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Introduction
to the poetry:
[The] ground that
enabled modern technology to set free new energy in nature [is] a revolution
in leading concepts . . . by which man is placed in a different world. This
radical revolution in outlook has come about in modern philosophy. From this
arises a completely new relation of man to the world and his place in it.
The world now appears as an object open to the attacks of calculative
thought, attacks that nothing is believed able any longer to resist.
-- Gelassenheit (1959),
translated by John M. Anderson & E. Hans Freund
Even before
his first book, in 1927, the young lecturer Heidegger was highly acclaimed.
In 1933, when Goebbels called for burning books by Jews, socialists, and
others, in bonfires often fed by professors and students, Heidegger swore
loyalty to Hitler and, by vote of the faculty, replaced the dissenting
rector at Freiburg. Always a German nationalist, Heidegger headed the
movement to unite workers and students into the Party and signed orders
firing Jewish professors, one of whom, Werner Brock, later an
editor-interpreter of Heidegger, claimed Heidegger could do nothing else.
When Hitler wanted him in Munich in 1933 and Berlin in 1935, Heidegger
remained at Freiburg, and after 1934 Heidegger resigned as rector, pleading
too much political influence. His fervent support of Nazis during the year
he was rector was given when their power was weakest, but investigations by
the French after the war cleared him of war crimes.
Among
Heidegger's loyal followers, Sartre (who read Heidegger and Husserl in
Berlin) was in the Resistance and a Nazi prison, and Hannah Arendt (once
Heidegger's student and lover), in exile in New York, became an influential
philosopher of community and justice. If some deem Heidegger the thinker of
his time, others find him original but untenable. He based his thought in a
concept of rooted relation he called being-there, and stood on it by staying
in Freiburg, even when it meant severing thought from action.
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(Section 12
of a 14-part poem)
Martin, I've meditated, and
calculating risks
to me, I would rather be silenced than silent.
Those are the choices we have where we are free
to see or not, as we please. Quizzes you pose
on creation and destruction, the relation of those
who reap power's prizes to dark abatoirs__let me:
Why does God hide? Is poetry mush? Will it feed
the disenfranchised poor, the confused prisoners?
What mirrors permit traffic between torn
Europe
and those who tore? Are our smoother obsessives
more educable than yours? Your silence and ours
were accessories. No one's innocent, but innocents
gasp and die in your sentences, and in ours.
We swallow blood of
old scripts, wasting brown‑babies
as terrorists to keep Hollywood safe, caring more
for fetuses than for the slaughtered, ignorant,
and (on so many levels) starving. Christ bleeds
in museums; we embalm children with shrivelling ideas,
petrified by the old terror in the bloodstream.
Martin, we don't know yet which of us is better.
Loyalty of
those whose work you would have burned
for Goebbels the year of your loud ascent, makes
you as hard to disregard as to pardon. You owe
too much to those who bore blows you didn't oppose.
Sartre made you our hair‑of‑the‑dog after the orgy.
But God's not dead, you responded, only hidden.
Yes, Martin. He was silenced, alone, in prison,
with Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Brother Dietrich died there.
But he was
only one of the numbered and unnumbered.
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