I didn't dare tell him that Heidegger collaborated in that triumph. I didn't dare do worse things: to tell him that, perhaps, he loved her. That he found in Hannah things his wife didn't know nor could give him. I didn't dare and I didn't out of fear, to protect myself. I this point in the story, even in our friendship, where Rainer was involved, I feared him. He waited between some old lime trees, in the spacious garden around there, he waited until dusk and until she came out, next to him, they embraced, they kissed and said goodbye. "I remained between the lime trees, Dieter. I had been there two hours or longer or however many it was. What could I know of the stupid time of clocks if all time, feverish, told me, 'now, right now, they fornicate like animals?'" He followed her to the train station. "There, brusquely like a militia man, I planted myself in front of her. To my surprise, she didn't appear frightened. I know, she said, that you've been following me since I left for here. As you see, it didn't bother me. I know you are sick, I can't avoid that and I won't avoid doing the things I want. But don't worry. There will be no more meetings between Heidegger and me. I return him to you. 'Not to me, Jewish bitch', I said, 'To the fatherland'. 'It's my fatherland too', she said. I asked her, with an irony intended to hurt her and even to scare her, if she still believed that. Her eyes shone and she was about to cry. 'Every day less', she said. 'Then it would be prudent for you to go, Hannah. Germany will become a more insecure place for you and yours.' She said that yes that she knew it, and after she said again that, yes, that she would go, and she would marry a man that she would learn to love and she would never return to Germany. I had some pity. 'Hannah, I'm an official in the SA', I said. 'I will tell things as they are. I thought your meetings with the Master had ended. I am a man of Ernst Röhm. We are a powerful force and want to have Martin Heidegger with us. If you leave Germany and return, if you leave Germany, return, and again approach Heidegger, we will kill you. Or you'll end up in a prison camp. We have already built several'. She didn't say a word. The train arrived; she got on and avoided looking at me once. I don't even know if I would have desired her."

Rainer appeared sober; the storm had passed, but in his spirit (in the one that fury never stopped) nested more tiredness than peace, or the serenity of the path. I served myself some cognac. I felt frozen. My hands shook. I asked: "Rainer is that true about the prison camps?" His cruel eyes pierced me. "Dieter, dear", he said. "I have been building them for months". And added: "It would be appropriate for you to stop asking about Being. I approve that you don't fall into the inauthenticity of its forgetting, but now is the time for you to start finding out about some things".

He proposed I enter the SA.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 6:23 AM