The Memory of Meßkirch Fades Away (1919–1923)

This chapter considers Martin Heidegger's life during the immediate postwar period. While Germany's defeat shook the nation's foundations, Heidegger thought that it was time for a philosophical revolution. Apolitical because he lacked knowledge of and esteem for concrete politics, Heidegger accorded much less attention to current events and to his contemporaries than to philosophy and to authors of the past, but he was not unaffected by the anti-Semitism simmering across the country. Despite harboring anti-Semitist beliefs himself, Heidegger nevertheless had close relationships with Jews, including his teacher, the noted philosopher Edmund Husserl. Since the war, however, Heidegger had found himself alone in his enterprise of philosophical revolution. Husserl seemed to him insufficiently radical, and the break with Catholicism had cut him off from his religious friends. Despite his arrogance, Heidegger regretted this solitude, though he gradually found a friend in Karl Jaspers. Moreover, despite an emotional return to his hometown, the revolution caused him increasingly to forget the region of his birth, its religion, and its values. The Meßkirch way was fading away without his realizing it.