"The Secret King"

Two Passages From Adam Kirsch's New Yorker article on the relationship between Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger:

Arendt on what she knew of Heidegger before she met him:

Little more than a name was known, but the name made its way through all of Germany like the rumor of a secret king.

In 1929 after the affair had already begun, Arendt ran into Heidegger at a train station, and, for a moment, he failed to recognize her:

When I was a small child that was the way my mother once stupidly and playfully frightened me. I had read the fairly tale about Dwarf Nose, whose nose gets so long nobody recognizes him any more. My mother pretended that had happened to me. I still vividly recall the blind terror with which I kept crying, but I am your child, I am your Hannah. -- That is what it was like today.