Born in 1889 in Messkirch, Baden, equipped with a humanistic education, sensitive to the vibrations of the zeitgeist, Martin Heidegger mixed stubbornness and philosophical profundity at an early age. The philosopher takes risks: he marries a Protestant, recognizes the illegitimate son, separates himself from the Catholic Church, turns away from the new Kantian Heinrich Rickert, who thinks in the same direction, and turns to the anything but established phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.
His thinking is characterized by intensive readings by Augustine and Luther, fading back to Aristotle, later Plato. The First World War is always in the background as a shock experience. Heidegger’s fundamental conviction is that everything that is established has to go in order to be able to penetrate something new, which is actually the oldest. Only when the truth shows itself “unhidden”, the existence that we are ourselves becomes visible, can actual things be thought and said.
Of haughty aversion to the world and at the same time completely surrendering to the times
In 1927 the book appeared around which everything else will revolve: “Being and Time”. The fashionable talk of “life” is pushed polemically into “botany”, “existence” is coupled with “death”, which is inexorably tapering. The unhistorical “historicity” which will later become “fate” leaves all ethics behind, a possible “I” need not be considered any further. That towers over all of this being or that Be and with them, because little by little he is the only one who can express them: Martin Heidegger.
How incredibly flexible this scheme is, not least because its inventor is one of the most precise and violent readers that philosophy has ever seen, becomes apparent in the Third Reich. With haughty aversion to the world and at the same time completely surrendering himself to the course of time, he confronts the “events” as phenomena of the “history of being” to be interpreted. If you do not meet him directly, you will be mercilessly embedded in the never-ending “contemplation”. Holderlin takes care of the light, the pre-Socratics preserve the possibility of a “different beginning”, which has yet to be uncovered.
Lorenz Jäger: Heidegger. A German life. Rowohlt Berlin Verlag, Berlin 2021. 604 pages, 28 euros.
Otherwise, from 1939 at the latest, “machinism” prevails, which will press and crush “Bolshevism”, “Americanism”, “Judaism” and also the “Germans” who do not understand themselves into the throat of the “gigantic” and misunderstood metaphysics. Next to it, in between, above, depending on the situation of thought, delicate poetry design and filigree efforts to interpret the “tradition” rearranged by Heidegger.
From here it goes into the so-called post-war period. His “existence”, not his “life”, become publicly visible. Together with others who had survived the Second World War and claimed to have heard of the Shoah, if at all, in the form of rumors or “news” and defended themselves against its mere naming or its interpretation as a singular turning point in human history Heidegger’s real career begins. “Holzwege”, “Lectures and essays” and “Wegmarks” are the names of volumes that every philosophy student had to “intus” for decades.
Heidegger’s story remained an extremely successful one until his death in 1976. When the time comes, everything is in order: The “Complete Edition” is heading inexorably towards the 100-volume mark – and the global reception proves its extraordinary rank. The so-called “Black Hefts”, which are closely interwoven with the work and have been published since 2014, reveal the foundations of Heidegger’s thinking. From them his work was to be redeveloped.
An enviable, well-written and cleverly composed book
Martin Heidegger’s biographical accounts in German are nonetheless rare. The historian Hugo Ott, who has just turned 90, presented a “preliminary” in 1992, which represents a sample of archive-based analysis. Rüdiger Safranski followed two years later and presented Heidegger as “Master from Germany”. The always sober Manfred Geier replaced the old rororo picture monograph by Heidegger’s student Walter Biemel in 2005. So it was time to draw a new biographical sum.
With Lorenz Jäger, however, a completely different type of intellectual takes on the role of the thinker. Born in 1951, he was editor and briefly head of the humanities department in the FAZ from 1997 to 2016. From 2003 onwards, the doctor of German studies presented a series of closely interlinked studies that amount to a history of ideology of the 20th century.
In any case, you can look forward to an enviable, well-written and cleverly composed book that has the courage to choose. In this way, Jäger succeeds in vividly portraying the young Heidegger and the “origin” of his thinking, always invoked by the hero, from the Alemannic and the landscape stretching from Messkirch to Todtnauberg. What is believable in the literal sense of the word is what is developed in front of the readers’ eyes on the first 100 pages. In addition, a natural environment that has been lost forever is being reconstructed there, for which the unity of church and education is a matter of course.
“He went ‘astray’ and ‘wrong’ under National Socialism, it was not his business to go into more detail.”
What Jäger quotes is always carefully considered. He also reads very carefully. The book, based on exclusively published writings, forces even experienced readers to read the writings of Heidegger or Karl Jaspers in hand again due to the arrangements made. And it is convincing and enlightening when Jäger regards the arguments and thought motives of the early Heidegger well into the thirties and beyond as decisive for his thinking. “There is untruth, of course, but it goes by the name of ‘crazy’. In this reading, being wrong is just as much a temptation as it is a proof of greatness Going into detail was not his thing. All behavior is brought to such towering heights and large dimensions that it can no longer be grasped in everyday life, cannot be addressed. Greatness means great madness: That will be the formula by which Heidegger understands his life He found her when he was twenty. “
The passage gives a good impression of Jäger’s serenity. The analyst of the trials and tribulations of ideological trench warfare does not scandalize Heidegger’s later pushing aside of National Socialist engagement, but notes it down.
The chapters on Hannah Arendt and Karl Löwith, whose works relate to Heidegger in very different ways, are also profitable. Jäger can also gain a lot from the discussion with Jaspers, whose intellectual closeness to Heidegger is clearly evident up to the Nietzsche biography of 1937. A small masterpiece in the Jaspers Passages is the interpretation of Heidegger’s discussion of the “psychology of world views”. In it, Jäger can show how much Heidegger was able to uncover ambivalences in the case of others, to which he himself was almost completely blind. Jäger achieved a coup with the Marburg Germanist Max Kommerell, who went to Heidegger as a participating observer to explore his way of thinking.
With Kommerell we are at Hölderlin. Jäger, who largely dispenses with the protection of secondary literature, deals most extensively with the winding relationships between poet and thinker. Nowhere else does the biographer Heidegger allow so much escapism, intellectual “height” and freedom of interpretation as here.
Holderlin is then also the tilting figure of the book, a second hero, so to speak. In it, Jäger Heidegger allows himself to be reflected again and to step into the supposedly open space: “The highest conception of the poetic is sibling with heresy: This is how the tearing constellation can be described in which Heidegger, a religiously deeply crisis-ridden person, in Holderlin’s hymns A gesture of distancing Heidegger from the prevailing reality becomes recognizable. “
Is that so? The question arises again and again when the historian of ideology emerges in Jäger. Because the historian of ideology dissolves the previously demonstrated virtuoso interweaving of life, existence, death and being / being, and inserts more and more idiosyncratic, even absurd, comparisons into the alleged “distancing”. These do not serve to play down Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, here Jäger is completely clear and steadfast (although he withholds some meaningful passages from the reader), rather the biographer believes he must remain approximate, right up to the point of quarreling. As in his Adorno biography, he is unable to write that Poland was attacked by the Reichswehr on September 1, 1939. The excessive use of the word “uncanny” is uncanny in itself with such an expert on historical processes.
The comments on Herbert Marcuse are annoying because they are sometimes simply wrong. And what Jäger babbles about the “Jewish army” should have been crossed out by a gracious editor. Occasionally it appears as if the biographer wanted to justify the word “world civil war”, which appeared early in the book, by staging little skirmishes later and appearing to be calling out to old comrades that he was on their side again. But hunters can easily be defended against hunters. Despite the objections, one should definitely read his Heidegger biography.