her
> > sister too) were steered by her parents and the UWS politics, and the
> > Easter European nonsense  that they were indoctrinated with from
> > childhood.
> >
> >
> > So, Horst likes to party, Even after he's married with kids. That's adventure.
> >
> > But not for Maxine.
> >
> > The the adventure part is mapped on from Hayden to Maxine & Horst
> > through her marriage to a Lutheran who doubles as Hayden the Hollywood
> > Lefty and war hero.
> >
> > Hayden is 6'5",  is a big beautiful man who loves adventure and has a
> > problem with Raygun.
> >
> >
> > The Totalitarianism as Fascist Corporate State is so obvious,  it
> > seems a given. But it's not corporate fascism, as March would argue,
> > but a madness that has no precedent, as Arendt remind us, the evil we
> > engage in, is often unprecedented, and looking for a precedent causes
> > blind spots, giving space to the banal evil of ordinary men and women,
> > and the madness of the mob.
> >
> > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sterling_Hayden
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l

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

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