Sein of the Times

In 1967 the Jewish poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan paid a visit to Martin Heidegger’s famous ski hut in the heart of Germany’s Black Forest. It was there that, 40 years earlier, the German philosopher had written “Being and Time,” one of the milestones of 20th century existentialism. For the Heideggerian faithful, the tiny cabin still functions as an obligatory pilgrimage site.

A day earlier Celan had delivered a reading to an overflow crowd at Freiburg University. When the poet and philosopher met for the first time following the reading, a journalist suggested that they pose together for a photograph. Celan demurred. Heidegger’s Nazi past stood in the way. After all, he had never publicly distanced himself from his politics. Though Celan admired Heidegger’s philosophy, he was not about to provide him with the political absolution he so desperately sought. Nevertheless, at Heidegger’s insistence, and out of admiration for his philosophy, Celan agreed to make the trip.

In the poem “Todtnauberg” (named after the village location of Heidegger’s hut), Celan recalls how he signed the cabin log book with “hope of a thinking man’s coming word in the heart”--a word of contrition concerning the philosopher’s political misdeeds. But his hopes met with stony silence. From the philosopher’s lips there would never come any words of remorse. To add a further irony to an already tense situation, tod is the German word for death. For Celan, this visit to the lair of a former ideological enemy was no doubt suffused with macabre memories and associations.

The original German title of Rudiger Safranski’s biography, “A Master From Germany: Martin Heidegger and His Age,” cleverly plays on the Heidegger-Celan association. This title--dropped, regrettably, from the present translation--alludes to Celan’s “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”), the poem that, following the war, catapulted Celan to international literary renown. Toward the end of the poem, Celan, the former death camp inmate, makes a portentous declaration: “Death is a Master From Germany.” They are by far the most quoted words of his oeuvre. The poem’s memorable opening lines bear citing:

Black milk of daybreak we drink it at evening

We drink it at midday and morning we drink it at night

We drink and we drink

We shovel a grave in the air there you won’t lie too cramped

Undoubtedly, the linguistic overlap between “Todesfuge” and the name of the ex-Nazi Heidegger’s mountain retreat, “Todtnauberg,” proved too much for the world-weary poet to bear. Celan had traveled to Todtnauberg seeking clarification and insight--an explanation for the inexplicable. Yet Germany’s greatest philosopher, an ex-Nazi, felt no need to explain himself. Celan’s disappointment at Heidegger’s reticence was palpable. Three years later, Celan took his own life by drowning himself in the Seine.

Yet, in “Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil,” the celebrated Celan-Heidegger encounter receives a weird, upbeat spin. The “word in the heart” Celan sought pertained, we are told, not to contrition but to the mysteries of Heidegger’s philosophy. Moreover, Safranski describes Celan departing from Todtnauberg in an “elated mood”--a characterization that is strangely at odds with all previous accounts. This is only one of several prominent quirks that mar an otherwise fluid narrative.

Had it not been for Heidegger’s fateful political lapse of 1933 when, with great fanfare, he joined the Nazi Party and assumed the rectorship of Freiburg University, biographers might have scant material to work with. Heidegger was studiously averse to traveling outside his native home in Baden. In the mid-1930s, he twice turned down offers to teach at the University of Berlin with resounding affirmations of the virtues of provincialism. One such account, “Why We Remain in the Provinces,” reads like a parody of the German discourse of “blood and soil.” According to Heidegger intimate Heinrich Petzet (whose testimony on the matter Safranski selectively omits), Heidegger felt ill at ease in big cities where too many Jews were to be found.

Yet Heidegger’s dalliances with Nazism, though relatively short-lived, have made biographical considerations central to the evaluation of his intellectual worth. Heidegger resigned as Nazi rector of Freiburg University after a year in office. As it turned out, Hitler and company were not at all interested in metaphysics or the “question of Being.” But, by then, sufficient damage had been done. He had effectively delivered over the university to the aims and ends of the so-called German Revolution. On the lecture stump, he proved an effective propagandist on behalf of the new regime, concluding one speech by declaring: “Let not ideas and doctrines be your guide. The Fuhrer is the only German reality and its law.”

In May 1933, there was an incriminating telegram to Hitler. There were instances of political denunciation and personal betrayal. Moreover, Heidegger remained a dues-paying member of the Nazi Party until the regime’s bitter end. Throughout the 1930s, he continued to open his classes with the so-called German greeting: “Heil Hitler!” To a former Jewish student, the philosopher Karl Lowith, he confided that his “partisanship for National Socialism lay in the essence of his philosophy”; it derived, he claimed, from the concept of “historicity”--which stressed the importance of authentic historical commitment--that he laid out in his 1927 book, “Being and Time.”

With the regime’s fall, Heidegger paid dearly for his transgressions. A university de-Nazification commission found that, by lending the prestige of his name and reputation to the regime in its early months, Heidegger had helped to legitimize it in the eyes of other German scholars. During the proceedings, an especially damning letter of evaluation was provided by philosopher Karl Jaspers, who claimed that Heidegger’s philosophy was “unfree, dictatorial, and uncommunicative.” “I think it would be quite wrong,” concluded Jaspers, “to turn such a teacher loose on the young people of today, who are psychologically extremely vulnerable.” Heidegger was stripped of his right to teach and granted emeritus status. The man who thought of himself as the most significant philosopher since Heraclitus did not take the verdict well. For nearly two months he was hospitalized for depression. According to recent findings by Heidegger biographer Hugo Ott, at one point he even attempted to take his own life.

In Safranski’s view, Heidegger’s case presents us with a quintessentially German drama: His life is a parable of the way that, in German cultural traditions, good and evil are frequently combined. Heidegger’s tragedy is thus a tragedy of genius. Following the war, novelist Thomas Mann expressed a similar insight when he observed, “There are not two Germanys, an evil and a good, but only one, which, through devil’s cunning, transformed its best into evil.”

But the problem with Mann’s remarks is that they tacitly contain a rationalization of evil. In essence, Safranski adopts the same Nietzschean standpoint toward Heidegger that Mann promotes in his novel “Dr. Faustus”: Evil is the price one must pay for creative genius; the two inevitably go hand in hand. This is an old trope from the days of German romanticism: Morality and genius are mutually exclusive. The genius is the one who, by breaking old rules, establishes his own. Thus, a genius is someone who is by definition above the law. He is a “law giver” in the sense of being a “law unto himself.” Nietzsche’s “Thus Spoke Zarathustra” is full of such adages.

Safranski’s biography is far from uncritical of Heidegger. Yet, by recycling this leitmotif concerning the “moral superiority of genius”--in essence, the ethos of Nietzsche’s superman--he reproduces one of the key elements of the German ideology that was responsible for so much trouble.

The strength of Safranski’s study is that, unlike previous biographers, he displays an excellent grasp of Heidegger’s notoriously hermetic philosophy. He is comfortable with the way that, whereas most modern philosophy (starting with Descartes) took the individual knowing “subject” as its point of departure, Heidegger proceeded from the standpoint of a situated self, man’s Being-in-the-world. Unlike other modern philosophers, he was not primarily interested in legitimizing scientific judgments about the world. Instead, he addressed a series of more practical and worldy concerns--concerns about the nature of human existence. Hence, his early existentialism revolved around concepts such as “mood,” “care,” “everydayness” and “authenticity.” His rejection of philosophical rationalism and preoccupation with questions of human existence foreshadowed the existentialism of Sartre and Camus.

Safranski even throws in a couple of good anecdotes to boot. Heidegger’s later thought revolved around a quasi-mystical veneration of the notion of being. In describing being, Heidegger was prone to serving up pompous phrases such as: “Being is the trembling of Godding”--which makes about as much sense in German as it does in English. When Heidegger heard the joke about the man who perpetually sits in a tavern because of his wife (“What about your wife?” “Oh she talks and talks and talks.” “What does she talk about?” “That she doesn’t say.”), he admitted that that’s how it was with his philosophy. When the wife of a friend played Schubert’s Sonata in B flat, Heidegger remarked with envy: “This we can’t do with philosophy.”

In his later years, Heidegger took to spelling the German word for being, sein, with a “y”--seyn--to emphasize his break with all prior attempts to philosophize about being. Safranski, to his credit, knows a fraud when he sees one: “[T]his whole metaphysical dadaism, is in terms of semantic content, Nothing.” Heidegger could write volumes about the nature of being. But, amid this glorious conceptual edifice, there was precious little room for the everyday concerns of flesh-and-blood human beings. Though he could pontificate endlessly about the mysterious “destining” of being, throughout his life, Heidegger showed a marked incapacity for self-knowledge. Instead, he rationalized his commitment to Nazism by invoking the prerogatives of genius: “He who thinks greatly must err greatly.”

When Safranski sticks to his subject matter, he’s informative. When he digresses to settle old political scores with the ‘60s generation, he merely beclouds his narrative focus. He displays a visceral hostility to the German New Left. In his view, the student protesters of the 1960s were merely the Nazis of their day. The irony here, of course, is that however misguided the students’ idealism may have been, they vigorously strove to contest the remnants of political authoritarianism in postwar German society. There may have been zealots and extremists among them. But to tar and feather them as “Nazis” is misleading and unfair.

Safranski can also barely conceal his dislike of Heidegger’s rival, Frankfurt School philosopher Theodor Adorno. To be sure, Adorno, who was one of Heidegger’s major postwar critics, held that Heidegger’s philosophy was “fascist to its very core.” Safranski devotes the better part of his penultimate chapter trying to mock or lay low what he calls Adorno’s “jargon of dialectics” (in express retaliation for Adorno’s characterization of Heidegger’s philosophy as a “jargon of authenticity”). But whatever points he has to make are lost amid the polemical excesses of his attack.

In the book’s description of his final years, Heidegger emerges as a sympathetic figure. During the 1960s, the reclusive philosopher visited his beloved Greece--the original site of “thinking”--three times, keeping an inspired diary. He avidly followed Germany’s fortunes on the soccer field. Once, when a local theater director tried to engage Heidegger in a philosophical conversation, Heidegger, as if under a spell, began waxing lyrical about the talents of legendary German midfielder Franz Beckenbauer. Upon encountering a church or chapel on one of his frequent hiking expeditions, Heidegger would piously genuflect. Asked by a fellow philosopher if this gesture were consistent with his avowed atheism, Heidegger replied: “One must think historically. And where there has been so much praying, there the divine is present in a very special way.”