ABSTRACT
Martin Heidegger was a celebrated German philosopher. Though he wrote on a number of topics, his best known work is Being and Time, in which he attempts to use phenomenology to give a temporal understanding of human existence. Heidegger became a Nazi shortly after his becoming rector in April 1933 of Freiburg University, which he helped make into a model Nazi university. One year later he resigned the post and ceased his public political activities. In 1945 Heidegger was prohibited from teaching and a year later was forced to resign his chair of philosophy because of alleged Nazi sympathies. Hannah Arendt was a political philosopher. She went to Marburg in 1924 and studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. In 1925 the relationship became romantic but broke off the following year when she moved to Heidelberg to study with Karl Jaspers. Her most widely read book was Eichmann in Jerusalem, in which she attends the trial of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.
