I never again has a direct conversation with him. I never again heard him speak to me. Dialogue, we always engaged in dialogue, from the Marburg years until the end, until this letter, where I still dialogue with him. But this dialogue was internal, it happened in me. Heidegger dwelled in my life. Who, if not him, with his happening in me, with his dwelling in me, could have awoken and sustained me day to day, for years, decades.

Eric Biemel's replacement was named Kruger and was an obese and clumsy man, a mean bureaucrat that, not even in the worst winter days, could avoid sweating. Everything was simple for him. He told me directly: "Our task is simple. We will teach whatever the Rosenberg office tells us to. We'll be patriots, true National Socialists". I tell you this so that you can understand my enthusiasm and my vacillations before the Master's course on metaphysics. When I heard his rectorial address it was he that directed Freiburg. It was him, Heidegger, our Rektor. Not now. Now it was no longer his word that we should necessarily be required to follow. What was his power then? He continued to be Heidegger, but he was no longer the Führer of Freiburg; a difficult situation for me. His word was, who could doubt it, unveiled truth. But that truth was no longer power. And this eroded him. For me, Martin, this event was obscure, difficult or impossible to understand. If truth doesn't express power, if power is not the expression of truth, if the truth is not power in its most profound becoming, if the truth doesn't unite with the maintenance and growth of power, is that, then, the truth?

Given that his truth was not the truth of the Rosenberg office, for whom it was that of power, was it then, true? Did Heidegger believe in a truth parallel to that of power? Did Heidegger believe in a new power? Only that way (only if Heidegger's parallel truth created a new power) could it stand up. Such a thing was, for me, improbable. The clingy bureaucrat Kruger had, now, more power than Heidegger. Power resided in the will of the Führer (Heidegger himself had said so) and the Führer had delegated the transmission of the truth to the Rosenberg office. Truth was no longer unveiling. It was obedience. It was to comply with the decisions of power, given that in those decisions truth was expressed, and whose compliance with, furthermore, power demanded and controlled. Kruger was right: our task was simple. There is nothing simpler than the simple act of obeying.

I confess: instead of "act" I was about to write "art". Only thinking in Brückner's seventh symphony blocked me. If anything is art, that symphony is. However, no one could conduct it, ever, like Furtwängler, obedient, a genial baton of power. It was he (when I heard him direct that symphony) who handed me the truth of music. Remember her that phrase of Heidegger's I have cited for you, that he said one somber afternoon, persecuted: music reaches heights that even philosophy can't manage. How was it possible that Furtwängler, obedient, tedious as a servant to power, could take up there? Or was that servilism, that docile compliance with power and its truth, that allowed him that reach? So to this event, Martin, was unclear to me, hard or impossible to understand. I hope you live in simpler times. Allow me my doubts: the ones your father lived through were so dark that they will never stop hounding you, they will grant no quarter.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 2:21 AM