At the Existentialist Café (9 page)

Heidegger discovered
Brentano’s thesis when he was eighteen, living in his home town of Messkirch, not far from Freiburg but in the Upper Danube region of Swabia. It is a quiet Catholic town, dominated by a wildly over-the-top baroque church in the local style. Its interior, a riot of white-and-gold excess, with saints and angels and flying cherubs by the cloud, comes as a cheering surprise after the stern exterior and the solemn, dark forests around the town.

Martin, born on 26 September 1889, was the eldest child, with a younger sister, Marie, and a brother, Fritz. Their father, Friedrich, was the sexton of the church, and the family lived just opposite it: their steep-roofed house, the plain central one in a group of three, is still there. Martin and Fritz helped out with church duties from an early age, picking flowers for decoration and climbing the tower steps to ring its seven
bells in the mornings. Each Christmas they began extra
early. After drinking milky coffee and eating cakes beside the Christmas tree at home, they would cross the little square to the church before 4 a.m. and began the
Schrecke-läuten
(fright-ringing) that woke all the townspeople. At Easter they stilled the bells and instead turned a handle to make small hammers hit wood, producing a rattling, pocking sound.

(Illustrations Credit 3.1)

The sound of hammers striking wood or metal resonated through Martin’s world, as his father was also the town’s master
cooper, making barrels and other ware. (A quick online search reminds us that coopers used to make ‘casks, barrels, buckets, tubs, butter churns, hogsheads, firkins, tierces, rundlets, puncheons, pipes, tuns, butts, pins and breakers’ — a beautiful list of objects that now sounds like a half-remembered dream.) The boys would go out in the nearby forest after woodcutters had passed by,
collecting pieces which their father could use. Heidegger later wrote to his fiancée describing his memories of the cooper’s workshop, and also of his grandfather, a shoemaker, who would sit on his three-legged stool hammering nails into
soles, by the light of a
glass globe. All this is worth dwelling on because, for Heidegger even more than for most writers, these childhood images remained important to him all his life; he never abandoned his allegiance to the world they evoked.

(Illustrations Credit 3.2)

When the ‘helpful son’ jobs were done, Martin would run out past the church and through the park of the equally grandiose Messkirch castle into the forest, and sit with his homework on a roughhewn bench at the side of a path in the deep woods. The
bench and path helped him to think through any tangled text he was studying; later, whenever he was bogged down in a tough philosophical task, he would think back to the bench in the woods, and see his way out. His thoughts were always filled with images of dark trees, and dappled forest light filtering through the leaves to the open paths and clearings. He gave his books titles like
Holzwege
(Forest paths) and
Wegmarken
(Trailmarks). Their pages resound with the ringing of hammers and the serene tolling of village bells, with rustic crafts and the heft and feel of manual labour.

Even in his most rarefied later writing — or especially there — Heidegger liked to think of himself as a humble Swabian peasant, whittling and chopping at his work. But he was never exactly a man of the people. From boyhood, there was something set apart about him. He was shy, tiny, black-eyed, with a pinched little mouth, and all his life he had difficulty
meeting people’s eyes. Yet he had a mysterious power over others. In an interview for a BBC TV programme in 1999, Hans-Georg Gadamer recalled asking an old man in Messkirch if he had known Martin Heidegger as a boy. The man replied:

‘
Martin? Yes, certainly I remember him.’

‘What was he like?’

‘
Tscha
[Well],’ answered the man, ‘What can I say? He was the smallest, he was the weakest, he was the most unruly, he was the most useless. But he was in command of all of us.’

As he grew up, Heidegger attended seminary schools, then went to Freiburg where he studied divinity. But meanwhile, his encounter with Brentano’s thesis led him to immerse himself in Aristotle, and to feel drawn towards philosophical rather than theological inquiry. He picked up the Freiburg university library’s copy of Husserl’s
Logical Investigations
,
borrowed it, and kept it in his room for two years. He was fascinated to see that Husserl’s philosophy took no account of God. (Husserl, although a Christian, kept his faith separate from his work.) Heidegger studied Husserl’s method of proceeding by close description and attention to phenomena.

He then followed Husserl in switching to philosophy, and building his career by scraping a living as an unsalaried
Privatdozent
for years. Also like Husserl, he acquired a family to support: he married Elfride Petri in March 1917, and they had two sons, Jörg and Hermann. Elfride was a Protestant, so they covered all bases by having a registry office wedding followed by two religious ones, Protestant and Catholic — after which they both broke with their churches completely. Heidegger officially ceased to consider himself a believer, although signs of a yearning for sacred things are not hard to find in his work. Their marriage lasted, despite episodes of infidelity on both sides. Many years later,
Hermann Heidegger revealed a secret he had heard from his mother long before: his real father was not Martin Heidegger, but a doctor with whom she had had an affair.

(Illustrations Credit 3.3)

During Heidegger’s early years studying and teaching in Freiburg,
Husserl was not yet based there; as soon as he arrived in 1916, Heidegger set out to court him. At first, Husserl responded in a vague and formal way. Then, as would happen to many others, he became enthralled by the strange young man. By the end of the war, Husserl was as keen as Heidegger was to
symphilosopheín
— philosophise together, in the Greek word their circle liked to use.

At that time, Husserl was still in deep grief for the son killed in the war — and Heidegger was of a similar age to the Husserl children. (Unlike them, he had avoided the front line because he had a weak heart, and was instead given duties as a mail censor and weather-station assistant.) Having the young Heidegger around had an extraordinary effect on Husserl. ‘
O your youth — what a joy it is to me’, he wrote. He became uncharacteristically gushy, adding three
postscripts to one letter and then scolding himself for sounding like an old chatterbox. Husserl later looked back and
marvelled at how infatuated he had let himself become, but it’s not hard to see why it happened. At his sixty-first birthday party in 1920, Malvine Husserl jokingly called Heidegger the
‘phenomenological child’. Heidegger cheerfully played up to the role of adoptee, sometimes beginning his letters ‘Dear fatherly friend’. He once wrote a thank-you letter for the Husserls’ hospitality by saying, ‘
I truly had the feeling of being accepted as a son.’

In 1924, Husserl helped Heidegger to get a paid job at the University of Marburg, not too far away. He stayed there for four years. In 1928, aged thirty-nine, he returned to Freiburg to take over the chair left vacant when Husserl retired — again with Husserl’s helpful support. It was a relief to be back: Heidegger was never happy in Marburg, which he called a
‘foggy hole’, but it did give his career its first big push, and while there he also had an intoxicating affair with his student Hannah Arendt.

During the Marburg years, Elfride Heidegger used an inheritance to buy a plot of land just outside the Black Forest village of
Todtnauberg, twenty-nine kilometres from Freiburg, overlooking the grand horseshoe sweep of village and valley. She designed a wood-shingled hut to be built on the site, wedged into the hillside. It was a gift for her husband: the family often went together, but Heidegger
spent much time working there alone. The landscape, criss-crossed by paths to help him think, was even finer than that of his childhood. Then as now, it was frequented by skiers, sledders and hikers, but in evenings or out of season it was silent and tranquil, with the tall trees looking down like dignified grown-ups on the humans playing between them. When alone there, Heidegger would ski, walk, light a fire, cook simple meals, talk to the peasant neighbours, and settle for long hours at his desk, where — as he wrote to Arendt in 1925 — his writing took on the calm
rhythm of a man chopping wood in a forest.

(Illustrations Credit 3.4)

Increasingly, Heidegger imported the peasant image into his town job too. He started wearing a specially tailored version of traditional Black Forest dress: a brown farmer’s jacket, with broad lapels and a high collar, set off by knee-length breeches. His students called it his ‘existential’ or
‘one’s ownmost’ look, the latter a reference to one of his favourite phrases. They found him funny, but he did not share the joke because his sense of humour was somewhere between peculiar and non-existent. It didn’t matter: his clothes, his rustic Swabian accent and his seriousness only heightened his mystique. His student Karl Löwith described how Heidegger’s
‘impenetrable’ quality gave
him a mesmerising hold over the class; you never knew where you were with him, so you hung on every word. Hans Jonas, who studied with both Husserl and Heidegger, remarked in a later radio interview that Heidegger was by far the more exciting of the two. Asked why, he replied that it was largely ‘
because he was much more difficult to understand’.

According to Gadamer, Heidegger’s trademark style was to raise up a ‘
breathtaking swirl of questions’ which would billow forth until, finally, he would roll them up into ‘deep dark clouds of sentences from which the lightning flashed’, leaving the students stunned. There was something occult about this, so the students created another nickname for him: the
‘little magician from Messkirch’. Even amid the clouds and lightning, however, he usually focused his lectures on minutely close readings of the classical philosophers, demanding extreme concentration on the text. According to Hannah Arendt’s memories of studying with him, Heidegger taught them to
think
, and
thinking meant ‘digging’. He worked his way down to the roots of things, she wrote, but rather than hauling them into the light he left them embedded, merely opening up exploratory routes around them — just as his beloved paths wound their way through the forest. Years later, and with a less sympathetic attitude, Daniel Dennett and Asbjørn Steglich-Petersen’s satirical
Philosophical Lexicon
would define a ‘heidegger’ as ‘
a ponderous device for boring through thick layers of substance’, as in, ‘It’s buried so deep we’ll have to use a heidegger.’