A Report on the Banality of Love - A Play in Five Encounters (Paperback)

He was Martin Heidegger, one of the most brilliant thinkers in Germany, a 35 year-old professor of Philosophy at the University of Marburg, married with children. She was Hannah Arendt, his 18 year-old Jewish student. In 1925, they started a passionate affair that would span half a century. When Hitler came to power, Heidegger was rector of the University of Freiburg and a member of the Nazi party. Arendt fled Germany, first to France and then to the U.S., where she became active in the Jewish survival effort. Separated for seventeen years, the lovers met again in 1950. By then, he was a discredited former Nazi and she was one of the most prominent intellectuals of the post-war world. Despite Heidegger's past affiliations, Arendt's love for him never faltered. She helped him regain his former position, and even became his translator and promoter. Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. And sometimes the greatest fiction arises from that truth. Based on two important historical figures of the last century, this may be the strangest love story ever told.