Heidegger denied Nazi sympathies to Arendt in early 1933

Evidence

Rumours had been circulating about Heidegger’s Nazi associations for a while. In August 1932, the writer René Schickele noted in his diary that Heidegger was said to be consorting ‘exclusively with National Socialists’. Husserl was told that Heidegger had made anti-Semitic remarks. Hannah Arendt heard similar stories. She wrote to Heidegger during the winter of 1932–3 asking point-blank whether he was a Nazi sympathiser. He denied it, in an angry letter emphasising how helpful he had been to Jewish students and colleagues. She was unconvinced, and they lost contact for seventeen years. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 267

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth noting: the rupture costs Arendt and Heidegger seventeen years of contact — a thread that later became central to their philosophical conversation.
• XREF: Connects to the broader historical account of Heidegger’s Nazism and Arendt’s later essay on his thinking. — connects to: Heidegger retained Nazi sympathies well after his rectorate resignation — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 298; Heidegger embraced Nazism out of conviction, not convenience or coercion. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 269