Marburg days (days I choose to call those "before Being and Time", the book that changed my life, and that possibly, will lead me to destroy it) had the intensity of a premonitory time. We all spoke of Heidegger. We went to his classes. We discussed his ideas. We were young and so was he, our Master. My bosom buddy was Rainer Minder. I'll tell you about him. He had gone further than us in his closeness to National Socialism. He had contacts in Röhm's SA and talked with fervor (despite his fervor not devouring his reflective temperament) of the figure that agitated Germany in those days. I don't need to tell you his name. It is enough to signal that that small bodied yet titanic man, that pure force of nature dragged Germany towards its encounter with its lost greatness. He dared to say what we all knew: the warriors of 1914 had been betrayed by the social democrats, by the cowardly merchants of 1918 that surrendered without a fight to the end, without deciding to summit a triumph that should have been ours. Germany, son, didn't lose that war. It was lost by the politicians, the bankers, the traitors. Hitler was the return of the pride of the nation. With him, Germany returned to occupy the center of the West, its philosophical destiny. If some place might relive the glory of Athens it was amongst us. That flag was the one we should now have courage of raising, unfurling. However, I'm getting ahead of myself.

In Marburg it was Rainer Minder who thought these things. I, fearful, listened to him and delayed my decision. Secretly (I believe) I was already turned, but I still had doubts about making it known publicly; not even, son, to myself. One fears throwing oneself in the abysses or climbing the peaks. Here, it was the case of the peaks. To climb to the highest peaks of German spirituality and his unrenounceable mission: defend the permanence of the Western spirit, its centrality. Its space open for the battle; its uncontainable willingness, in permanent warrior expansion.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 7:02 AM