If it was hard to get accurate information about French existentialism, it was even harder to learn anything about the German thinkers who had started it all. One of the few who tried to correct this imbalance was Heidegger’s former pupil and lover, Hannah Arendt, now based in the United States and working for Jewish refugee organisations. She wrote two 1946 essays, for the Nation and the Partisan Review respectively. One, ‘French Existentialism’, unpicked some of the myths about Sartre and the others. The other, ‘What is Existenz Philosophy?’, tried to plant existentialism back into its German roots, summarising the thought of Jaspers and Heidegger.
But this was a difficult moment to tell people that the prettiest existentialist you ever saw and the swoon-inducing Sartre owed their ideas to Germans. Few wanted to acknowledge this fact in France, either. And Heidegger was no ordinary German. If the magician of Messkirch could have magicked his own past away, everyone would have been happier.
8
DEVASTATION
In which Heidegger turns and is turned against, and some awkward meetings occur.
Germany in 1945 was a place where no one would want to be. Survivors, isolated soldiers and displaced persons of all kinds roamed the cities and countryside. Refugee organisations struggled to help people get home, and occupying forces tried to impose order amid near-total loss of infrastructure. Heaps of rubble often stank of dead bodies buried inside. People searched for food, grew vegetables in makeshift allotments, and cooked on open fires. Besides those killed, around fourteen to fifteen million Germans had been made homeless by firebombing and general destruction. The English poet Stephen Spender, travelling the country after the war, compared the people he saw wandering through the wreckage of Cologne and other places to desert nomads who had stumbled across the ruins of a lost city. But people, especially groups of Trümmerfrauen or ‘rubble-women’, did begin working to clear the stones and bricks, supervised by occupying soldiers.
Displaced persons from the camps often had to wait a long time to go anywhere. Many German soldiers also remained missing; some slowly made their way home, crossing whole countries by foot. They were joined by well over twelve million ethnic Germans expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia and other central and eastern European countries; they too walked to Germany, pushing small wagons and trolleys containing their possessions. The number of people simply trudging around Europe at this time is astounding. The grandfather of a friend of mine walked home to Hungary from a prison camp in Denmark. When, in Edgar Reitz’s 1984 film sequence Heimat, a young man turns up in his Rhineland village having walked all the way from Turkey, the scene is not as fanciful as it might seem. But many others remained stranded in far-off places for years, with relatives having no idea where they were.
Among those lost to communication in 1945 were the Heideggers’ two sons, Jörg and Hermann. Both had been soldiers on the Eastern Front, and both were now in Russian POW camps. Their parents could only wait in uncertainty, not knowing whether either was alive.
Since his resignation from the Freiburg rectorship in 1934, Martin Heidegger had kept fairly quiet. The same heart condition that had kept him out of active service in the First World War had continued to prevent his being called up for service of any kind through most of the second. He taught at the university and spent as much time as possible in his Todtnauberg hut, feeling misunderstood and badly treated. A friend who saw him there in 1941, Max Kommerell, described him as having a good tan, a lostness in his eyes, and ‘a delicate smile that is just a tiny, tiny bit crazy’.
With the Allies closing in by late 1944, the Nazi regime ordered the total mobilisation of all Germans, including those previously exempt. Heidegger, now fifty-five, was sent with other men to dig trenches near Alsace to ward off a French advance. This only lasted for a few weeks, but meanwhile he also took the precaution of hiding his manuscripts in safer places in case of invasion. Some were already stored in the vaults of the Messkirch bank where his brother Fritz worked; he squirrelled others away in a church tower in nearby Bietingen. In April 1945, he even wrote to his wife about a plan to put several volumes of writing into a secret cave which would be closed up and its location recorded on a treasure map, entrusted to just a few people. If this was ever done there is no evidence of it, but he did keep moving papers around. Heidegger’s precautions were not irrational: Freiburg was badly damaged in air raids, and Todtnauberg was not large or secure enough to store much safely. He may also have feared that some items were incriminating.
He kept with him only a few manuscripts, including his recent work on Friedrich Hölderlin, whom Heidegger read obsessively. The great local poet of the Danube region, born in 1770 in Lauffen and suffering from bouts of insanity all his life, Hölderlin had set much of his visionary poetry in the local landscape, while also evoking an idealised image of ancient Greece — the very combination that had always fascinatined Heidegger. The only other poet who would ever be so important to him was the even more disturbed Georg Trakl, an Austrian schizophrenic and drug addict who died aged twenty-seven in 1914. Trakl’s eerie poems are filled with hunters, young women and strange blue beasts stepping through silent forests by moonlight. Heidegger immersed himself in both poets, and generally explored the question of how poetic language can summon forth Being, and open a space for it in the world.
In March 1945, the Allies arrived in Freiburg, and Heidegger moved out. He arranged for philosophers and students in his faculty to find refuge in Wildenstein, a spectacular castle perched high on a crag over the Danube near Beuron, not far from Messkirch (also, incidentally, not far from the castle of Sigmaringen where the Germans had herded members of the Vichy government for a grotesque Decameron-style retreat after they fled France). Wildenstein’s owners were the prince and princess of Sachsen-Meiningen; the princess had been Heidegger’s lover. This is perhaps why Elfride Heidegger did not join them; she was left behind in Freiburg to mind the Heidegger house in the suburb of Zähringen. When the Allies arrived, they commandeered it, so that she would share the house for some time with a refugee from Silesia and the family of a French sergeant.
(Illustrations Credit 8.1)
Meanwhile, the little band of university refugees — around ten professors and thirty students, mostly women — had cycled through the Black Forest, with Heidegger himself catching them up later on his son’s bicycle. He stayed with the princess and her husband at a nearby forester’s lodge which they used as their home, while the rest of the group ascended into the fairy-tale castle. Through May and June 1945, even after the French had arrived in the area, the philosophers helped to bring in hay from surrounding fields, and spent the evenings entertaining each other with lectures and piano recitals. At the end of June, they had their farewell party in the forester’s lodge; Heidegger lectured them on Hölderlin. When the pleasant few months came to an end, the merry band returned home to Freiburg, no doubt ruddy-cheeked and fit. But Heidegger arrived in Freiburg to find his home full of strangers, the city under French administration, and a total ban against him teaching. His enemies had reported him as a suspected Nazi sympathiser.
Heidegger had spent that Danube spring of 1945 writing several new works, including a philosophical dialogue to which he gave the date 8 May 1945 — the day Germany’s surrender became official. It is entitled ‘Evening Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia, between a Younger and an Older Man’. The two characters are German inmates of the POW camp, and when the dialogue opens they have just returned from their day of forced labour in the woods.
The younger man says to the older, ‘As we were marching to our workplace this morning, out of the rustling of the expansive forest I was suddenly overcome by something healing.’ What is this healing thing, he wonders? The older man says it may be something ‘inexhaustible’ that comes from that expanse. Their conversation continues, sounding very much like two Heideggers talking to one another:
YOUNGER MAN: You probably mean that the capacious, which prevails in the expanse,
brings us to something freeing.
OLDER MAN: I do not only mean the capaciousness in the expanse, but also that this expanse leads us out and forth.
YOUNGER MAN: The capaciousness of the forests swings out into a concealed distance, but at the same time swings back to us again, without ending with us.
They go on trying to define the healing power, and to undersand how it might free them from what the older man describes as the ‘devastation that covers our native soil and its helplessly perplexed humans’.
‘Devastation’ (Verwüstung) becomes the key word of their conversation. It turns out that they are not only referring to recent events, but to a devastation that has been eating at the earth for centuries and turning everything into a ‘desert’ — Wüste, a word etymologically linked to Verwüstung. It has made its greatest gains in a certain workers’ paradise (clearly the Soviet Union), and in a coldly calculating, technologically advanced rival land where ‘everything remains overseeable and arranged and accounted for so as to be useful’. This, of course, is the United States; like Sartre and other Europeans in this era, Heidegger found it natural to associate it with technology and mass production. At the end of the dialogue, the younger man says that, rather than trying futilely to ‘get over’ universal devastation on such a scale, the only thing to do is to wait. So there they remain, a Germanic Vladimir and Estragon, waiting in their haggard landscape.
It is a typical Heideggerian document, filled with mutterings about capitalism, Communism and foreign lands that are up to no good — surely signs of what Hans Jonas called ‘a certain “Blood and Soil” point of view’. Yet it also contains images that are moving and beautiful. It can’t be read without thinking of the missing Heidegger sons, lost somewhere to the East. It speaks eloquently of the ruins of Germany, and of the German state of mind amid those ruins: a mixture of post-traumatic distress, blankness, resentment, bitterness and cautious expectancy.
Having resumed his limbo life in Freiburg in the summer of 1945, Heidegger set off one November day on a clandestine drive to recover his hidden manuscripts from the countryside near Messkirch and Lake Constance, or Bodensee. He was helped by the young French philosophy enthusiast Frédéric de Towarnicki, who had called at Heidegger’s house and made friends with him. German civilians were not yet permitted to travel without authorisation, so Towarnicki procured a driver and an official-looking piece of paper in case they were stopped. Heidegger installed himself in the back seat with an empty rucksack. They left in the middle of the night, amid storm clouds and lightning flashes.
The car had gone barely twenty kilometres when one of the headlights flickered and went out. They continued, despite the difficulty of seeing the road between black trees in the heavy rain. A French patrol loomed out of the darkness, with its tricolour flag; the travellers had to stop and explain themselves. The guard scrutinised their papers, pointed out that their rear lights were also broken, then waved them on. They advanced cautiously. Twice, Heidegger asked the driver to stop in front of a house in the middle of nowhere; both times he got out with his backpack, went in, and came out smiling with the bag loaded with documents.
The second headlight began to flicker too. Towarnicki tried to use his electric torch to light the way, but it was not very effective. Then the car swerved off the road and hit the embankment. Inspecting the damage, the driver announced that they had a puncture. They all got out while the driver tried to attach the spare wheel, which did not fit the car correctly. Heidegger looked on, interested — one of his favourite new philosophical topics was technology. He did not offer to help, but wagged his finger with a mischievous air and said, ‘Technik.’ He was clearly enjoying himself. Somehow the driver fixed the wheel and they moved onwards to their last stop, Bietingen.
By now it was morning, and Heidegger settled himself in to stay at the house of his friends there. The long-suffering Towarnicki hitched back to Freiburg to arrange for a new car. He arrived to find Elfride glaring at him: what had he done with her husband? Still, the consensus was that he had done well by his friend: Heidegger later recalled the favour with gratitude, and gave Towarnicki an inscribed copy of his translation of the chorus from Sophocles’ Antigone, with its passage on the strangeness of man. He wrote on it, ‘In memory of our expedition to Constance.’
Heidegger’s good cheer did not last long, as he now had to settle in for a long wait for judgement from the Denazification Committee and the university. Four years would pass before he was cleared to teach again, being finally declared a Mitläufer (‘fellow traveller’) in March 1949, after which he resumed teaching from 1950. The five years of uncertainty were difficult, and for the first year he also had the worry about his lost sons. In early 1946, he had a complete psychological breakdown, and in February was taken into the Haus Baden sanatorium in Badenweiler to recover. It must have looked for a while as though Heidegger was going the way of his heroes Hölderlin and Trakl. But, with treatment from psychiatrists who were already primed in his philosophical language and style of thought, he slowly improved. It helped when news came in March that the Heideggers’ two sons were alive in Russia. A much longer wait ensued before they came home. Hermann was released in 1947, having fallen ill, but Jörg, the elder son, was still away in 1949.
Heidegger left the sanatorium in spring 1946, and convalesced in the Todtnauberg hut. The journalist Stefan Schimanski, who saw him there in June 1946 and October 1947, described the silence and isolation, and noted that Heidegger greeted him wearing heavy skiing boots even though it was summer. He seemed to want nothing but to be left alone to write. At the time of Schimanski’s second visit, Heidegger had not been down to Freiburg for six months. ‘His living conditions were primitive; his books were few, and his only relationship to the world was a stack of writing paper.’
Even before the war, Heidegger’s philosophising had changed, as he gave up writing about resoluteness, Being-towards-death, and other bracing personal demands on Dasein, and shifted to writing of the need to be attentive and receptive, to wait and to open up — the themes that are woven through the prisoner-of-war dialogue. This change, known as Heidegger’s Kehre, or ‘turn’, was not an abrupt whirl-around as the word suggests, but a slow readjustment, like that of a man in a field who gradually becomes aware of the movement of the breeze in the wheat behind him, and turns to listen.
As he was turning, Heidegger paid increasing attention to language, to Hölderlin and the Greeks, and to the role of poetry in thought. He also reflected on historical developments and on the rise of what he called Machenschaft (machination) or Technik (technology): modern ways of behaving towards Being which he contrasted with older traditions. By ‘machination’ he meant the making-machine-like of all things: the attitude that characterises factory automation, environmental exploitation, modern management and war. With this attitude, we brazenly challenge the earth to give up what we want from it, instead of patiently whittling or cajoling things forth as peasant smallholders or craftsmen do. We bully things into yielding up their goods. The most brutal example is in modern mining, where a piece of land is forced to surrender its coal or oil. Moreover, we rarely use what we take at once, but instead convert it to a form of abstract energy to be held in reserve in a generator or storehouse. In the 1940s and 1950s, even matter itself would be challenged in this way, as atomic technology produced energy to be held in reserve in power plants.
One might point out that a peasant who tills the land also challenges it to put forth grain, and then stores that grain. But Heidegger considered this activity quite different. As he argued in a lecture-essay first drafted in the late 1940s, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, a farmer ‘places the seed in the keeping of the forces of growth and watches over its increase’. Or rather, this is what farmers did until modern agricultural machinery came panting and chuffing along, promising ever greater productivity. In modern challenging-forth of this kind, nature’s energy is not sown, tended and harvested; it is unlocked and transformed,
then stored in some different form before being distributed. Heidegger uses military images: ‘Everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately at hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering.’
It is a monstrous reversal — and for Heidegger humanity has become monstrous. Man is the terrible one: deinos in Greek (the word also featuring in the etymology of ‘dinosaur’, or ‘terrible lizard’). This was the word that Sophocles had used when he wrote his chorus about the strange or uncanny quality unique to man.
This process even threatens the basic structure of intentionality: the way the mind reaches out to things as its objects. When something is placed ‘on call’ or in ‘standing-reserve’, says Heidegger, it loses its ability to be a proper object. It is no longer distinguished from us and cannot stand up to us. Phenomenology itself is thus threatened by modern humanity’s challenging, devastating way of occupying the earth. This could lead to the ultimate disaster. If we are left alone ‘in the midst of objectlessness’, then we ourselves will lose our structure — we too will be swallowed up into a ‘standing-reserve’ mode of being. We will devour even ourselves. Heidegger cites the term ‘human resources’ as evidence of this danger.
For Heidegger, the threat of technology goes beyond the practical fears of the post-war years: machines running out of control, atom bombs exploding, radiation leaks, epidemics, chemical contamination. Instead, it is an ontological threat against reality, and against human being itself. We fear disaster, but the disaster may already be under way. There is hope, however. Heidegger reaches for his Hölderlin:
But where danger is, grows
The saving power also.
At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails With Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others Page 20