Rainer returned happy to Marburg. We are provincial men, he said, of the soil, we are not, unfortunately, peasants but we would not become true Germans if we do not read in the soul of our peasants, if we do not learn from them. The fatherland is the soil and our blood will only be German if flows to defend it. These phrases I had heard from Ernst Röhm, the Führer of the SA, whom, little by little, but resolutely, he was approaching; so much so that he made himself indispensable. One day a stream of demented words hit me like lashes. It was Rainer who said them, and he said them in a beer hall we often went to speak of philosophical questions, and not passionate ravings. I don't know if he was drunk, I don't know if he should have been. I don't know, above all, what manner of drunkenness possessed him. He told me Heidegger had approached Röhm. That he was one of them; that they would take him to the rectorship of Freiburg. That Hitler (he said, to my infinite puzzlement and to my horror or frenzy) would not last long; that a second revolution was necessary, a revolution within the revolution. That Hitler was ceding too much before the aristocrats of steel, and before the decadent glory of the decadent German army, that they were the new army. That Röhm would be the Führer and Heidegger the philosophical Führer of the new stage of the revolution: the socialist stage, he said. I told him ("I'll remind you", I started) that the National Socialist revolution was done to stem the advance of the red wave over Germany. He told me ("I'll remind you", he too said) that the only way to annihilate the red wave is by destroying our rotten bourgeoisie. If we allow them, they will slow, no doubt, the red wave, but another way, the only way which they know so well: seducing them, inserting them as minor members in the soul of Germany. We won't allow it. If the nation is ours, so will be socialism. One must destroy the army and the aristocracy of capital, the gentlemen of steel. We are many, he boasted, we grow with youth, uncontainable. Röhm and Heidegger have already met. The professor is with us and soon, with us too, he will be rector of Freiburg. He lit a generous pipe, made it smoke smoothly, with the mystery of a morning fog, a fog from the Rhine. Then he said something perhaps as surprising as what he'd already said, but maybe more out there, warped by an disorder, by a coming unhinged from what moored (not in the tumultuous history of Germany) but in some unreachable hollow of his conscience, a hole in which only madness could live. "Do you know whom he continues seeing?" he asked. "Do you know whom he condemns to the humiliation of fornicating in abject train stations? The Jew, dear friend, our Hannah. And she, prostituting herself, accepts. He sent her to Jaspers. But with repugnant frequency, clandestinely, indignantly, he subjects her to some rest stop between Marburg and Heidelberg. I brought it up with Röhm. He told me: "You decide. That relation muddies our plans. It must be halted. Think of something and let me know. Whatever it is, we'll do it". Rainer smiled intimately. He liked to narrate these opacities. He liked to show off in front of me like a sorcerer of history, the maker of destiny. Everything was in his hands: Röhm and his deepening of the Nazi movement; Heidegger and the metaphysical soul of Germany. And, above all, Hannah, the Jew, the impure, the woman who with a love impossible and bitter, loved. I asked him what he planned to do. The only possibility, he said. Annihilate the Jew. Rescue Heidegger. "In sum, dear friend," he ordered another beer, "the same as always." Night had come. The smoke from his pipe was lost among the shadows, but when he exhaled strongly, upwards, he seemed to seek the stars. "To save Germany."

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 7:56 PM