Martin – that’s what we call a German philosopher in his prime – Martin Heidegger had spent the best hour of an April afternoon reducing the ontological difference between himself and his trainee by introducing the young woman, who was willing to learn, to the concepts of being and time, from Being and being-against, which gave him the opportunity to bring out his Parmenides, according to which beings can never emerge from non-beings, in order then to casually bring Hesiod’s “eternal Eros” into play and then return to Parmenides, the procreator knew primal power. It was this, he informed the student, with reference to Plato and his “Symposium”, which among all the gods was the first to create Eros.
Yes, Eros, that rascal! Until last week, the world knew nothing of this unique unio mystica et philosophica, which connected the great thinker with Eleonore Otte, his “invisible lover”, as the Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper enthusiastically reported. Ms. Otte was one of his Freiburg students who, as we are saddened to learn, only managed to become a secondary school teacher herself, despite her philosophically based liaison with the Great Spirit. It is possible that the world would never have found out about this undoubtedly fundamental and thrown-away love if Günter Seubold had not rummaged through the estate in Marbach.
With a delicacy that only true disciples of the great Heidegger possess, Seubold knew how to tell of furtive meetings in a Rottweiler inn, of letters sent poste restante, but also of the longing that occasionally seized the great philosopher. Then, as Seubold whispers about his find in the Humanities section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Heidegger asked his distant lover for pictures “that should show her whole figure”. The reader, he can’t help it, he sympathizes when Seubold whispers about what a “beautifully exciting sight” these full-body shots must have been for the “master from Germany” (R. Safranski).
“When you look at me, I become beautiful / beautiful as the sedge under the dew.”
The longing was sometimes so great that Heidegger could no longer contain himself and had to write poetry himself. This is confirmed by a poem presented to the loyal readers of the FAZ-Geistwissenschaften in the most beautiful facsimile and examined by the Heidegger editor Seubold with Trevor Roper-like expertise: “It clearly comes from Heidegger.”
Following a whim of the moment, the philosopher chose bishop’s purple paper, to which he entrusted in steep German handwriting what moved his heart: “If you look at me, I’ll be beautiful,/beautiful as the sedge under the dew./When I go down to the river,/recognize the high reed my blessed face no more.” The beloved put the precious sheet in a volume with lectures and essays that Heidegger dedicated to her as a reminder of the Rottweiler inn. So sweet.
It’s actually a shame that this purple love story fell apart immediately, and once again the evil internet is to blame. There it was first given to his certainty of “memorial intensity of feeling” and the “counterintuitive rays of beauty felt to be associated with the light of the moon”, but then it came out: the alleged Heidegger poem, oh, it’s not a Heidegger poem at all, but it comes from Gabriela Mistral, who received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1945. Heidegger might have been blind to love and Parmenides, but as a good philologist he had clearly identified the poem as a copy by means of quotation marks and quotation marks.