The Banality of Love

“The Banality of Love”—a play about the stormy love of Martin Heidegger, the leading German philosopher and one of the outstanding intellectuals of the twentieth century, and his student, the Jewish student Hannah Arendt, who became an outstanding philosopher with worldwide fame. A secret romance between them began when Hannah, a young student, studied under the professor Heidegger she revered and adored—a family man. With Hitler’s rise to power, Hannah Arendt—being Jewish—managed to escape Germany, while Heidegger became a member of the Nazi Party and took the post of rector of the famous university in the city of Freiburg. He supported racist theories of the Nazis, expelled from the university all Jewish students and professors, among them was the great philosopher Professor Edmund Husserl, M. Heidegger’s teacher, whose chair he later inherited.
After the end of the Second World War, Hannah Arendt renews contact with Martin Heidegger. She remains faithful to her youthful love, despite the fact that M. Heidegger refused to apologize for his Nazi past.