Let us return to Maria Elizabeth, your mother. How did that Bolshevik warrior, in so short a time, abandon her fights, her family, Berlin, and marry a National Socialist professor? It's not so hard to understand. She was twenty, when she fought in the streets. She did not have a political identity. She reached for Bolshevism to negate the figure of her father. Wessenberg was not a Nazi, but he was something worse than that: a scared German. He wanted order in Germany and knew that only Hitler would bring it. He feared him yet was bewitched by him. That led him to the vainest chitchat about the peace that National Socialism would deliver to German lands. He would go on about work, the future, the unity of the nation and the growth of industry. He was, of course, anti-Semitic. To be an anti-Semite was a mode of the era; a form of candor, of inauthenticity. "They say" such things of the Jews. All good German believed it. What the Master, in Being and Time, calls Man; should not to be understood as a sociological aspect of Dasein, but instead ontological. The "they say" (The French Heidegger would later say on dit or, with less precision, "bad faith") is a fundamental state of Dasein. If I submit to what everyone says it is because I am afraid to confront my own word. I'll give you this for now, Martin. But it suffices to explain Mr. Wessenberg: he said and believed in what everyone said and believed in. Maria Elizabeth didn't want to be like that. She wanted to rebel against that plain vision of life; anonymous. What she looked for, then, in the fire of Bolshevism, was for her own face, without realizing that it wasn't coming from herself, but propelled by the banality of her father. She looked for in Bolshevism (which is the perfect organization of the anonymous, of massification) her authentic being. To try to affirm a difference against the identity of her father, she threw herself on a movement devised to negate the individual. I told her so and she understood, because she wanted to understand, because she wanted to love me. Or because she wanted, in fleeing with me to Freiburg, to escape from her father, to no longer participate in the clamor of the reds, but to become the wife of a thinker, of a man from the provinces, far from that cluttered Berlin, shaken by crazy wars, in which she left her past, her story, her myths, distant infancy, her youth, her infinite chaotic dreams and, above all, the suffocation of a father, for her, inescapable. With me, she would forget him.

So it was. We bought a little house in which we would live a short time, together at least, in which you would be born and in which I would know, inexpressible pain, failure, solitude, mediocrity and even fear. Once again I get ahead of myself. It is enough to say that in all that -- not your arrival in the world, of course -- would happen an event as unexpected as unjust, and unacceptable. Maria Elizabeth would die in that house.

No sooner had she arrived in Freiburg, I took her to a class of the Master's. It was on the pre-Socratics. Maria Elizabeth surrendered before the genius of the Master. Luckily, that day the Master had spoken in the auditorium with a rare transparency; something that disillusioned some but stimulated your mother. She was in Freiburg, had attended one of Heidegger's classes, and she had understood all of the Master's majestic words! This sudden access to the sublime made her forget in a flash the disturbances in Berlin, the skirmishes with the police, the stink from the latrines, all now insignificant. She would contract leukemia in 1935. How can life be so cruel with a being that so loves it, and so deserves it?

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 5:04 AM