At the Existentialist Café (15 page)

Müller turned to Heidegger — but Heidegger pedantically stuck to his point, saying, ‘I gave the only answer that corresponds to the truth. But I have wrapped it in a cover of justifiable, good things.’

‘That won’t help me,’ replied Müller. ‘The sentence is there.’

Heidegger said: ‘As a Catholic, you should know that one must tell the truth. Consequently, I cannot cross out the sentence.’

Müller disputed the theology behind this, but Heidegger was unmoved: ‘No, I will stick to what I was asked. I can’t take back my
whole report now and say I won’t write one at all, because people already know that I have given one to the university to be passed on. Nothing can be done. Don’t hold it against me.’

These final words were what astonished Müller most. All
Heidegger seemed to care about was justifying his own actions, with no thought to the danger facing the other man. Fortunately, Müller escaped serious consequences on this occasion, but it was no thanks to Heidegger. He remembered his parting remark to Heidegger that day: ‘The point is not that I might hold it against you, the point is my existence.’ His feelings about his former mentor were different from then on: he could never forget his experience of ‘a certain ambiguity in Heidegger’s character’.

This word ‘ambiguity’ comes up again and again in describing Heidegger, and it applies not just to his character or actions, but to his philosophy. Ever since 1945, philosophers and historians have tried to work out whether Heidegger’s thought is entirely invalidated by his Nazism, or whether it can be judged in isolation from his personal and political flaws. Some people have proposed trying to rescue certain aspects while discarding others, burying the dangerous bits like so much radioactive waste while holding up the occasional fragment deemed worthwhile. But this seems unsatisfying: Heidegger’s philosophy forms a dense, complicated whole in which every aspect depends on every other. If you try to remove everything unpleasant from
Being and Time
, the structure collapses.

Moreover, almost every important thought in Heidegger holds some ambiguity
within
itself. The most dangerous ideas can also be the ones with most to offer — as in the passages calling us to authenticity and answerability. Most puzzling of all are the sections where he wrote about
Mitsein
, or being with others: he was the first philosopher to make this experience so central in a philosophical work. He wrote beautifully about
‘solicitude’ for others: about the moments when we ‘leap in’ for another person, out of concern and fellow feeling. Yet none of this enabled Heidegger to show any fellow feeling at all for those suffering or persecuted in Nazi Germany. He could write about
Mitsein
and solicitude, but he could not apply it to history, or to
the predicaments of those around him, including those to whom he seemed close.

He certainly seemed to have no idea what he was putting his friends through. Many who knew him, especially Husserl, Jaspers and Arendt, were confused by Heidegger’s ambiguity, and wounded by his actions and attitudes. They could not bring themselves to forget him, so they agonised over him. Their effort to figure him out gave them a glimpse into a void. It wasn’t that Heidegger had a bad character, Hannah Arendt wrote to Jaspers in 1949; it was that he had
no
character. Sartre said a very similar thing in an essay of 1944, speaking of Heidegger’s Nazism: ‘
Heidegger has no character; there’s the truth of the matter.’ It is as if there was something about everyday human life that the great philosopher of everydayness did not get.

Brooding up at the hut in Todtnauberg, Heidegger struggled on with his writing and thinking through the 1930s. In 1935, he wrote miserably of ‘
the darkening of the world, the flight of the gods, the destruction of the earth, the reduction of human beings to a mass, the hatred and mistrust of everything creative and free’. But this was ambiguous too: did he mean that the Nazis were responsible for this, or that the general darkening and massification of humanity had made Nazism necessary?

He may have felt some confusion himself during these years; he certainly had difficulty expressing his thoughts. In July 1935, he wrote to Jaspers saying that all he had been able to manage lately in his work was a ‘
thin stammering’. But he had been working on translations, and with the letter he enclosed some lines from Sophocles’
Antigone
, the chorus’ ‘Ode on Man’ section. (He would also have this translation printed privately later, as a birthday gift to his wife in 1943.) It begins, in the published English translation of Heidegger’s German:

The manifold uncanny holds sway

And nothing uncannier than man.

Heidegger’s thought itself was now becoming more and more ‘uncanny’. In his snowy forest, he began a long, slow reorientation which has become known as the ‘turn’ (
die Kehre
), although it can be pinned down to no single event. It was a process leading Heidegger towards a more earthy, more receptive, more poetical way of thinking, and away from talk of resoluteness and decisiveness.

His poeticising and communing with the forest also led to new decisions of his own, however. Around the time he was considering whether to continue the rectorship, he was also offered a university post in
Berlin — an option which must have complicated the Freiburg decision. But he rejected the offer. He gave his reasons in a radio address, published in the Nazi-approved publication
Der Alemanne
on 7 March 1934.

The address did not openly deal with politics at all, though its implications were political. He said that he would not move to Berlin because it would take him away from his Black Forest environment — from ‘the slow and deliberate growth of the fir-trees, the brilliant, simple splendour of the meadows in bloom, the rush of the mountain brook in the long autumn night, the stern simplicity of the flatlands covered with snow’. When a blizzard blows around the cabin on a deep winter’s night, he wrote, ‘that is the perfect time for philosophy’. And:

When the young farm boy drags his heavy sled up the slope and guides it, piled high with beech logs, down the dangerous descent to his house, when the herdsman, lost in thought and slow of step, drives his cattle up the slope, when the farmer in his shed gets the countless shingles ready for his roof, my work is of the same sort.

When the offer first came through, said Heidegger, he sought advice from his Todtnauberg neighbour, a seventy-five-year-old farmer since identified as Johann
Brender. Brender thought for a moment — one of those long, thoughtful moments that wise country people supposedly go in for. Then he replied, not with words but with a quiet shake of the head. And that was all it took. There would be no Berlin for Heidegger; no cosmopolitan urban life; no more flirting with the
‘intoxication of power’. It was back to the south-west German forest, to the tall trees, to the wood-chopping, and to the rustic benches at the side of the pathways, where his thinking worked best — that is, where
‘all things become solitary and slow’.

(Illustrations Credit 4.2)

These were the scenes — which just happened to correspond to Nazi rural kitsch of the worst sort — which would guide the rest of Heidegger’s philosophising.

Karl and Gertrud Jaspers were also wrestling with their own decision, and continued to do so through the 1930s: should they leave Germany? The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 severely restricted their lives: they stripped Jews of their citizenship and banned mixed marriages, although those already existing, like theirs, were officially tolerated for the moment. The following year, Jaspers lost his university position because of his marriage. Yet they still could not bring themselves to
leave. Instead, they kept their heads down and lived cautiously, very much as Jaspers had learned always to breathe and move cautiously, for fear of damaging his vital organs.

Hannah Arendt, instead, left early on: she had the benefit of a powerful warning. Just after the Nazi takeover, in spring 1933, she had been arrested while researching materials on anti-Semitism for the German Zionist Organisation at Berlin’s Prussian State Library. Her apartment was searched; both she and her mother were locked up briefly, then released. They fled, without stopping to arrange travel documents. They crossed to Czechoslovakia (then still safe) by a method that sounds almost too fabulous to be true: a sympathetic German family on the border had a house with its front door in Germany and its back door in Czechoslovakia. The family would invite people for dinner, then let them leave through the back door at night. From Prague, Arendt and her mother went on to Geneva, then to Paris, and finally to New York, where Arendt settled. She told a television interviewer later that everyone had known from the start how dangerous Nazi Germany was, but knowing it in theory was one thing, while acting on it and turning it into
‘personal destiny’ was very different. They survived.

(Illustrations Credit 4.3)

Heidegger’s former sparring partner at Davos, Ernst Cassirer, did not wait for a warning. Living in Hamburg, where he had taught since 1919, he saw how things were going as soon as the laws of April 1933 came in and left promptly with his family in May. He spent two years at Oxford University, then six years at Göteborg in Sweden; when it looked as though Sweden would fall under German control, he moved on to the United States, where he taught at Yale and then Columbia. He survived until just before the end of the war: on 13 April 1945, in New York, he died of a heart attack while out for a walk.

Emmanuel Levinas had left for France well before the Nazis came to power. He taught at the Sorbonne, became naturalised as a Frenchman in 1931, and signed up to fight when the war began.

The
Husserls’ children, Elli and Gerhart, emigrated to the United States. Edmund
Husserl himself was offered a post at the University of Southern California in November 1933; he could have become a Californian. I find it strangely easy to imagine him there, as neat as ever in his suit, strolling with a cane beneath the palm trees and clear white sun — just as many other intellectual European émigrés did. But he was not prepared to leave the country that was his home. Malvine Husserl stuck by him, equally defiant.

Husserl continued his work in his own extensive private library. The student whose safety Heidegger jeopardised, Max Müller, was often sent on errands to his house by Heidegger, usually to keep Husserl up to date on who was doing what in the philosophy faculty and which dissertations were being written. Apparently Heidegger did not want Husserl to be entirely isolated, yet he never went to visit him personally. Müller was pleased to have this excuse to see the great phenomenologist. From what he saw, he concluded that Husserl was indeed rather cut off, mainly because he took little interest in outside affairs. ‘
He was a strongly monological type and, as he had entirely concentrated on his philosophical problems, he did not actually experience the time that had begun in 1933 as “hard”, unlike his wife.’

Husserl was paying more attention to the world than was apparent, however. In August 1934, he applied to go to Prague for the Eighth International Congress of Philosophy, dedicated to the theme ‘the mission of philosophy in our time’. He was denied a travel permit, so he sent a letter to be read out at the congress instead. It was a short but stirring document, in which Husserl warned that a crisis was threatening the European tradition of reason and philosophical inquiry. He called on scholars in every field to take up their responsibility — their ‘answerability to themselves’, or
Selbstverantwortung
— to counter this crisis, and especially to establish international networks that would bring thinkers together across borders.

He repeated a similar message in person in a lecture to the Cultural
Society in Vienna in May 1935, this time being allowed to travel. Scholars must unite, he said, to resist the current slide into dangerous, irrationalist mysticism. A
‘heroism of reason’ was Europe’s only hope. In November 1935, he applied again to travel to Prague, and permission was granted, so he delivered another lecture making similar arguments. Throughout that year, he had been working his ideas into a longer project. He finished the first two sections in January 1936, and
published them as
The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
. Since the anti-Jewish laws now forbade him to publish anything in Germany, the work appeared in
Philosophia
, an international yearbook based in Belgrade.