Sancta Susanna: opera in one act by Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith was one of the most important German composers of the 20th century.

Alfred Einstein’s famous assessment of Hindemith as the natural musician “who produces music as a tree bears fruit” may easily and appropriately be extended to all his music making, not just composition.

In 1921 he composed the one act opera “Sancta Susanna” on a libretto based on the play “Sancta Susanna” by August Stramm.

August Stramm

August Stramm was a German poet, born in Muenster in 1874. He became a postal official after his university studies, and started contributing to the periodical “Der Sturm” in 1913.

Der Strum, October 1917

Although Stramm in 1914 was a reserve officer, he enthusiastically enlisted for active duty and was sent to the front.

Stramm died in 1915 at the Russian front, in Belarus.

Stramm’s supercharged theatrical style had led to his works being dubbed Schreidramen (Screamplays).

Though the play’s religio-erotic symbolism is the outward manifestation of its power to disturb, Hindemith’s music grippingly reinforces and intensifies that disturbance. Impressive though the first two members
of his operatic trilogy had been, Sancta Susanna is his first authentic masterpiece. Here he has powerfully assimilated all the contemporary influences, and the music speaks an Expressionist language entirely
Hindemith’s own.

The spine-tingling virtuosity of the orchestration is remarkable for the hallucinatory vividness of its scene-painting and its portrayal (betrayal, rather) of Angst and subconscious desire with a phantasmal
refinement of instrumental chiaroscuro. Yet Hindemith’s opera has firm tonal foundations, upon which fierce dissonance alternates with delusory consonance in nightmarish ways. Sancta Susanna is
built, like its cathedral cloister, in large, wellproportioned blocks. The music is almost monothematic, proceeding by variation of a principal melody (the lyric, nightingale-like flute solo heard in the deceptively beautiful nocturnal prelude). From this source derive many sinister subsidiaries, such as the clarinet theme for the appearance of the horrific spider – which in turn becomes the theme of the nuns’ denunciation of Susanna as she entraps herself in the web of her own emotions.

Paul Hindemith composed Sancta Susanna as part of a trilogy, which also included Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen and Das Nusch-Nuschi. These two works premiered in 1921, but Sancta Susannawas not performed because of its obscene content.

Fritz Busch, who was responsible in 1921 for the turbulent premieres of Das NuschNuschi (which infuriated the audience by using a quotation from Tristan to accompany a burlesque castration scene) and Miirder, Hoffnung der Frauen (“Murderer, hope of women”, a setting of Oskar Kokoschka’s luridly incomprehensible expressionist drama about the war of the sexes), flatly refused to conduct Sancta Susanna on the grounds of its blasphemous obscenity: Susanna is an hysterical nun who first strips naked in front of the convent high altar and then tears the loincloth from a statue of the crucified Christ. The three scores made Hindemith’s name as an enfant terrible.

Sancta Susanna finally premiered in Frankfurt in 1922 and caused immediately a scandal.

Sancta Susanna was charged with blasphemy and Frankfurt institutions like the Catholic Women’s League protested against the performances and even demanded the pieces be withdrawn.
In 1934 Hindemith banned further productions of the three works. He had distanced himself from the compositional style of his early works and was unwilling to subject the works to any further public debate on morality.

Reviewing the world premiere in 1922, philosopher Theodore Adorno wrote:

In Sancta Susanna, everything that happened musically is developed from one theme; a theme of emotional power which pertains not to one individual, nor to one mood, but quite simply to the fundamentally irrational occurrences of this opera.

Synopsis (from the Chandos booklet)

In the cloister chapel of a nunnery, old Sister Clementia discovers the young nun Susanna in abject prayer before the high altar, troubled in spirit and body by the warm, windy, nightingale-loud summer night.

They become aware of movement outside: a couple is making love under the linden-trees.

Susanna calls the peasant-girl inside and tries to make her feel guilty; she demands to see the man too, but he enters only to snatch his girl away.

Susanna curses him as Satan.

Clementia, agitated, seems to be hearing something.

She tells Susanna how, many years ago, on a night like this, she saw a girl come naked to the altar and embrace and kiss the life-size figure of the crucified Christ.

For this blasphemy she was buried alive, and the image has been veiled ever since.

The tale only fans Susanna’s repressed sexual hysteria.

She, too, imagines she hears the voice of the entombed girl and, stripping naked, she defies Clementia and rips the covering from Christ’s torso.

But she is terrified when a huge spider falls into her hair from the crucifix, and cowers beneath the altar while midnight strikes and the other nuns file into the chapel.

Nevertheless she finds a transfiguring strength from her act: she demands that they wall her up, and endures their curses as the curtain falls.

In the Gramophone review of the opera, we read:

“Musically speaking, the shock value of Sancta Susanna lies in the expectations aroused by the opening (a delicately atmospheric, romantic nocturne with almost Puccinian overtones; the quiet, chant-like dialogue that follows) and their contradiction by the feverish, obsessive music (Hindemith predicting his Cardillac manner—only four years off, after all) of the main action.”

A much larger-scale summing-up of Hindemith’s ideas had come earlier in the 1930s with the completion of the opera Mathis der Maler (Mathis the Artist) and the symphony based on it. The German painter Matthias Grunewald symbolized for Hindemith the dilemma of all artists caught up in political upheavals: Hindemith had himself been attacked by the Nazis, and in 1937 was forced to leave Germany. The three movements of the symphony Mathis der Maler each represent one of the panels of Grunewald’s altarpiece at Isenheim, and the warmth and humanity of the work show the composer coming to terms with his Classical and Romantic heritage, and with his innate respect for tradition.

Hindemith found refuge from the Nazis in America, where he taught at Yale University and took United States citizenship in 1946. A series of orchestral commissions included the Symphonic metamorphosis on themes of Carl Maria von Weber, whose wordy title conceals a work of the most deft and delightful humour, an antidote to the common view of the mature Hindemith as a composer of unbending Teutonic seriousness. In 1953 he moved to Switzerland, and there, in his last years, completed Die Harmonic der Welt (The Harmony of the World), a mystical opera about the astronomer Johan Kepler.

Thomas Schutte – German, Sculptor and Draughtsman

Thomas Schütte © Jörg Koopmann, May 2009

I first saw works by Schutte in 1999, when he exhibited in the Bernier/Eliades Gallery in Athens, Greece. What impressed me back then were the aluminum figures “Great Spirits”.

Thomas Schutte: Grosse Geister - Great Spirits - No 9 and 14, 1998, Photo courtesy of Bernier/Eliades Gallery

Some 13 years ago, the press release of Bernier/Eliades Gallery read like this:

‘THOMAS SCHÜTTE

January 16 – February 25, 1999

Thomas Schtutte was born in 1954, in Oldenburg,Germany. He lives and works in Dϋsseldorf.

“One of the most important German artists working in the late 20th century, Thomas Schütte’s installations, sculptures, models, drawings and watercolours can take many, often contradictory guises.

His art looks utilitarian, offering shelter, sustenance and companionship, yet delivers false promises and alien worlds: a museum that incinerates art; potatoes made of bronze; or the artist’s own ‘audience’, consisting of wooden stand-ins or metallic figures assembled before his work. Like Gulliver wandering through a Swiftian world of shifting scales, the viewer is immersed in a series of theatrum mundi, poetic yet dysfunctional utopias which alternate between the private and the public, the romantic and the sceptical.

The artist deploys a vivid spectrum of colours and a range of materials to revision the basic constituents – natural, cultural and political – of everyday life whilst exploring fundamental questions about the artist and society.”

(Thomas Schütte, Phaidon)

The exhibition will last until February 25, 1999.’

Thomas Schutte: Gross Geister, Palazzo Grassi, Venice

I met one of the great spirits again in Venice in late 2011, in Palazzo Grassi. The photo below is shaken and obscure, but it is better than nothing. The sculpture is enveloped by Jeff Koons’ Balloon Dog.

The photo was taken under distress, as in spite of the fact that there was no reasonably priced catalogue, the policy of the Palazzo is not to allow photographs. I protest!

“The Grosse Geister came to life through the formation and molding of long strands of wax, which were 
then cast in aluminum. This explains their anti-monumental appearance: they are both robotic and organic, futuristic and absurd. The “great minds” referred to in this work’s title are contained in reflective aluminum shells, which passively absorb the shadows and forms of their environment. Despite their monumental size, they seem elastic, ready to move about the space as soon as the viewer looks away. This blending of contradictory elements results in these comic somewhat mischievous sculptures, through which Schütte gives mass and presence to vaporous beings.” (Source: Palazzo Grassi)

Thomas Schutte: Grosse Geister, Kunstplatz Graben, Wien, 2011

While I was in Venice, other great spirits were installed in Kunstplatz Graben, in Vienna. This time, they are black and look menacing. The neutral curiosity of the alumunium is replaced by the threatening black shining surface.

I quote from the October 2009 issue of “frieze” magazin’s review of the Thomas Schutte exhibition in Munich’s Haus der Kunst:

‘Schütte’s ‘Große Geister’ series stalked the entrance to the show, foreshadowing the exhibition’s partial focus on the figure and the artist’s ambivalent relationship to it. Melty, molten and reflective, these aluminium figures evince both menace and levity: part Darth Vader, part Pillsbury Doughboy. Outsized, they put the viewer at a disadvantage, an auspicious start to Schütte’s lecture on power relations. ‘

I have two comments on the Great Spirits:

• The name chosen: we do not have a person, or a creature even. We have an entity that cannot be grasped by our senses, it is a Spirit.
• The entity is a cross between the human form and a robot, although the Michelin Man also comes to mind (or SPirit?) for parts of the body.

Thomas Schutte: Efficiency Men, Punta della Dogana, Venice

Next meeting with Schutte’s work was in Punta della Dogana, in Venice yet again. This time I met with the “Efficiency Men”.

“These works explore states of conflict, isolation, disillusionment, despair and vulnerability, which are also echoed in his Efficiency Men(2005), spectral figures made out of thin steel spirals, wrapped in heavy blankets from which emerge three disquieting colored silicone faces. Grotesque masks of corrupt contemporary society, the three figures advance in space like prisoners in chains engaged in a forced patrol.”  

(Source: In praise of Doubt)

Thomas Schutte: Four Sisters in Bath, 1989, Tate Gallery

Before concluding, let us take a bath with the four sisters, let the water cleanse us and our Minds, Great and Small, silver and black, and lets hope that we get out of the sight of the Efficincy Men.

P.S. I thank Tate Gallery for inspiring me to add “… and draughtsman” to the title of this post.

Objects that tell a story: (1) Carved Rosewood Sofa

Today I start a new series of posts, on objects that tell a story.

The first object is a carved rosewood sofa that I inherited from my mother, who died almost two years ago, on 5th August 2009. Her memory brought back to my mind this storyof the sofa.

The sofa was bought by my maternal grand father, Spiros, at the beginning of the 20th century. It was hand made in France and imported in Greece, where it took a prime position in the seating area of my grandfather’s house in Athens.

When the Germans occupied Athens in 1941, a Jewish family of friends came to my grandfather’s house in Koukaki, a neighbourhood near the Acropolis in Athens, and asked for help as they were persecuted by the occupying Germans.

My grandfather and grandmother both decided to help their Jewish friends. The Jewish family stayed with my grandfather’s family until the liberation of Athens in 1944. Due to lack of space, my mother, a young woman at the time, had to abandon her bedroom and sleep on the sofa.

This is why my mother was always calling this sofa “my little bed”.

After the liberation the family of friends left Greece and ended up in Israel. The two families lost touch until sometime in the early 80′s, when my mother got a telephone call from the elder son of the family. He was visiting Greece and wanted to see her. They met, like they were together the day before, although so many years had gone by. Time for them would be frozen, in the house in Koukaki.

Golo Mann: The History of Germany since 1789 – Part I

Born Angelus Gottfried Thomas Mann, he was the third son of the novelist Thomas Mann and his wife Katia Mann.

One of six children of Thomas Mann, he described the drawbacks of growing up with a famous novelist for a father.

Katia Mann with her six children

“We almost always had to keep quiet — in the morning because our father was working, in the afternoon because he first read, then napped, and toward evening, because he was again occupied with serious matters. And there would be a terrible outburst if we disturbed him, all the more hurtful because we almost never provoked him intentionally.”

(Source: The New York Times )

I got to know him because of his father, one of the giants of world lieterature, and bought his book “The History of Germnay since 1789″ years ago, when I was living in England, and forgotabout it withour reading it. All of a sudden, the book appeared in front of me one afternoon as if it had a voice, and without any further delay I Started reading it. It was an instant love affair, that continues until today, after almost two months of reading it.

Golo Mann

In today’s post I want to start sharing with you some quotes from the book, which I consider one of the best history books on Europe. The original’s title is “Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts”, first published in German in 1958. I use the English translation by Marian Jackson, reprinted by Penguin Books in 1990. For ease of reference, in each quote I will use  the page number of the 1990 reprint.

There will be two parts, the first covering the period from Napoleon to the end of Bismarck’s rule.

I am not aiming at reproducing the great intensity of the book, or summarize it. All I want is to present some elements of the work that are representative of its author and his views, which I find stimulating and challenging.

As an introduction to the period from 1789 to 1890, I offer the following timeline.

1813: Battle of the Nations at Leipzig; Napoleon is defeated

1848: a year of European revolutions; the Frankfurt Parliament convenes

1863: the Social Democratic Party of Germany is formed

1866: the kingdom of Prussia defeats the Austrian Empire in the battle of Koeniggaetz

1870: Bismarck emerges victorious from short war against the French

King Wilhelm of Prussia is proclaimed German Emperor

1871, January 18: GERMAN UNIFICATION – King Wilhelm of Prussia is proclaimed “German Emperor” in the Hall of Mirrors at the Chateau des Versailles. The German Empire is a confederation of 25 constituent states

1871: Bismarck becomes the first Chancellor of unified Germany

1875: Thomas Mann is born

1890: Bismarck resigns; Caprivi is sworn in a the next Chancellor

1898: Bismarck dies

Nations have always managed to find some rational necessity, some ideological reason for murdering each other (p. 28)

Nothing in history really starts at one particular moment (p.38)

The people’s of Europe have always learned from each other, and imitation is not necessarily follish (p. 59)

The moments in history in which noble enthusiasm reigns are short and one must be grateful for any lasting achievement from such a period (p. 67)

The mind of the individual is not a textbook, it is full of contradictions (p. 71)

… but eras follow each other without a break and clear divisions exist only in our minds (p. 85)

Ferdinand Lassalle

Our age is confused and devoid of ideas; it does not know what it wants and therefore anything seems possible (p.121)

A man without a home, without roots, cannot be effective, but he can see and speak, and that is what Heine did. (p. 142)

It is characteristic of men who have been disfranchised to take more than their share when they are liberated and to do to others what has been done to them (p. 169)

What anyway did right mean where interests conflicted, where two peoples were imbued with equal determination to survice? (p.171)

Anger unsupported by power can achieve nothing (p.178)

“The great questions of the age”, said Bismarck in 1862, “are not decided by speeches and majority decisions – that was the big mistake of 1848 and 1849 – but by blood and iron”. (p.204)

Ferdinand Lassalle once said: “Basically constitutional questions are not questions of law but of power; a country’s real constitution exists only in the actual prevailing political conditions. Written constitutions are only of value and permanence if they exactly express the existing distribution of power in sociaty”. (p. 214)

It is wrong entirely to condemn any class of human beings. The world is not a just place and when just men reach the top they are usually not as just as they promised to be while they were oppressed (p. 215)

Some men who are at odds with their age show that they belong to it by the extent of their opposition to it. (p.236)

Nevertheless he (Schopenhauer) was a Christian and distinguished between two basic tendencies in Christianity: an optimistic one promising paradise on earth, which he regarded as Jewish in origin, and an ascetic one proclaiming the misery and treachery of this world, teaching resignation and compassion. Something of this, which he found best expressed in the pantheism of the Indians, is present in his own work, and that is why a man who hated politics and modern society, a Christian commmunist like Leo Tolstoy, looked up to Schopenhauer as his master. (p. 239-240)

Yet he (Schopenhauer) wrote more beautiful and more forceful German than anybody who came after him; from the depths of German tradition, mysticism, romanticism and music came the moods which he skillfully combined into the four movements of his great symphony. (p. 240)

Arthur Schopenhauer

Everything that he (Bismarck) had tried to prevent or to delay, the worst that he feared, happened in the end: world wars, world revolution, the literal desctruction of the state which he idolized, with the result that the younger generation growing up today hardly knows the name of Prussia. Moreover, this happened not so very long after his death. People who knew him well actually experienced it; for example the wife of his son, who poisoned herself in 1945 a few hours before soldiers of the Red Army reached the family castle. A fate which serves to illustrate the futility of all political endeavour. Or should we say the futility of false, unjust and in the in the last resort unnatural political endeavour? Our story must seek to answer this question, although there will not be a clear yes or no. (p. 261-262)

He (Bismarck) denied energetically that Austria in the Balkans was defending German interests against Russia: “The mouth of the Danube is of very little interest to Germany”. Prussia had no reason to help Austria “to procure a few stinking Wallachians”. (p. 271)

His (Bismarcck’s) great achievement was not that he created German unity; that had been longed for and talked about for fifty years. What makes his achievement so very clever, daring and unnatural is the fact that he brought about German unity without the elements associated with it for fifty years: parliamentary rule, democracy, and demagogy. (p.287)

Bismarck saw the possible when it appeared and rejected the impossible. …If all but one player play a half-hearted game, the one who takes his game seriously is likely to win. (p.288)

The superior opponent attacks, and the attacker is almost always superiro; but he must know how to stop while he is still superiro. (p. 294)

Bismarck did not believe in elaborate constitutions. Like Lassalle he believed in the reality which alone would show what the constitution was and could be. (p. 307)

Often we are most eloquent about the virtues we lack…….The nature of politics does not permit a vacuum of power. (p. 312)

Payment for political services must be received in advance, not in retrospect. (p. 315)

But the frontiers between defence and attack are uncertain; and once the monster of war has been born it starts a life of its own not easily controllable by party political strategy. (p. 319)

Fuerst Otto von Bismarck

Too much elaborate theory may harm a cause, as it has probably harmed American constitutional life to the present day. Too much brutal pragmatism has the same effect. The Reich suffered because bits that did not make a whole were hastily and roughly thrown together, the Prussian military monarchy, federation and universal suffrage. (p. 329)

Historical power is never without historical guilt (p. 345)

But the element which Stoecker (Adolf Stoecker was the court chaplain to Kaiser Wilhelm II, and founded the Christian Social Party in the 1870s) knew how to mobilize and which remained a sinister driving force in German politics was anti-semitism. It was an age-old, evil force which ahd existed in latent form from Christian, even pre-Christian, times onwards, concealed or under control and almost forgotten, only to break out again into brutal misdeeds. (p. 391)

For twenty -five years Bismarck had been Europe’s first statesman, at times its arbiter. His personal qualities entitled him to a place among the ranks of the great rulers of the past, Wallenstein, Cromwell and Napoleon. But whereas in comparable crises they did not hesitate to resort to extremes, to civil war and rebellion, all the Prussian Prime Minister could do was obediently to draft his letter of resignation (Bismarck resigned on 18 March 1890) the moment an undeserving young man asked him to do so. (p. 410-411)

1001 Ways to Die – (5) Ferdinand Lassalle, German Politician and Publicist

Lassalle's Tomb in Wroclaw, Poland

The German politician and publicist Ferdinand Lassalle (1825-64) died after a duel in Switzerland at the age of 40.

Sturm und Drang marked the life of Ferdinand Lassalle. Born in 1825 in Breslau, Eastern Prussia (today’s Wroclaw in Poland) as Ferdinand Lasal, he changed his name to one that sounded less Jewish and more like a revolutionary French name. As lawyer for Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt in her divorce, he became famous and received a tidy sum, which he dedicated to the revolution and the workers’ movement.  (Source: IISH)

The General German workers’ Association (Allgemeiner Deutscher Arbeiterverein, ADAV) was established by Lassalle in 1863. The only stated purpose of this organization was the winning of equal, universal, and direct suffrage through peaceful and legal means. As a result of the “disagreements between MArx and Lassalle, a lot of German Marxists did not join the first labour party in the history of Germany.  

The German Social Democratic Party, SPD, ws established in 1875, absorbing ADAV.  

But Lassalle was not an “ordinary” socialist. He became friends with Bismarck. As Geoffrey Wawro notes in his review of Steiberg’s Bismarck biography on WSJ:

“Mr. Steinberg notes that Bismarck’s tactical use of democracy drew much from his controversial friendship, in the early 1860s, with the dashing socialist Ferdinand Lassalle. None of Bismarck’s conservative contemporaries could make sense of this relationship, but Bismarck learned from Lassalle clever ways to ­discredit liberalism and what the ­Germans called Manchestertum—the mania for British-style capitalism ­wedded to parliamentary government.

Lassalle loathed liberalism on the grounds that it merely replaced the landed aristocracy with a new elite of merchants and professionals; it would lead, he believed, “to a deep immorality and to exploitation” of the poor by the rich. Bismarck would later employ that novel line of attack to justify the paternal Polizeiwirtschaft (police state) that he wielded against German socialists and Catholics after unification. With one hand, he doled out old-age pensions and accident insurance, while removing representative government with the other.”

Ferdinand Lassalle

 

According to Golo Mann (The History of Germany since 1789) when Bismarck had to address the Reichstag years later, he made what was almost a declaration of love for LAssalle as a human being:

“He had something which geatly attracted me as a private person; he was one of the most intelligent and charming people with whom I have come in contact, a man who was ambitious in a big way. Lassalle was an energetic and highly intelligent person and to talk to him was very instructive; our discussions lasted for hours and I was always sorry when htey were over. I regret that our political positions did not allow more extended dialogue. I would have been glad to have a man of such talents and intellect as my neighbour in the country….”

But Lassalle was not just a politician. He was a man of many talents. In 1845, having graduated from University, he started wrting a book on Heraclitus. The author’s efforts were intrrupted by other events and the book was eventually published in 1858 with the title “ The philosophy of Heraclitus the Dark Philosopher of Ephesus”. In this essay Lassalle portrayed Heraclitus as a young Hegelian, or a precursor of Hegel.

The reason that led him to the fateful and fatal duel was is love for a woman, Helene von Donniges, the daughter of a Bavarian diplomat. Herr von Donniges was dead against the marriage between his daughter and the socialist Leader. Helene finally sucumbed to the huge pressures exerted by her family and renounced Lassalle, becoming engaged to the Wallachian Count von Racovitza. Lassalle who did not take this lightly challenged both Helene’s father and fiancee to a duel. The fiancee accepted and on the morning of 28 August 1864  Lassalle was mortally wounded. He died on August 31.

Wilhelm von Donniges

Helene married the Wallachian Count Von Racovitza and, subsequently, the actor Siegwart Friedmann, a leader in German theater. After Friedmann’s death, Helene married again, this time the Russian Baron von Schewitsch. After the Baron died in Munich in 1911, Helene became very distressed and committed suicide taking chloral hydrate in November of the same year.

Helene von Donniges

In a dramatic and romantic posture worthy of Sarah Bernhardt, Helene (Von Racovitza) poses at the Mora studio.

Paris - Musée d'Orsay: Jean Baptiste Carpeaux's La Danse (model)

Note: This allegorical vision of a genie of the dance, surrounded by Dionysiac creatures, was designed in 1865for the Paris Opera House. Puritans, who exist even in France, thought that the sculpture was obscene and erotic. Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux had given the genie a female face (that of Princess Helene de Racowitza) and a male nude body (the model was a carpenter, Sebastien Visat). (Source: flickr)

Lassalle's Death Mask

In lieblicher Blaue – In lovely blue: A poem by Friedrich Holderlin

Louise Keller, Holderlin (1842) drawing

More than a year ago, I wrote a post about Holderlin’s “Hyperion”. Today I revisit the great German poet, and present his poem “In lovely blue”. I have added some pictures to the words. In addition, there are explicary notes to the poem and the pictures. All of them are at the end of the post.

In Lovely Blue
by Friedrich Hölderlin
(Translated by Glenn Wallis)

Yves Klein, Blue Monochrome, MOMA, Ney York (See Note 1)

In lovely blue blooms the steeple with its metal
roof. Around the roof swirls the swallows’ cry,
surrounded by most touching blue. The sun rises high
above and tints the roof tin. But in the wind beyond, silently,
a weathercock crows. When someone comes forth from
the stairs of the belfry, it is a still life. And though the form
is so utterly strange, it becomes the figure of a
human being. The windows out of which the bells resound are as
gates to beauty. Because gates still take after nature
they resemble forest trees. Purity, too, is beauty. From within, out
of diverse things, a grave spirit emerges. So simple,
these images, so holy, that one often fears
to describe them. But the heavenly ones, always
good, possess, even more than the wealthy, virtue and
joy. Humans may follow suit. Might a person, when
life is full of trouble, look up and say: I, too,
want to be like this? Yes. As long as friendliness and purity
dwell in our hearts, we may measure ourselves not unfavorably
with the divine. Is God unknown? Is he manifest
as the sky?(a) This I tend to believe. It is the measure
of the human. Deserving, yet poetically, we dwell
on this earth (b). The shadow of night with its stars,
if I may say so, is no purer than we
who exist in the image of the divine (c).

Andre Butzer, Nasaheim (See Note 2)

Is there measure on earth? There is none. (d) For
the creator’s worlds can never contain the clap of thunder.
Because it blooms under the sun, a flower, too, is beautiful.
In life, the eye often finds creatures to call more beautiful
still than flowers. Oh! I know this well!
For to bleed in body and heart and cease to be whole—
does this please God? The soul, I believe, must remain
pure, or else the eagle will wing its way to the almighty
with songs of praise and the voice of so many
birds. It is substance and it is form. Beautiful little
brook, so touching you seem as you roll so clear,
like the eye of God, through the Milky Way. I know
you well. But tears stream from my eyes. A clear
life I see in the forms of creation that blooms around me
because I do not compare them unreasonably with the lonely pigeons
in the churchyard. People’s laughter seems
to grieve me—after all, I have a heart. Would I
like to be a comet? I believe so. For they have the quickness
of birds, they blossom in fire, and in their purity is as children’s.
To wish for more is beyond the measure of human nature.
The clarity of virtue also deserves praise from the grave
spirit that blows between the garden’s three pillars. A beautiful virgin must
garland her head with myrtle, for to do so is simply
her nature and her sensibility. But myrtle trees are found in Greece.

Samuel Francis, In lovely Blueness 2 (1955-56) (See Note 3)

When a person looks into a mirror and sees
his image, as if painted, that is like the Manes.
The human form has eyes, but the moon has light.
Perhaps King Oedipus (e) had an eye too many. This
man’s suffering seems indescribable, unspeakable,
inexpressible. When the drama presents it so, so it is. But how is it with me?
Am I thinking now of your suffering? Like brooks, the end of
Something as vast as Asia is carrying me toward it. Oedipus, of course, suffered like this, too;
and certainly for the same reason. Did Hercules suffer as well? Of course.
Did not the Dioscuri, too, in their friendship bear pain?
As Hercules fought with God—that is
suffering. And immortality in envy of this life—
to divide these two—that, too, is suffering. But it is also
suffering when a person is covered with freckles—
to be completely covered with freckles! The beautiful
sun does that, for it draws out everything. The path
seduces the young with the charm of its rays, like roses.
Oedipus’s suffering is like a poor man
wailing that he is deprived. Son Laios, poor
stranger in Greece. Life is death, and
death is also a life.

Emil Nolde, March Landscape in the evening (See Note 4)

Notes to the poem

(a) Note that in German, Sky is Himmel, which also stands for Heaven.

(b) This is the phrase that Heidegger used in his essay “…poetically man dwells…”.

(c) Book of Genesis, Chapter 1 verse 26: ‘And God said: Let us make man in our image’.

(d) Holderlin seems to imply that only in the heavenly skies one can find measure, therefore introducing a metaphysical element in the poem. Werner Marx, who was the professor who took Heidegger’s teaching post at the University of Freiburg, wrote a book with the same question in its title, and “Foundations for  a nonmetaphysical ethics” as its subtitle.

(e) Holderlin translated Sophocles’ tragedies Oedipus and Antigone. These translations are significant interprpetations of the works.

Notes accompanying the pictures

(1) Note  to Yves Klein’s painting: Monochrome abstraction—the use of one color over an entire canvas—has been a strategy adopted by many painters wishing to challenge expectations of what an image can and should represent. Klein likened monochrome painting to an “open window to freedom.” He worked with a chemist to develop his own particular brand of blue. Made from pure color pigment and a binding medium, it is called International Klein Blue. Klein adopted this hue as a means of evoking the immateriality and boundlessness of his own particular utopian vision of the world.(Source: MOMA)

(2) Question: On the other hand, perhaps it is Friedrich Holderlin who has organized you? Why is Friedrich Holderlin ‘Kommando’, rather than, e.g., ‘Muse’?

No. Holderlin is just one of my main heroes and he is my favorite poet in my private library. He is my choice and therefore I myself am Holderlin, I can call myself N-Holderlin, which means NASAHEIM(*)-Holderlin, a self-fullfilling prophecy of abstract art. There is no form of art without a relation towards utopia and therefore abstraction. The show is called Kommando because it was a very high or a very low order from heaven that initiated the show. Within the world of art, which is a completely useless world, a Kommando can be a group of people, or an individual that tries to find a way out of this world.

(*) “Nasaheim” – the outerspace station of Anaheim/Disneyland.

(Source: An Interview With Andre Butzer, Artist And Curator Of ‘Kommando Friedrich Holderlin’ At Max Hetzler, Berlin, Saatchi Online Magazine)

(3) This at once airy and expansive composition by Sam Francis brilliantly demonstrates the artist’s unique combination of Abstract Expressionist and late Impressionist influences. With its soft pastel palette, the monumental abstract work creates the sensation of standing before a vast and boundless space. Francis, who often found his inspiration in literary sources, titled the painting after a poem by the German Romantic writer Friedrich Hölderlin which begins with the narrator looking to the sky: “In lovely blue the steeple blossoms/ With its metal roof. Around which/ Drift swallow cries, around which/ Lies most loving blue.” (Source: Art Institute of Chicago)

(4) Nolde’s landscape is a landscape dominated by the sky of North Germany, near the Danish borders, Nolde’s home.

Heidegger-Weg (Heidegger’s Path) – Part II: The French Connection

It is now more than five months since I have posted the first part of my tribute to Heidegger, following my visit to his hometown and the mountain retreat in the Black Forest. It is time to continue with the second part, which focuses on two French friends who became very important for Heidegger after the Second World War. One is a philosopher, Jean Beufret, and the other is a poet, Rene Char. Until the 1970′s Heidegger had a major impact on French intellectual life and philosophy. His two French friends, in their own way, have played a major role in this.

Thor Seminar, 1968: Heidegger in the middle, Beaufret far right

The Philosopher Jean Beaufret

Jean Beaufret is the French philosopher who played a key role in introducing and developing Heidegger’s ideas in France. Heidegger’s ideas were introduced in France in the 20′s and 30′s, but became highly influencial only after the second world war. Heidegger and Beaufret met in 1946 in Todtnauberg. Beaufret introduced Heidegger to French existentialism, and posed to him some questions with regard to Sartre’s address “Existentialism is a Humanism”, given earlier in the year. Beaufret wrote the questions hastily on a piece of paper in a Paris cafe so as to be delivered by a friend ready to leave for Freiburg. Heidegger in response to these questions wrote the “Letter on Humanism” and dedicated it to Beaufret. It was written at a time of great personal struggle for Heidegger: he had just been indefinitely banned from teaching following the Nazi war-crimes hearings, and he had undergone a kind of emotional breakdown as a result.

Jean Beaufret and Martin Heidegger

Beaufret taught philosophy at the Ecole Nationale Superieure from 1946 to 1962 and was in the core of Parisian intellectual life, being friend with among others Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, and Louis Althusser. In 1955, with Kostas Axelos, a Greek philosopher who was teaching in Paris, Beaufret organized the conference “What is Philosophy?”, in which Heidegger was welcomed by the leading French Philosophers.

Beufret edited and published some of the letters he exchanged with Heidegger in four volumes of “Dialogue with Heidegger”. The first volume is on Greek Philosophy.

The Poet Rene Char

It is not an accident that two of Heidegger’s most celebrated acquaintances are poets: the French Rene Char and the Romanian – German – Jewish Paul Celan.  As Heidegger observes in “Letter on Humanism”:

“Be[-ing], as what has come down <to us> which becomes truth, remains hidden. But the fate of the world is presaged in poetry, without its having as yet emerged as the history of be[-ing].”

In 1955, Jean Beaufret introduced Heidegger to the French poet Rene Char, during one of his to France. Prior to his arrival in France, Heidegger stated that the person he most wanted to meet was Char, whom he regarded as the most important contemporary thinker. They became friends and met many times in Provence, the birthplace of Char.

Rene Char and Martin Heidegger

One of his “surrealist” poem collections, written in the 30′s is “The Hammer without a Master”. Some of its verses, were set to music by Pierre Boulez. Here is one of them.

The furious handicraft

The red caravan on the edge of the nail
And corpse in the basket
And plowhorses in the horseshoe
I dream my head on the point of my knife is Peru

“There are those who leave behind poisons while others leave remedies. Difficult to tell which is which. You have to taste.
The immediate yes or no is healthy in spite of the corrections that will follow.”

[Rene Char: In a crude mountain shelter, translated by Susanne Dubroff]

Char has influenced Heidegger deeply. As Michael Worton comments “…this friendship led Heidegger to write his Gedachtes sequence of poems, which are among his last writings and bear the marks of Char’s poetic practice of thinking-through-language”.

Rene Char

Heidegger was so captivated by the landscape in Thor, the place of residence of Char, that he organized philosophy seminars there in 1966, 1968, and 1969. In the mornings the participants would sit under the trees in front of the house and discuss the topic of the seminar, while in the afternoons they would visit the surroundings. One topic was young Hegel’s words: “A torn stocking is better than a darned one; not so self-consciousness”. Another one discussed Marx’s eleventh Feuerbach thesis: “The philosophers have merely interpreted the world. The issue is to change it.”

 

 

1001 Ways to Die – (3) Heinrich von Kleist, Writer

2011 will mark the 200th anniversary of the death of the great German writer Heinrich von Kleist.

Kleist was born in the market town of Frankfurt on the Oder into an aristocratic Prussian family that had produced a long line of distinguished military men. Following tradition, he joined a regiment of the royal foot guards when he was not yet 15. He saw action against the French, but he was quite unsuited to the discipline and monotony of military life. “So many officers, so many drill masters, so many soldiers, so many slaves,” he wrote.

Unappreciated in his own time, Kleist posthumously received wide critical acclaim for his short prose. His eight short stories, or Novellen, originally puhlished in two volumes in 1810-11, are considered comparable to the work of Giovanni Boccaccio and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. In addition to his Novellen, Kleist wrote eight plays and many political essays. The extreme stylization and frank sexuality of his works shocked his contemporaries, denying him the acclaim he coveted; however, these same qualities have ensured continuing interest in his work today, and he is now particularly praised for his acute psychological insight and honest depictions of sexuality.

In Greece Kleist is mostly known for his play “The Broken Jug”, which he wrote in 1808. The play was staged for the first time in Greece by the National Theater, in 1954, under the direction of Alexis Solomos.

{Goethe, a literary father-figure to Heinrich von Kleist, may have sensed an Oedipal bloodlust in the emerging poet and playwright: “With the best will in the world towards this poet,” he wrote, in a review of The Broken Jug, “I have always been moved to horror and disgust by something in his works, as though there were a body well planned by nature, tainted with an incurable disease.”}

Read more: http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/kleist_new_translations/#ixzz1D56qSlse

I got to know Kleist and his work more, when a good friend some years ago, gave me as a present Kleist’s novellas. It was a revellation. I quote from a “New Republic” article:

Patricia O'Donovan's work based on the story by Heinrich von Kleist

{Heinrich von Kleist’s famous story “The Earthquake in Chile” is set in Santiago in 1647. A young Carmelite nun named Josephe, condemned to death for becoming pregnant out of wedlock, is about to be beheaded. Across town, her lover, Jeronimo Rugera, is preparing to hang himself in the prison where he has been incarcerated. Just as the bells announcing Josephe’s imminent execution begin to toll, a gigantic earthquake strikes: We now know that it measured around 8.5 on the Richter scale, just a little less than the recent 8.8 quake. The pillar on which Jeronimo was to hang himself becomes his support, and he escapes as the building collapses around him. His beloved, saved by the same “heavenly miracle,” finds him in the countryside, where the refugees from the city have gathered. (This quotation and the others come from Peter Wortsman’s new translation of Kleist’s Selected Prose, just out in an attractive new edition from Archipelago Books.) The same townspeople who earlier that day had gathered to watch Josephe’s execution now greet the pair with warmth and compassion. Had the past, they wonder, only been a bad dream? The earthquake seems to have acted as a great leveler, erasing the previous divisions of class and piety:

Amidst these awful moments that had brought about the destruction of all of humanity’s worldly possessions, and during which all of nature threatened to be engulfed, it did indeed seem that the human spirit itself blossomed like a lovely flower. In the fields all around, as far as the eye could see, there were people of all social classes lying together, nobles and beggars, matrons of once stately households and peasant women, civil servants and day laborers, monks and nuns: all commiserating with each other, helping each other, cheerfully sharing the little of life’s necessities they’d been able to salvage, as though the common calamity had joined all those who’d managed to survive it into a single harmonious family of man.}

Later when I was living in London, I got introduced to other Kleist plays, like “The Prince of Homburg”  and “Penthesilea”. The appreciation of Kleist’s work grew even more when I discovered Hans Werner Henze, the German composer who wrote an opera based on the play “The Prince of Homburg” in 1958.

von Menzel Adolf: Illustration to Kleist's - The Broken Jug

{As (Thomas) Mann stressed to Anglo-Saxon readers, one cannot account for Kleist’s narrative quirks with historical perspective. “No other contemporary writer resembled him in the least. His method of storytelling is as eccentric as his plots, and with very few exceptions…Kleist’s contemporaries found his fiction intolerably mannered, unpalatable in fact.”}

Read more: http://wordswithoutborders.org/dispatches/article/kleist_new_translations/#ixzz1D57I1fVx

In his essay “On the Theater of Marionettes,” an ironic, fictionalized dialogue, Kleist consider’s Man’s fall from Eden and asks whether human self-consciousness is less a blessing than a curse.

Excerpt from “On the Theater of Marionettes”

{In this context, Mr. C… replied in a right friendly manner, I must tell you another story, of which you will immediately comprehend the connection.

On a trip to Russia I happened to find myself on the country estate of a certain Sir von G…, a Livonian nobleman, whose sons were at the time very much focused on their fencing; especially the older one, who had just returned from his university studies, played the virtuoso, and one morning up in his room handed me a rapier. We fenced, yet I proved superior; passion helped put him off his guard; with almost every thrust I struck home, until, finally, his rapier flew into a corner. Half in jest, half pained, he said, as he picked up his rapier, that he had found his master; but everything in nature finds its match, and he would soon lead me to mine. The brothers laughed out loud and cried: Off with him! Off with him! To the woodshed he must go! Whereupon they took me by the hand and led me to a bear that Sir von G…, their father, was training in the yard.

When I appeared before him in stunned amazement, the bear stood upright on its hind legs, with his back to a post to which he was attached, his right paw raised and ready to strike, looking me straight in the eye: this was his fencing position. And finding myself face to face with such an opponent, I did not know if I was dreaming; but Sir von G…, egged me on: Thrust man! Thrust! he said. See if you can teach him a thing or two! And having gotten over my initial amazement, I lunged with my rapier; the bear made a very slight movement with his paw and parried my thrust. I tried with feints to trick him; the bear did not budge. And once again I lunged with a nimble stroke that would have pierced without fail any human breast; but the bear made a very slight motion with its paw and parried the thrust. Now I was almost as befuddled as had been the young Sir von G… The bear’s perfect calm helped rob me of my own composure, I varied thrusts and feints, sweat dripped from my brow: for naught! Not only did the bear, like the foremost fencer in the world, parry all my thrusts; but, unlike any human counterpart would have done, not a single time did he go for my feints: Looking at me eye to eye, as if he could read my soul, he stood stock still, paw raised and ready, and if my thrusts were ruses, he did not even budge.

Do you believe this story?

Absolutely! I replied with cheerful applause; I’d believe it from the lips of any stranger; all the more so from you!

Well then, my fine friend, said Mr. C…, you now have all the knowledge you need to grasp my meaning. We see that in the organic world, to the same degree that reflection gets darker and weaker, grace grows ever more radiant and dominant.—But just as two lines intersect on one side of a point and, after passing through infinity, suddenly come together again on the other side; or the image in a concave mirror suddenly reappears before us after drawing away into the infinite distance: so, too, does grace return once perception, as it were, has traversed the infinite—such that it simultaneously appears the purest in human bodily structures that are either devoid of consciousness or which possess an infinite consciousness, i.e. in the jointed manikin or the god.

In which case, I observed, a bit befuddled, would we then have to eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge again to fall back into the state of innocence?

Undoubtedly, he replied; which will be the last chapter of the history of the world.}

Kleist shot himself on the 21 November 1811, on a small hill by the shore of the Wannsee lake just outside Berlin, having first shot dead a woman called Henrietta Vogel, who was the wife of an acquaintance and who in the subsequent autopsy would be found to have been suffering from incurable cancer. There was no love affair between the two of them, although when I first read the events, I trully wished this were the case.

As an ending to the post, I would like to present his masterpiece, the play “The Prince of Homburg”, with the help of two articles from the British newspaper, “The Guardian”.

The Prince of Homburg

“Encountering Kleist, one’s first impression is of a compelling strangeness. Nowhere is this more potent than in his masterpiece The Prince of Homburg, with its moonstruck opening tableau, its sleepwalking hero, its plot developing ominously and unstoppably from a single and essentially mysterious incident. The strangeness is compounded for a modern audience by the setting of the play. We are somewhere called Prussia, with the semi-legendary historical incident that inspired the play – the Prince’s cavalry charge at the 17th-century battle of Fehrbellin – transposed into a recognisable early 19th-century world of bureaucracy, organised warfare and journalism. But this is not the Prussia of history, for all the concrete details of its steely military orthodoxy. It is an interior landscape of the imagination, one very different from that of the English 19th century.

Kleist’s characters are confined, trapped, caught; but their imaginations and their narratives are opened up by the same vistas of exaltation and devastation that are to be found in the music of Beethoven, the visionary architecture of Schinkel, the paintings of Caspar David Friedrich. They live on a stage where the stoniest of certainties can be suddenly evacuated by doubt, or hope, or catastrophe; where the sternest of hierarchies can unexpectedly warp, dissolve and then cruelly reassert themselves. Even time can be dangerously swift one moment, rapturously suspended the next. Darkness is suddenly challenged by light; brightness suddenly overwhelmed by the night.

No wonder that Kleist’s stories and plays are so haunted by sudden disaster and inexplicable reversals of fortune. Contemporaries still devoted to a more optimistic reading of the ideals of the Enlightenment found the violent emotions, the radical ambiguities and black ironies of his work hard to stomach. On publication The Prince of Hom burg was widely deemed unperformable. In addition, its portrayal of a high-ranking Prussian officer who collapses centre-stage in grovelling terror at the prospect of his own imminent death carried swift condemnation from the state censor.”

(Source: Neil Bartlett in the Guardian)

“Set during the time of Brandenburg’s war with the Swedes, the play starts mesmerisingly. In a moonlit garden, the eponymous prince has vivid dreams of military glory and royal betrothal. But, on waking, he becomes a distracted figure who fails to attend to the battle-plans of the ruling Elector.

As a result, in ordering the cavalry to charge too early, the prince suffers a bad case of premature exhortation. Although the Swedes are routed, the prince is court-martialled for disobeying orders and sentenced to death. What follows is an intricate cat-and-mouse game in which the Elector, bombarded with pleas for mercy by his generals and his niece, offers to quash the sentence if the prince himself can prove it was unjust.

…

But Kleist’s play is infinitely more subtle and morally ambiguous than that. In part, it is about the age-old conflict between freedom and order. But it is also a startlingly prophetic play about the equivocal nature of reality. In his dreams, the prince seems on solid ground. Only when he wakes is he plunged into a world of utter confusion. In this sense, it is only a short step, as George Steiner once pointed out, from Kleist to Pirandello.”

(Source: The Guardian)

1001 Ways to Die – (1) Fritz Wunderlich, Tenor

Today I embark on a sequence of posts, under the title “1001 ways to die”. The inspiration for this came to me back in 1980 when I was a graduate student in the USA. The vastness of the country, the incredible gap between the avarage person and the ultra high net worth individuals, among other things, led me one night to declare among my fellow students that at some stage of my life I will compile this as a study of human affairs during a life long journey.

On January 2011, 31 years laters, I am embarking on it, starting with Fritz Wunderlich, a German Tenor who died accidentally in 1966 before arriving at t the peak of his career.

He fell from a stairway onto the stone floor below in a friend’s country house in Oberderdingen near Maulbronn. He died in the University Clinic of Heidelberg just days before his 36th birthday. In the documentary that I have appended at the end of the post, his wife mentioned that Wunderlich was on the phone prior to descending the stairs, and while talking on the phone, he untied his boots. As he started the descend, he got tangled up, and fell on the stone ground.

Herman Prey, a contemporary German baritone, who had become a friend with Wunderlich and sang together since 1959, wrote in his diary after the tenor’s death in 1966:

“My friend Fritz is dead. This simple sentence becomes more incomprehensible to me with every day. Our friendly and artistic collaboration developed into something very rare in the last few years. We shared many amusing adventures and spent many contemplative hours together. He could discuss life’s problems and musical issues for nights on end. The most beautiful hours of my career were those spent together with him on the stage or in front of a microphone. We never discussed phrasing in advance or how we would colour certain passages – the sympathy was simply there. We used to play piano duets for hours, or roamed the forests making plans for the future.

When we first mounted the stage together during the “Schweigsame Frau” rehearsals at Salzburg in 1959, we knew that our paths would converge then on. In those brief years we learned how to complement one another. He knew a tremendous amount about singing. I learned a lot from him. With his immense natural musical talent, this son of the gods was still at the beginning of a meteoric career. What might he not have achieved, given the time? At Schubert’s graveside Grillparzer said: “Here Death buried a rich treasure, and even richer promise.” How this statement applies to Fritz too! When we were last together he told me: “The best years are yet to come; a singer only gains command over tears at forty.” He did not know that he already had it.

Wunderlich sings Schubert, Strauss and Wolf (1965)

Our dreams were truly boundless. We wanted to become the heavenly twins of song. Fate decided otherwise, decreeing that I be left alone, a deserted twin. We virtually improvised this record, our last one, together with Fritz Neumeyer and his musicians. Listening to it today, there are points at which I cannot really tell who is singing what. Our voices melted together to form one. The world is mourning for a gifted singer of his generation. I mourn for a friend and brother in song the likes of whom I will never find again.”

FRITZ WUNDERLICH – ARTE DOCUMENTARY

In addition to listening to his divine voice, in what ever he has recorded, I strongly recommend to those of you who can understand German, to view the wonderful documentary of “arte”. It comes in 7 pieces. Every minute is worth it!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Part 6

Part 7

Heidegger-weg (Heidegger’s Path) – Part I

(according to Heidegger)

“The whole history of philosophy is just an endless variation of the Greeks’ theme ,

which is the theme of the Being itself. “

Jean Beaufret, 1974

This post started as a description of my journey to Martin Heidegger’s hometown and mountain resort.

On the way it changed, it grew.

The physical dimension and elements are now interlaced with a journey through time, and through the philosophical space.

The material outgrew the confines of a  post and I had to split it in two parts, the first ending nominally with the second world war.

This journey is a tribute to the great modern philosopher and his work.

As a man, Heidegger was quite a controversial figure on many fronts. I touch upon some of them, but the post cannot exhaust them or cover them in any way approaching completeness.

Martin and Elfride Heidegger's grave in the Messkirch Cemetery

Εκ του τελους αρχεσθαι.

The beginning is the end.

“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life – and only then will I be free to become myself.” MH

Martin Heidegger died in 1976 in Freiburg, and was burried in the cemetery of his hometown, Messkirch.

The beginning of the journey was the small town of Messkirch, in Baden – Wurttemberg, near the Black Forest, where Martin Heidegger was born in 1889.

Heidegger’s father, Friedrich, was a carpenter. His mother Johanna, née Kempf, was a house wife. They were a family of poor means, who could not afford to send Martin to the university. Therefore, they enrolled him to a Jesuit Seminary.

Young Martin did not stay in the Seminar.  In 1909 he “escaped” and went to the University of Freiburg, where he studied theology and philosophy.

In 1917 he marries Elfride Petri who will remain his supporting wife until his death.

Edmund Husserl - Photo courtesy of the Heidegger Museum in Messkirch

From 1919 to 1923 he served as an assistant to Professor Edmund Husserl at the University of Freiburg.

Heidegger developed Husserl’s phenomenology in a new direction. He shifted the emphasis from the meaning of consiousness to the meaning of Breing.  Husserl’s epistemological question “What does it mean to know?” is transformed into the question “What does it mean to Be?” in Heidegger’s conception.

Heidegger opposes the Husserlian claim that a person’s relation to the world and the things in it must be mediated by something in the person’s mind: beliefs, desires, experiences, etc. — what philosophers call “intentional content.” As he puts it:

“The idea of a subject which has intentional experiences . . . encapsulated within itself is an absurdity which misconstrues the basic ontological structure of the being that we ourselves are.”

After Heidegger became a Professor at the University of Freiburg, the relationship of the two men deteriorated and eventually broke down completely.

In 1922 Elfride gave Martin as present the wood cabin (Hutte) in Todtnauberg, where she was going for skiing. This cabin became Heidegger’s refuge, the calm place to go and think, write and meet some people.

In Paul Celan’s poem “Todtnauberg”, written in 1967 after his visit to the cabin, the Sternwürfel, the wooden cube above Heidegger’s well (resembling a Mallarmean die in “Un coup de dès”), is metonymically linked by its star design to the yellow arnica flower, viewed as the Jewish star.

The Cabin in the late October for and snow

In 1923 he was elected professor a the University of Marburg, where he stayed until 1928.

Heidegger turned the Western Philosophy upside down, starting with Descartes, who considered that the human being is a mind located in a meterial body. Heidegger asserted that the human existence is a happening, a process that welds the human to the World.

For Heidegger, there is not mind, body, and world, but Dasein in-the-world, as a ‘unitary phenomenon’.

For Descartes, space is a matter of abstract mathematical coordinates and calculations in which things are located and move about; for Heidegger, space is how Dasein experiences things.

Heidegger’s determination to break out of the philosophical tradition is focused in his attempt to get beyond the subject/object distinction.

In 1924 he met Hannah Arendt, with whom he had an affair until 1926 , when she left Marburg University to go to Heidelberg and study under Karl Jaspers. Arendt is a key person in Heidegger’s life, as she became one of his strongest supporters when he was accused of being a Nazi. She referred to this as a personal “error”.

His next major affair after Hannah Arendt was with Elisabeth Blochmann, who was also studying at Marburg. It must be noted that with the recent publication of the letters between Martin and Elfriede Heidegger in 2005 did it become known that the Heidegger marriage was an “open” one, in that Elfriede likewise had affairs, including one with the family doctor who fathered her first son, Hermann Heidegger.

In 1927, Heidegger publishes “Sein und Zeit”, “Time and Being”, his unfinished masterpiece, and dedicates it to his Professor, Edmund Husserl.

Most of it was written in the Todtnauberg cabin.

In its original design, Being and Time would have two parts, each part comprising three divisions.

As published, the book covered only the first two divisions of Part One.

The third division of Part One is now considered to be covered by the “The Basic Problems of Phenomenology”, and the first part of Division Two by “Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics” (see below”.

Divisions two and three of Part Two are essentially covered by  ”The Basic Problems of Phenomenology”.

In this sense, the original design of Being and Time has been completed, albeit in an indirect way.

Within a few years, this book was recognized as a truly epoch-making work of the 20th century philosophy.

In 1928 Heidegger is appointed Professor at the University of Freiburg, succeeding Husserl.

In 1929 Heidegger delivers his important inaugural lecture, What Is Metaphysics

and publishes his famous book, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.

In the Spring of 1933, April 21, Heidegger is appointed Rector of the University and joins the NSDAP.

Heidegger attending a celebration at the University of Freiburg

On May 3, 1933 he joined the NSDAP party. On May 27, 1933 he delivered his inaugural rector’s address on “The Self-Affirmation of the German University,” whose ambiguous text is frequently interpreted as an expression of his support of Hitler’s regime.

His spell as a Rector is short lived. He resigns on the 23rd April 1934.

He is the first Rector to resign under NSDAP rule.

His inaugural rector’s address was found incompatible with the party line and its text was eventually banned by the Nazis.

In his lectures of the late 1930s and the early 1940s, especially those which he gave during the period in which he was writing Contributions to Philosophy, he expressed covert criticism of Nazi ideology. Heidegger says in the SPIEGEL interview:

“After I resigned from the rectorate, I retreated back to my task as teacher. In the summer semester 1934 I lectured on “Logic.” In the following semester, 1934/35, I gave the first lecture on Hölderlin. The lectures on Nietzsche began in 1936. All of those who could hear heard that this was a confrontation with National Socialism.”

The entrance to the Heidegger Museum in Messkirch

For some time he was under surveillance of Gestapo. He was finally humiliated in 1944 when he was declared the most “expendable” member of the faculty and sent to the Rhine to dig trenches. Heidegger reminisces:

The Spiegel Interview

“In the last year of the war, five hundred of the most eminent scholars and artists were exempted from any kind of military service.19 I was not one of those who were exempted. On the contrary, in the summer of 1944 I was ordered to dig trenches over near the Rhine, on the Kaiserstuhl.” (The SPIEGEL Interview).

I cannot of course cover this issue completely and even more, offer any explanations or assertions to the truth.

A lot of books have been written, heated debates taken place, and this will go on.

In my humble view, there is no doubt that Heidegger flirted with NSDAP in 1933,and failed miserably. He resigned from the Rector’s position and never resumed a position of power or influence. The way he rationalized this is of no interest to me. His work reamined at large untainted by the Nazi rubbish and poison. There are slips here and there, but he recovers quickly and never returns to the fallacies.

The path through the fields in Messkirch

Heidegger was attached to his homeland. When in Messkirch, he would go for a walk in a path crossing the fields, for which the German word is Feldweg.

Today the path is still there, but the bench where Heidegger used to sit and work is gone. Only a label on a tree informs the visitor that the bench was there in the past.

A sign on MH's bench

Messkirch is a sleepy town in the middle of nowhere. It is a town that appears to have disowned its son, Martin Heidegger. Heideger is covered by a cover of guilt and oblivion.

“Anxiety as the superlative disclosure leads Dasein to an authentic

awareness of essential finitude of human existence, and hence serves

as the foundation for the possibility of authentic existence in its intrinsic

relation to the anticipation of death.” MH