a blog by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl

As we spent the long Easter weekend together at his home in Greenport, Long Island, in April, 2011, Jerome Kohn and I had leisure to return several times to talking about our friend Lotte Kohler, who had died on March 24^th in New York, at the age of 91. Each time, we registered an “end of an era” feeling. A world, organized around Hannah Arendt and her friends and their legacies, had lost its last member, and the one who had become, after the death of Arendt’s literary executor, Mary McCarthy, the chief literary preserver and the reservoir of stories. After she had finished the compiling the Arendt-Jaspers and the Arendt-Bluecher correspondences, Lotte had handed on to Jerry, across a generational difference, the role of the executor and “the editor.” But she had remained at her guard station, watching over the next generation: Jerry edited volume after volume of Hannah Arendt’s posthumous papers, and I brought out a second edition of my 1982 biography of Arendt and a little book to celebrate her centenary, Why Arendt Matters. But now our guardian Lotte is gone.

Even though she was so old and had grown quite frail in recent years, Lotte’s death was startling.  She had survived so many troubles since the sad death of her second husband Hans-Joachim Schrimpf in 2003 –treatment for stomach cancer, painful pinning of a broken hip, encasement of her neck after a serious fall had fractured it. All this she had endured with a stoicism that even a Stoic would have been impressed by. It seemed that she would just keep returning home from the hospital, indomitable, willing herself into her attitude of “Ach, it is only a bone that has broken…”

Lotte  had been careful to cultivate good younger friends, many of them German-speaking, who were a great comfort to her in her last years, as was Jerry. But losing Hans-Joachim had been a great blow, particularly because he had come into her life as an unexpected, almost miraculous, remedy for the loss she had felt after Hannah Arendt died and the Hannah Arendt friendship circle, the “tribe,” of which Lotte had been the youngest member, had began to shrink with other deaths. Slowly, she was being left alone.

Hans-Joachim had been her friend when they were young (he younger than she), after the Second World War. But she had gone off to England to work as a nanny, acquiring her faultless English, and he had married someone else. She remained the widow she had been since 1943, when she was twenty-three and lost her first husband, Wilhelm Kohler, a soldier killed while he served in the German Army.  Lotte was based in Germany until 1955, when she was 35, had received her Ph.D in German Literature from Munster, and was able to emigrate to the United States and take teaching positions –principally at City College, but initially at Brooklyn College, which was a kind of oasis for émigré German intellectuals in the very anti-German atmosphere of  post-War America. Others of Hannah Arendt’s non-Jewish German friends, like the historian Lotte Sempel Klenbort, taught at Brooklyn, too, as did many Jewish émigrés –including Arendt herself for a brief period.

Hans-Joachim, too, had become a Germanist after the War, but he had stayed on in Germany and raised a family there.  Writing books about Gerhard Hauptman, about Lessing and Brecht, about Goethe, he had had a distinguished academic career. As one of the editors of the 14 volume  Hamburger Ausgabe of Goethe’s works, he had been the junior colleague of the chief editor, Benno von Wiese. Von Wiese had also been very dear to Lotte, and it was he, while he was a visiting professor at Princeton in 1955, who had introduced the newly arrived Lotte to Hannah Arendt. (This world united in love of German literature was very small and crisscrossed:  in his youth in the 1920s, Benno von Wiese had briefly been Hannah Arendt’s boyfriend.) When Hans-Joachim was retiring, he and Lotte remet each other, and after several years of his commuting to New York to be with her, they married and he became an émigré himself.  For the time they had together, they were a happy couple, excellently suited for each other, and both so grateful that Fortune had done them such a fortuitous turn late in their lives. Recreating an old love.

After Hans-Joachim’s death, I invited Lotte several times to the loft apartment I had in Manhattan’s East Village. She liked coming, as she said, “to bohemia.” And she enjoyed reminiscing with me, certainly not a pleasure she had felt while I was writing Hannah Arendt’s biography back in the late 1970s. Then, she had been very cautious with me about what she revealed –about Hannah Arendt, or about herself. And she was very strict with me, too, in her guardian role.  Pages of critical notes about my biography came to my mailbox while she was reading it in final draft. She fretted over every umlaut that was not made by my American typewriter, every fact that needed another fact to make it complete. All very helpful –Yale University Press hardly needed to hire a copy editor!   But all very tense. However, it should be said that her spirit in this barrage was generous, as it always was; intense scrutiny was a form of gift-giving.  People who had definitively been placed on her “not to be trusted” list got only her scorn.

Lotte weathered all kinds of storms in her guardian role. The worst by far was created by a later biographer Lotte had trusted, Elzbieta Ettinger, who took advantage of the permission she was given in 1989 to read Arendt’s side of the then unpublished, partly restricted Arendt/Heidegger correspondence. Rather than, as she had promised to do, contextualizing the Arendt/Heidegger story as a chapter in a full biography, Ettinger rushed into print with a hugely distorted double portrait.  Lotte was appalled, and promptly put Ettinger on her “not to be trusted” list. But she could hardly anticipate then how huge and how vicious the broohaha over this little book would become.

Ettinger’s characters, very familiarly called Hannah and Martin, and behaving like figures in a kitchy melodrama, were greeted with torrents of excited reviews in the American and European press. Their affair promptly became a Rorschach for projections of all sorts. For years, Hannah Arendt virtually disappeared behind strange images of her fashioned out of Ettinger’s description of a naieve, deluded, passive, conflicted seducee.  Not surprisingly, a young woman unable to resist the charms of an older, domineering man, soon-to-be a Nazi Party member, was useful to people who hated Hannah Arendt for her Eichmann in Jerusalem.  I remember how amazed we all were when, from Paris, Mary McCarthy had sent a newspaper clipping that had as its two inch high headline: “Hannah Arendt, est elle une Nazi?”  So the lowest level of the controversy over Eichmann in Jerusalem, which had started in the 1960s, got another puff of life in the 1990s from this kind of psychodrama. It is getting yet another ascent from the depths this year, the 50^th anniversary of Eichmann’s trial, and Hannah Arendt is once againbeing maligned and misunderstood.

During the most important of the 2005 conversations in my loft, Lotte said that she had come to realize that one really needed to be a psychoanalyst to understand what had happened with “the Ettinger meshuggas.”  She had learned at the time of Ettinger’s death earlier in 2005, at age 80, that Ettinger herself had, as a schoolgirl, had an affair with a domineering older professor, which had left her conflicted, guilty. She could –and often did–tell people this story, but seems to have had no idea that she had woven it into the story of Hannah and Martin –a projection.  “Projections attracts projections,” I commented. “It is,” Lotte had said, “like a little mass hysteria, isn’t it?”

Wanting to ease the burden of guilt Lotte carried for having given Ettinger permission to use the Arendt letters, I reminded her that the would-be Arendt biographer she had interviewd was the respected Polish-born head of MIT’s Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies, a novelist and a biographer of Rosa Luxemburg.  The fact that she was given to writing, over and over again, stories about young women who had had affairs with dominating older men and never gotten over them was not part of the resume.  I told Lotte  that I, out of curiosity, had read Ettinger’s  Rosa Luxemburg and could see the compulsion to repeat in it, but no little mass hysteria over that biography had warned of  things to come.

Luxemburg’s affair with Leo Jogiches is the central story in Ettinger’s 1987 biography, offered up as the key to Luxemburg’s political life. Rosa, so Ettinger had argued, was a woman so conflictedly under the spell of the older, domineering, emotionally tormented Leo that she could not emerge as the triumphant anti-Bolshevist her biographer clearly wanted her to have been –and that Ettinger herself had aspired to be. Ettinger had been an unrelenting critic of the Soviet Union as Bolshevism’s outgrowth while she was a Ph.D student in Warsaw, but her bravery had never won her fame in her homeland or as an émigré in America, where she turned from activism to writing.  It must have been disappointing that the melodramatic Rosa biography had stirred up exactly no controversy.  In circles where the history of Bolshevism and anti-Bolshevism are perennial topics of debate, it is class struggles, not love struggles, that make the world go round.

No one needed Red Rosa to be a little woman whose ability to think and lead was compromised by her sexual submission, while lots of people needed Hannah Arendt to be forever  Heidegger’s girl rather than the profoundly independent person she was. But, I said to Lotte, it seemed to me that we could look back on “the Ettinger meshuggas” and see that an episode of mass hysteria, hurtful as it was, did no lasting damage to Hannah Arendt’s reputation—eventually, only the people who threw stones found their glass houses full of cracks. The Eichmann book would remain controversial no matter what tactics were used to fight over it.

Lotte was interested in my reflections on Ettinger, but her thoughts went off in another direction. She asked me if psychoanalysts still found “the repetition compulsion” in the center of people’s lives. “It is not hard to find!” I joked with her, “because it is so difficult and rare for someone to become conscious of it and break its hold.” But she did not want to joke, she wanted me to listen to something else she needed to get off her chest. The whole tenor of our conversation changed as she told me, hesitantly, that she and Hannah Arendt had had “a psychoanalytic moment” during one of the summers when she had joined the Bluechers at the cottage retreat they rented in Palenville, New York.

Lotte had woken up having dreamt a very familiar dream. She told it to Hannah Arendt. As a little girl, she was standing alone and forlorn in a roadway near her family’s house. Suddenly, up the road came a fancy carriage in which her mother was seated –coming home. She was filled with joy, waiting for her mother to climb down from the carriage and take her in her arms. Hannah Arendt looked shocked, and responded by telling Lotte that she had felt so close to her while she was telling the dream. She, too, had a recurrent dream, and one uncannily like Lotte’s.  As a little girl, she was standing alone in the road near her family home when, down the road, came a wagon which her father was driving. She waited with tremendous excitement for him to climb down and take her in his arms. Soon, however, he got back onto the wagon and drove away.  The only way she could get him to come back was to dream the dream again.

Lotte’s mother had been schizophrenic, and often disappeared into asylums. Her heart’s desire was for her mother to come home and not be ill. Hannah Arendt’s father had been diagnosed with syphilis when she was a young child and disappeared into a psychiatric hospital where she and her mother visited him. But heerm other stopped taking her there  after he became paretic and could not recognize them. Lotte and Hannah Arendt spoke about these childhood traumas, briefly, and then never mentioned them or the dreams again. “That was a strong moment we shared, but we did not need to speak of it afterwards. When Hannah loved someone, she loved with this old intensity. And for me it was the same. I always wanted a reunion.”

She paused for a long time. And then she very generously said to me: “When I read in your biography about Hannah’s father and the hospital, and how they were on their own in Konigsberg after he died, I wanted to tell you this story about our dreams. That Hannah dreamt over and over the return of her father. But I was afraid that if people read this in your book they would say that she spent her life looking for her father –starting with Heidegger.  Or that I only looked for sanity and for my mother.  Psychoanalysis supports this kind of simplifying, don’t you think?”

At the time, I had no answer for this, which was half a question and half an accusation. I did say, though, that I would certainly keep the story to myself so that she would never feel hurt by anyone using it to “analyze” her reductively. Now that death protects her from that possibility, I hope the story will show you her capacity for self-analysis and her capacity for friendship –two sides of the same capacity, which Hannah Arendt had so richly, too.