I took her, in my strong arms (not because of my youth but because I was, naturally, a strong man, something I inherited from my father), and took her up a side street, isolating her, isolating us. I told her she was crazy, that she fought for a lost cause, that she would die for nothing in the middle of events that no longer made sense. She asked me, furious, if all her companions, there, in that street died for nothing, if they were, then, idiots, if we should laugh at them or pity them. I told her the truth: that we should pity them. That I would never laugh at people capable fighting until death for their ideas. But there was no truth in those ideas. They expressed nothing of the German soul; of her spirit. The spirit of our country has already chosen, I told her. She had found her destiny, and the will of her destiny. She has decided on and elected herself. She has turned to the will of the Führer and the strength of the blood and the soil; which is, whether you like it or not, National Socialism. You're a shitty Nazi, she said. I thank you for what you did for me but...I grabbed her by the arms. I told her to stay with me. That she not return to the stupid battle. To that finished war. That she not turn over her life to the bites of those moribund dogs, all already dead without knowing it, despite barking or whining pathetically, sadly. I asked her name. I told her mine. I told her I was professor of philosophy at Freiburg. Your mother, Martin, was a beautiful woman. I can tell you she had a broad brow. That her perhaps excessive eyebrows gave her eyes a Gothic shadiness, obligated to the night and its mysteries. That her eyes were green, not large but green like the best fields deep in our nation, despite beating in them something superior, unlike any known shade, new iridescent colors. A brightness, Martin. A warm and passionate light that, I told myself, expressed her militant ardor and later, correcting myself, I knew it came from her intelligence. Because, Martin, empty and poor is that mundane idea of intelligence, of lucidity, of that marvelous and rare power that distinguishes us from the rest of creation, thought. Intelligence is a passion, and it burns. I saw that in your mother's eyes. There, I believe, I decided to love her.

I stayed in Berlin and, three or four days later, I ate dinner at her home, with her family. Mr. Wessenberg sat at the front of the table and said all manner of vague things and variations about the state of Germany in those days. I, aware of them all, made an effort to listen to him as if possessing an interest that he, undoubtedly, believed genuine, inoffensive like the vain who, with those that know them, let them flatter and manipulate them, and even, secretly in this case, amuse themselves at their expense. I got everything I wanted. I took your mother to my hotel room. We made love joyfully. Later I talked to her father and told him, simply, that I wanted to marry Maria Elizabeth. Mr. Wessenberg was a fan of philosophy and, I suppose, this worked to my advantage. The decisive moment came, in any case, when he asked me about Heidegger and I said I knew him, that I had been his disciple for years, that I could, when so few can, explain the complex yet quite understandable passages of Being and Time, and I would, of course, explain them to him, no sooner was I back from my honeymoon. "Or even better", I said with the most exquisite of my smiles, "When you visit us in Freiburg". A few days later I was taking your mother to the provinces. Mr. Wessenberg promised to visit us. He also asked if I might present him to Heidegger. I told him yes. Was there anything in the entire universe I might not promise him in order to take his daughter? If he'd expressed any interest in striking up a relationship with Hegel, I would also have told him yes. "It won't be easy, but I'll do what's possible", I would even have done more, yielding to that stubborn compromise that we philosophers have with the truth. 1933 began, I lived with Maria Elizabeth Wessenberg in Freiburg, and I was about to be named adjunct professor to the chair of Philosophy of History, held by Eric Biemel, prominent disciple of Heidegger and political manager of the SA, who hated me. His motive was only one and even (as I will tell you) not very surprising: he thought me a Marxist thinker.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 5:04 AM