At the Existentialist Café (27 page)

Conversely, many black Americans who found themselves in Paris after the war appreciated the experience of being treated with basic human respect. They were more than respected; they were often idolised, as French youngsters so loved black American music and culture. Some decided to stay on, and a few were drawn to existentialism, finding much to recognise in its philosophy of freedom.

The great example of this was Richard Wright, who had made his name in the US with the novels
Native Son
(1940) and
Black Boy
(1945). While still in New York he met both Sartre and Camus, and he and his wife became particularly good friends with Simone de Beauvoir, who stayed with them in 1947. He wrote in his journal that year,
‘
How those French boys and girls think and write; nothing like it exists anywhere on earth today. How keenly they feel the human plight.’ In return, his French visitors loved his gritty, semi-autobiographical writing about life as a black man growing up in America. Camus arranged to have his books translated for Gallimard; Sartre commissioned him to write for
Les Temps modernes
. Wright managed, with difficulty, to get a visa to visit France himself, and was instantly converted. Just as the details of America had amazed the French, the peculiarities of Paris delighted Wright: ‘
The knobs were in the center of the doors!’ He arranged further sojourns, and eventually settled in the city.

Even though the Europeans were puzzled by American ways, they loved being received so warmly: the US was (and still is) a tremendously hospitable country for new ideas, and for potential celebrities too. The year after Sartre’s photo appeared in
Time
magazine with the caption
‘Women swooned’, Beauvoir was hailed in the
New Yorker
as ‘the prettiest Existentialist you ever saw’. Articles on existentialism appeared in newspapers and cultural periodicals: the
New York Post
, the
New Yorker, Harper’s Bazaar
, and the
Partisan Review
— favourite reading of intellectuals — which published essays on Sartre, Beauvoir and Camus, with translated excerpts from their works. The French exile Jean Wahl wrote ‘Existentialism: A Preface’ for the
New Republic
in October 1945. Along with the primers and prefaces came some gentle satire. In 1948, the
New York Times Magazine
reprinted an existentialist spoof by Paul F. Jennings from the British weekly the
Spectator
, called
‘Thingness of Things’. It described a philosophy of ‘resistentialism’ propounded by one Pierre-Marie Ventre, dedicated to undersanding why things resist and frustrate human beings at every turn, as when they trip us up underfoot, or decline to be found when lost. Ventre’s slogan is
‘Les choses sont contre nous’
— ‘Things are against us’.

One thing about the existentialists seriously bothered American intellectuals, and that was their low taste in American culture — their love of jazz and blues, their interest in the sleazy murders of the Deep South, and their fondness for potboilers about hitmen and psychopaths. Even their more elevated choices in American fiction
were suspect, since cultured Americans were less inclined to appreciate their own modern novelists than the filigree meanderings of Proust — whom Sartre abhorred. William Barrett, an early existentialist populariser, wrote in the
Partisan Review
that Sartre’s novels stood as ‘
grim reminders that one cannot read Steinbeck and Dos Passos as great novelists with impunity’. All such books, with their ‘banal and meaningless conversations, characters wandering in and out, bars and dance-halls’, were a bad influence. In the same issue, the critic F. W. Dupee concluded that the French taste for Faulkner was less a compliment to American literature than an indication of some terrible ‘
crisis in French taste and reason’.

A divergence also emerged in the American and French ways of thinking about existentialism. For the French in the 1940s, it tended to be seen as new, jazzy, sexy and daring. For Americans, it evoked grimy cafés and shadowy Parisian streets: it meant old Europe. Thus, while the French press portrayed existentialists as rebellious youths with outrageous sex lives, Americans often saw them as pale, pessimistic souls, haunted by dread, despair and anxiety à la Kierkegaard. This image stuck. Even now, especially in the English-speaking world, the word ‘existentialist’ brings to mind a noir figure staring into the bottom of an espresso cup, too depressed and anguished even to flick through the pages of a dog-eared
L’être et le néant
. One of the few to challenge this image early on was Richard
Wright, who, after first meeting the existentialists, wrote to his friend Gertrude Stein that he could not understand why Americans insisted on seeing it as a
gloomy philosophy: to him it meant optimism and freedom.

American readers in these early years had very little original material to go on if they wanted to judge existentialism for themselves, and if they did not read French. Only a few fragments of Sartre’s and Beauvoir’s work had so far been translated, and these did not include either
Nausea
, first translated by Lloyd Alexander as
The Diary of Antoine Roquentin
in 1949, or
Being and Nothingness
, translated by Hazel Barnes in 1956.

If it was hard to get accurate information about French existentialism, it was even harder to learn anything about the German thinkers
who had started it all. One of the few who tried to correct this imbalance was Heidegger’s former pupil and lover, Hannah Arendt, now based in the United States and working for Jewish refugee organisations. She wrote two 1946 essays, for the
Nation
and the
Partisan Review
respectively. One, ‘
French Existentialism’, unpicked some of the myths about Sartre and the others. The other, ‘What is Existenz Philosophy?’, tried to plant existentialism back into its German roots, summarising the thought of Jaspers and Heidegger.

But this was a difficult moment to tell people that the prettiest existentialist you ever saw and the swoon-inducing Sartre owed their ideas to Germans. Few wanted to acknowledge this fact in France, either. And Heidegger was no ordinary German. If the magician of Messkirch could have magicked his own past away, everyone would have been happier.

8

DEVASTATION

In which Heidegger turns and is turned against, and some awkward meetings occur
.

Germany in 1945 was a place where no one would want to be. Survivors, isolated soldiers and displaced persons of all kinds roamed the cities and countryside. Refugee organisations struggled to help people get home, and occupying forces tried to impose order amid near-total loss of infrastructure. Heaps of rubble often stank of dead bodies buried inside. People searched for food, grew vegetables in makeshift allotments, and cooked on open fires. Besides those killed, around fourteen to fifteen million Germans had been made homeless by firebombing and general destruction. The English poet Stephen Spender, travelling the country after the war, compared the people he saw wandering through the wreckage of Cologne and other places to desert
nomads who had stumbled across the ruins of a lost city. But people, especially groups of
Trümmerfrauen
or ‘rubble-women’, did begin working to clear the stones and bricks, supervised by occupying soldiers.

Displaced persons from the camps often had to wait a long time to go anywhere. Many German soldiers also remained missing; some slowly made their way home, crossing whole countries by foot. They were joined by
well over twelve million ethnic Germans expelled from Poland, Czechoslovakia and other central and eastern European countries; they too walked to Germany, pushing small wagons and trolleys containing their possessions. The number of people simply trudging around Europe at this time is astounding. The grandfather of a friend of mine walked home to Hungary from a prison camp in Denmark.
When, in Edgar Reitz’s 1984 film sequence
Heimat
, a young man turns up in his Rhineland village having walked all the way from Turkey, the scene is not as fanciful as it might seem. But many others remained stranded in far-off places for years, with relatives having no idea where they were.

Among those lost to communication in 1945 were the Heideggers’ two sons, Jörg and Hermann. Both had been soldiers on the Eastern Front, and both were now in Russian POW camps. Their parents could only wait in uncertainty, not knowing whether either was alive.

Since his resignation from the Freiburg rectorship in 1934, Martin Heidegger had kept fairly quiet. The same heart condition that had kept him out of active service in the First World War had continued to prevent his being called up for service of any kind through most of the second. He taught at the university and spent as much time as possible in his Todtnauberg hut, feeling misunderstood and badly treated. A friend who saw him there in 1941, Max Kommerell, described him as having a good tan, a lostness in his eyes, and ‘
a delicate smile that is just a tiny, tiny bit crazy’.

With the Allies closing in by late 1944, the Nazi regime ordered the total mobilisation of all Germans, including those previously exempt. Heidegger, now fifty-five, was sent with other men to dig trenches near Alsace to ward off a French advance. This only lasted for a few weeks, but meanwhile he also took the precaution of hiding his manuscripts in safer places in case of invasion. Some were already stored in the vaults of the Messkirch bank where his brother
Fritz worked; he squirrelled others away in a church tower in nearby Bietingen. In April 1945, he even wrote to his wife about a plan to put several volumes of writing into a secret
cave which would be closed up and its location recorded on a treasure map, entrusted to just a few people. If this was ever done there is no evidence of it, but he did keep moving papers around. Heidegger’s precautions were not irrational: Freiburg was badly damaged in air raids, and Todtnauberg was not large or secure enough to store much safely. He may also have feared that some items were incriminating.

He kept with him only a few manuscripts, including his recent
work on Friedrich Hölderlin, whom Heidegger read obsessively. The great local poet of the Danube region, born in 1770 in Lauffen and suffering from bouts of insanity all his life, Hölderlin had set much of his visionary poetry in the local landscape, while also evoking an idealised image of ancient Greece — the very combination that had always fascinatined Heidegger. The only other poet who would ever be so important to him was the even more disturbed Georg Trakl, an Austrian schizophrenic and drug addict who died aged twenty-seven in 1914. Trakl’s eerie poems are filled with hunters, young women and strange blue beasts stepping through silent forests by moonlight. Heidegger immersed himself in both poets, and generally explored the question of how poetic language can summon forth Being, and open a space for it in the world.

In March 1945, the Allies arrived in Freiburg, and Heidegger moved out. He arranged for philosophers and students in his faculty to find refuge in
Wildenstein, a spectacular castle perched high on a crag over the Danube near Beuron, not far from Messkirch (also, incidentally, not far from the castle of Sigmaringen where the Germans had herded members of the Vichy government for a grotesque
Decameron-
style retreat after they fled France). Wildenstein’s owners were the prince and princess of Sachsen-Meiningen; the princess had been Heidegger’s lover. This is perhaps why Elfride Heidegger did not join them; she was left behind in Freiburg to mind the Heidegger house in the suburb of Zähringen. When the Allies arrived, they commandeered it, so that she would share the house for some time with a refugee from Silesia and the family of a French sergeant.

(Illustrations Credit 8.1)

Meanwhile, the little band of university refugees — around ten professors and thirty students, mostly women — had cycled through the Black Forest, with Heidegger himself catching them up later on his son’s bicycle. He stayed with the princess and her husband at a nearby forester’s lodge which they used as their home, while the rest of the group ascended into the fairy-tale castle. Through May and June 1945, even after the French had arrived in the area, the philosophers helped to bring in hay from surrounding fields, and spent the evenings entertaining each other with lectures and piano recitals. At the end of June, they had their farewell party in the forester’s lodge; Heidegger lectured them on Hölderlin. When the pleasant few months came to an end, the merry band returned home to Freiburg, no doubt ruddy-cheeked and fit. But Heidegger arrived in Freiburg to find his home full of strangers, the city under French administration, and a total ban against him teaching. His enemies had reported him as a suspected Nazi sympathiser.

Heidegger had spent that Danube spring of 1945 writing several new works, including a philosophical dialogue to which he gave the date 8 May 1945 — the day Germany’s surrender became official. It is entitled ‘Evening Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia, between a Younger and an Older Man’. The two characters are German inmates of the POW camp, and when the dialogue opens they have just returned from their day of forced labour in the woods.