I never saw Hannah Arendt again.

Rainer, yes, he loved her too much for it not to provoke a definitive hurt with no chance of healing. Don't ask me what torments took place in the soul of Rainer, but they were dangerous and hurt everyone around him. I knew Rainer, I knew or suspected, in some privileged, mysterious instant, who he was, what he was searching for in the world, what passion drove him, or why, with lights glaring, only hatred appeared to drive him. Was it possible to know men in that crossroads of history? Was anyone themselves? Weren't we all warped by events that overtook us, which dragged us along? There were so many callings, so many imperatives that knew no delays, no doubts, that made us appear thrown into the middle of a great storm that lead, without any doubt, to greatness, but whose cost we did not know and whose horizon was now, was here, was falling on us (the future was falling on us, soon: I don't know if I can express that to you or the uncertainty that causes) and we, at least me, appeared to be still unarmed, destitute. I presume hatred was absent in me, that I lacked that titanic force that moved Rainer and his noisy companions. I presume -- I'll risk this confession -- that your father was a Nationalist Socialist unable to fill his spirit with anger and hate. These days only with shame, almost with dishonor could I confess something like this to myself.

Rainer carried out his great exploit: humiliate the Jewess. He knew everything he needed to know. What train she would catch. At which station she would chose to get off. What path she would follow to -- in a dusk of unusual, violent beauty -- reach the hut in which the Master waited for her. He told me this (sweating, red faced, his eyes very open and shining with triumph and loathing) near midnight the day of the events. He'd dropped himself into a wood chair, onto a generous cushion made from an antique fabric, red and very dark and so German and so strong like Nietzsche's prose. "Today", he said, triumphant, "the Jewess dragged herself through the mud of her humiliation. There I sunk her and there she stayed". I did the expected. I asked him to calm himself. I offered him a cognac. I offered him an aspirin that, in his coarse style, he rejected: "Don't be stupid, Dieter. How could you confuse a victorious man with a sick one?"

He followed Hannah down some country paths that -- he said -- were his and not the Jewess's, that she offended them crossing them and, even worse, passing through them in search of sin. They are mine because I am a true German and every true German is united with the soil, the countryside, and its paths. Recall our days in Berlin. It is a great city of our great nation, but our greatness, Dieter, is different. It is that of the earth, the countryside, and its paths. I said to him that the Master often said those things. He said yes, but he had heard him say them not only with the serenity of the peasant but, also, with the conviction of the soldier. I suppose I was ready to ask him to whom, and when, and why, when I was intimidated by his menacing voice, pastoral recital, rural yet warrior. Would I have listened to the Master say these phrases in the same manner?

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 7:33 AM