Heidegger. That Ridiculous Nazi Philistine
Thomas
Bernhard
Thomas Bernhard was born in Holland in 1931
but grew
up in
Austria. His interest in music
and theatre
led him
to study at the Akademie
Mozarteum
in Salzburg.
He has written a quantity
of poetry,
several
novels, short stories
and plays
and three
volumes of autobiography.
He died
in 1989.
'Thomas
Bernhard
is one
of the masters of
contemporary
European
fiction-After
Kafka's
and Canetti's
his sensibility
is one
of the
most
acute,
the most
capable of exemplary
images
and gestures,
in modern
literature.'
George
Steiner,
Times Literary Supplement
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Stamp used by Heidegger in his letters, October
1944,
when he directed the philosophy seminars
at Freiburg,
Taken from the cover of Heidegger l'introduction du
nazismedans la philosophie, by Emmanuel Faye.
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Bernhard's description
of Heidegger in Old Masters is unsurpassable:
'Stifter
in fact
always reminds me of Heidegger,
of that
ridiculous
Nazi philistine in plus-fours.
Just
as Stifter
has totally and in the most
shameless
manner
kitschified great literature,
so Heidegger,
the Black
Forest philosopher
Heidegger,
has kitschified
philosophy, Heidegger
and Stifter,
each
one for himself and in
his own
way,
have hopelessly kitschified
philosophy
and literature.
Heidegger, after
whom
the wartime
and postwar generations
have
been
chasing, showering him with revolting
and stupid
doctoral
theses even in his lifetime
I always visualize
him sitting on his wooden bench outside his
Black Forest house, alongside his wife who,
with her perverse knitting enthusiasm, ceaselessly
knits winter socks for him from the wool
she has shorn from their own Heidegger sheep.
I cannot visualize
Heidegger other than sitting on the bench
outside his Black Forest house, alongside
his wife, who all her life totally dominated
him and who knitted all his socks and crocheted
all his caps and baked all his bread and
wove all his bedlinen and who even cobbled
up his sandals for him.
Heidegger was a kitschy
brain..... a feeble thinker from the Alpine
foothills, as I believe, and just about right
for the German philosophical hot-pot. For
decades they ravenously spooned up that man
Heidegger, more than anybody else, and overloaded
their stomachs with his stuff. Heidegger
had a common face, not a spiritual one, Reger
said, he was through and through an unspiritual
person, devoid of all fantasy, devoid of
all sensibility, a genuine German philosophical
ruminant, a ceaselessly gravid German philosophical
cow, Reger said, which grazed upon German
philosophy and thereupon for decades let
its smart little cow-pats drop on it....
Heidegger is the petit-bourgeois
of German
philosophy, the man who has placed
on German
philosophy his kitschy nightcaps,
that
kitschy black night-cap which Heidegger
always
wore, on all occasions. Heidegger
is the
carpet-slipper and night-cap philosopher
of the
Germans, nothing else.
.
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