What was Maria Elisabeth Wessenberg in my life? What was I in hers? Does transcendence need time? Does it need to extend itself into that linear and bureaucratic temporality of the almanacs? No. The great achievements of a life are outside of time. They happen, wound and then flee, they abscond. I believe, sadly, that your mother and I had none of that. Not even the factical and lineal expansion of so called ordinary days. Nor the unavoidable event that cleaves the spirit and keeps it from being what it was. What did I do for Maria Elisabeth? I plucked her out of the Berlin squalls. It was the case; I assume at times, that there was more historic authenticity than in the years she later spent at my side. I plucked her from her home, I took from that gray, frightened, father, that could only show her the mediocrity of the "interpreted" German, he who said what everyone said and did what everyone did. The German of they say, not of his own words. I took her to Freiburg and I made her listen, beside me, the speech of Rektor Heidegger. Never, as in that moment, was there more historic authenticity in her life. But did she let herself be pierced by it, or did she merely observe the greatness and the storm as a distant spectacle? I never asked her. Not even next to her death bed. Did she stop being Bolshevik? Did she truly embrace National Socialism? We didn't speak about that either.

What was I to her, the man that caressed her sweaty brow in the exact instant of her last breath? There is a final breath, Martin. It's not a metaphor, it's not literature. Humans, on dying, exhale. If you read Homer you'll tire of finding that happening. What we exhale in that last breath is the soul. I never knew whether to believe in this. The soul is not a prestigious philosophical category. But then, why do we die exhaling? What are we expelling in that last exhalation? What is leaving us? It is being that leaves us, Martin. When we die we don't die, we cease to be. Dasein, on dying, is not dead. Death isn't. Death is a ceasing to be. Your mother, then, when she expelled that sigh, when that tenuous exhalation left her parted lips, expelled her being. The last thing we exhale is being. On exhaling we deprive ourselves of it. On exhaling, we cease to be. That is death. That event made your mother while I caressed her face. Nothing, I believe, united us as much. We were never as together as the instant we separated forever.

And then on to you. And what if you were the event of the erratic union, almost indecipherable, between Maria Elisabeth Wessenberg and Dieter Müller? It's your own existence that will respond to this question. It is your own existence that will strengthen the lightness of ours, or will ratify their insignificance. We're depending on you, Martin. Only one thing will alleviate this grievous load. We won't be there to judge you. Or yes: we will be there in your spirit, demanding of you. You will then have, one only path to happiness: to tear us out of you, exhale us. You'll have to kill us, Martin.


The day I buried her there was a hostile sun. That brightness was injuring my hurt, which was deaf and turbid. I hate nature. What indifference, so little does it accompany us. How could I feel myself one with it? Did it do anything for me? Had it allowed me a fresh dawn, with dark clouds, with dark birds? Everything shone. Everything was unbearably visible. You mother's coffin sank into the earth and the sun warmed its somber texture, drawing reflections from it, festive, idiotic luminosities. Not even paleness was allowed for our brows. The sun reddened us and we looked at each other and we watched ourselves burn, flowering out of season like stupid roses in the spring. I hated nature, Martin. I thought (against everything the Master had taught me) that maybe it deserved our devastation, the razing of no return we submitted it to.

Maria Elisabeth was buried without shadows, between the splendors of a glorious morning. I couldn't describe to me the revulsion that a simple butterfly can awaken in a wasted widower. Even the earth we put her in burned. And she, poor thing, endured soaring temperatures. She wasn't even conceded the charity of a humid earth, of a cool tomb that would allow her to free herself of the hell of the fever.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 3:20 AM