edited by Dieter Roelstraete Machines

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penser CONTENTS

NOTE TO THE READER This publication accompanies the exhibition “Machines à penser,” conceived and Dieter Roelstraete Trois machines à penser 19 curated by Dieter Roelstraete at Fondazione Prada, Venice. The project recounts the archi‑ Ludwig Wittgenstein Culture and Value 179 tectural typology of the hut as a “machine for thinking,” made for or named after the three Shumon Basar The Eternal Return 197 German philosophers Theodor Adorno, Martin Heidegger of the Primitive Hut and Ludwig Wittgenstein. In addition to the lead essay Theodor Adorno Refuge for the Homeless 251 by the curator, the volume con­‑ tains two essays and a poem written by scholars, theorists, Alec Finlay HUTOPIA 257 and participating artists. Also included are a selection of excerpts relating to the Martin Heidegger Why Do I Stay in the Provinces? 323 theme of dwelling by Adorno, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Saint Jerome, and three con- Goschka Macuga versations with artists commis‑ sioned to make new works for the exhibition project: Leonor Leonor Antunes Conversations 339, 357, 369 Antunes, Alexander Kluge, and Goshka Macuga. The publica‑ tion features a bibliography, the Alexander Kluge } Italian translations of the texts, and a list of exhibited works and illustrations. Mark Riley Thinking Place: 403 All the images in the book, apart from the cover cards, Imagining Heidegger at Todtnauberg are accompanied by a short and Wittgenstein at Skjolden caption with the name of the artist or maker, title of the work, and date. Complete captions Saint Jerome Letter XLIII to Marcella 443 for the illustrations can be found in the list of exhibited works and illustrations. Key images are accompanied by Bibliography 449 an extended caption (in italic) Italian Translations 453 written by the curator. List of Illustrations and Exhibited Works 529 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 Dieter Roelstraete Trois machines

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18 When men were scattered over German philosophy as a whole the earth, finding their shelter […] is the most fundamental in dugouts or some fissured rock form of romanticism and home- or hollow tree, philosophy sickness that has ever been. […] taught them to raise up roofs. One is no longer at home anywhere. 1 2 Seneca Friedrich Nietzsche

Previous pages: Bartolomeo Montagna Saint Jerome in Bethlehem, 1505–10 11 Hendrick van Steenwyck the Younger Saint Jerome in His Study, 1630 12 Vincenzo Catena , Saint Jerome in His Study 1 Quoted in Joseph Rykwert, 1510 14 c. On Adam’s House in Paradise: Albrecht Dürer The Idea of the Primitive Hut in Saint Jerome in His Study, Architectural History (Cambridge, post 1511 16 MA: The MIT Press, 1981; second edition), p. 110. Dieter Roelstraete Remains of Wittgenstein’s hut, 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Skjolden, October 2017 17 Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann Bartolomeo Montagna and Reginald J. Hollingdale Saint Jerome in the Desert, n.d., (New York: Random House, 15th century 18 1968), p. 225.

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0. Corner Stones attracting a steady stream of phenome- nological pilgrims and philosophical Theodor Adorno (born 1903 in tourists, all of whom are greeted by the Frankfurt am Main), Martin Heidegger same emphatic road sign identifying (born 1889 in Messkirch) and Ludwig the mythical hut as inaccessible private Wittgenstein (born 1889 in Vienna) property, still in the hands of the occupy the opposing corners of the pro-­ Heidegger family. Wittgenstein’s hut verbial Bermuda triangle that constitutes is a slightly more specialist—‌ ‌and there- 20th-century German-language philos- fore more enigmatic and alluring—‌ ‌ ophy, while simultaneously bridging affair, its footprint remains much the gap between the so-called “conti- harder to reach and find in the remote nental” and “Anglo-Saxon” traditions ‌ mountainous folds at the far end of —‌the central drama, one could say, Norway’s Sognefjord. Not entirely un-­ of 20th-century philosophy proper‌— surprisingly, however, this hut too‌— ‌between them. Curiously, all three have ‌or rather, the shadow cast by its memory: also had huts named after them, or have Wittgenstein’s hut has not stood at seen their names associated with certain its original location in the village of modest dwellings, from the well-known, Skjolden for many years now—‌ ‌has widely photographed and thoroughly become something of a tourist destina- documented to the obscurantist and tion. “Adorno’s Hut,” finally, I trust rarely seen: Wittgenstein’s hut, very few people have ever heard of: Heidegger’s hut, Adorno’s hut. Of it comes bracketed in the quotation these three, Heidegger’s hut is far and ‌marks of a title—‌that of a faintly away the best known: built in the early hut-like artwork by the late Scottish 1920s, it still stands today outside the poet and sculptor Ian Hamilton Finlay, Black Forest village of Todtnauberg, who surely knew only too well that

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Theodor Adorno, of all people, could the fact, back then, that these philoso- never have chosen to live in a hut on phers, with their curiously mirroring the edge of the known world, much less biographies‌—‌both were born in 1889, have built one himself. Finlay himself, and although their intellectual trajecto- however, was a hut-builder of sorts—‌ ries took them in starkly differing phil- ‌and a hermit for sure: Adorno’s hut osophical directions, they kept quietly is really Finlay’s hut; the philosopher’s respectful track of each other’s work exile akin to the poet’s escape. Adorno throughout their lives—‌ ‌shared the was certainly indebted to the hermetic, habit of hut-dwelling, and that the world-denying tradition in philosophy, landmarks that would come to define yet there is little in his thought, so an- their respective philosophical legacies xious to root out any trace of the un- were both conceived, in large part, in reflectively romantic, that could be simple wooden cabins built for this very considered less Adornian than hut- purpose in the same seven-year span. dwelling. Still, “Adorno’s Hut” The significance of this particular con- stands out as a powerful summation, gruence is something I only grasped in the wood and steel of Finlay’s later on, while leafing through a lavishly chosen treatment, of modern illustrated tome on postmodern art and philosophy’s enduring infatuation architecture (the title of which, like so with fantasies of flight and much postmodernism, I’ve long since the architecture of retreat. forgotten) and coming across a single As a philosophy student in the early ‌photograph of an artwork—‌ ‌assemblage, 1990s, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin ‌installation, sculpture—‌ by‌ Ian Hamilton Heidegger each made a deep and lasting Finlay titled Adorno’s Hut. The writings impression on me, though I do not of Theodor Adorno had by then remember ever being made aware of become another cornerstone of my

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philosophical and art-theoretical formation, and it was the encounter with this curiously titled (and decidedly odd-looking) work of art that planted the seed for the present curatorial thought experiment—‌ ‌the ultimate aim of which it is to recast, to some extent, the often troubled relationships between these three key thinkers, whose lives and thoughts have done so much to enrich our own reflections on the subjects of building and dwelling, exile and retreat, rootlessness and belonging, homeliness and homeless- 3 The title of this essay, “Trois ness, as seen through the allegorical machines à penser”, alludes to Le Corbusier’s famous prism of the hut, or the hut as both characterization of the house as a “machine-à-habiter.” a figure of and home for thought: It is of course worth noting Wittgenstein’s, Heidegger’s, Adorno’s that Le Corbusier likewise had a hut (called “le cabanon”) “machines for thinking” are machines built for his private living use for rethinking philosophy’s very own in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin 3 on the French Riviera. edifice complex.

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Though they themselves would doubt- lessly, and predictably, have objected to the reductionist risks and facile lure of biographical anecdote, the respective

Previous pages: life stories of Heidegger and Wittgen- Patrick Lakey stein hold important clues to a deeper Hegel: Collegium, Jena, 4 Germany, 2004 27 appreciation of their philosophies. Schopenhauer: Schöne Aussicht, It can be insightful and rewarding, Frankfurt, Germany, I, 2004 28 for the philosophically challenged, Marx: Reading Room, Great to see for themselves, for instance, Hall, British Museum, London, I, 2004 30 where a certain philosopher was born, Nietzsche: Lake Silvaplana, grew up, lived and worked, or lies Surlej, Switzerland, IV, 2004 32 buried‌—‌where he or she thought, Heidegger: (Hut) Todtnauberg, that is, or what they considered a Black Forest, Germany, I, suitable home for thinking. I, for one, 2004 34 Patrick Lakey’s German Photo- have long enjoyed visiting philoso- graphs (1724–2005) series docu- phers’ birthplaces, graves and hide- ments the places where German-­ speaking philosophers—from outs, and two telling anecdotes related Immanuel Kant to Theodor Adorno—lived and worked, to my early passion for Heidegger recorded with the clinical precision (since considerably toned down) of a certain idea of “German” photography. Traveling through and Wittgenstein (since cautiously Germany, England, Switzerland, and ending up in his adopted rekindled) are worth recounting hometown of Los Angeles, Lakey in this regard. photographed the places where these thinkers wrote, thought, In the fall of 2002, I visited Vienna lived, and in some cases, died. [see also ills. on pp. 243-250, for the first time in my life. Armed 331-338 ] with the intoxicating recent memory

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4 Heidegger’s well-known of reading Allan Janik and Stephen Ludwig Wittgenstein were Haus Wittgenstein: the austere arch- distaste for biography is best both born in 1889 in adjacent remembered in an anecdote Toulmin’s Wittgenstein’s Vienna, German-speaking countries modernist house Ludwig Wittgenstein connected to his 1924 course I set about trying to locate the house (Germany and Austria, respec‑ designed together with one Paul on the Fundamental Concepts of tively). After flirting with other Aristotelian Philosophy, which where Ludwig Wittgenstein was born occupations (priesthood and Engelmann for his sister Margaret he famously introduced, on engineering), they both came May 1, with the observation in 1889, which I mistakenly, but to study under leading philoso‑ Stonborough-Wittgenstein in 1928, that “the personality of the phers of the day (Edmund philosopher is of interest only no less doggedly, remembered to have Husserl and Bertrand Russell), which I had somehow, miraculously to this extent: he was born at stood somewhere in a certain Kund- each of whom recognized it now seems, managed to miss on my such and such a time, he in his pupil not only an heir worked, and died.” It is worth manngasse in the city’s third Bezirk. apparent but the saviour of three or four traipses up and down said noting, however, that this philosophy as a whole. Both should be read in part as “a I vividly remember finding, and walk- published a first book in the street. (Oh well.) I have been back rhetorical flourish, for Heideg‑ ing up and down this street in the vain 1920s (Being and Time and to Vienna many times since, but have ger referred his audience in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus) the same breath to Werner hope of encountering something like which employs their mentors’ yet to visit this Tractatus turned into Jaeger’s path-breaking methods (phenomenology and Aristoteles: Grundlegung seiner a “Palais Wittgenstein”—‌ ‌which I knew logical analysis) while criticiz‑ stone, now famously functioning as Entwickelung, dedicated to have been built in the great era of ing their mentors’ conception the cultural center of the Bulgarian precisely to the exploration of it. Full of enigmatic claims of the link between Aristotle’s Gründerzeit pomp—‌ ‌or at least a memo- written in a cryptic style embassy in Austria. (I may choose biography and his thought.” (hyphenated neologisms and Hans Sluga, “Introduction: rial plaque in its honor (I wasn’t entirely diamond-dense numbered never to do so.) The remains of Ludwig Wittgenstein: The sure, at the time, whether the building statements, respectively), Wittgenstein’s hut in Norway, Man, the Life, and the Work,” each book established its in Hans Sluga & David Stern had survived the war): nothing of the author as preeminent within however, I have had a chance (eds.), The Cambridge Companion a branch of philosophy.” to Wittgenstein: Second Edition kind, and after an hour or so I finally Lee Braver, Groundless Grounds: to see in the meantime. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge gave up. Only later that evening, back A Study of Wittgenstein and University Press, 2017), p. 4. Heidegger (Cambridge, MA: A recent study comparing in my hotel, did I realize that the Kund- The MIT Press, 2014), p. 1. Ten years later, in the summer of 2012, the philosophies of Heidegger and Wittgenstein—one of a manngasse was not the address of the 5 The Palais Wittgenstein I set out on a similar journey when I de- number such investigations grandiose Palais Wittgenstein‌—‌which originally stood in the Allee‑ cided to break up my trip from Basel to devoted to two thirds of our gasse, behind the Karlskirche; curatorial equation; a compar‑ was indeed demolished, in the course the street was renamed Argen‑ Berlin with a detour via Todtnauberg in ative study devoted to all three tinierstrasse after the war. has yet to be written—starts of the 1950s, to make place for a nonde- search of Heidegger’s fabled Black out with an intent to “first, 5 get the obligatory biographical ‌script housing block —‌but of the Forest cabin, about which I knew quite parallels out of the way. much better known, quasi-mythical a bit already at the time‌—‌except, Martin Heidegger and 36 37 TROIS MACHINES À PENSER DIETER ROELSTRAETE

crucially, the hut’s exact address. but also a measure of revenge on the (I don’t think it ever had one.) part of the much-maligned figure The weather wasn’t great that day in of urban (though really suburban) June, rainy and surprisingly cold, and living in Heidegger’s rustic, obsessively although the village of Todtnauberg rooted thought. “Fuck the hut!,” features many a road sign pointing I remember thinking to myself back to the so-called Heidegger Rundweg then‌—‌as anyone who chooses to snaking around the hills above, I searched expose him- or herself to extended fruitlessly for a trace of the hut for about doses of Heidegger reading must in- an hour before returning to Freiburg, evitably be tempted to think at some frustrated and empty-handed—‌ ‌and 6 Heidegger’s hut is the point or other in the process (“fuck subject of a compelling decided to go seek out Heidegger’s architectural study by Adam the hut” being shorthand for a more Sharr published in 2006. much more prosaic urban residence In a foreword, Simon Sadler fundamental dismissal of Heidegger rhetorically asks, “Is the hut instead, a nondescript villa built in 1928 described in this text the as a whole, of course): consider the hut in the leafy Freiburg suburb of Zähringen. smallest residence ever to a corny, overthought and in some ways merit a monograph?” Sharr (The building of this house, which is wisely spends some time in even overproduced vessel of an impossi- his book discussing Heideg‑ today occupied by Heidegger’s grand- ger’s Freiburg villa, but a ble, positively suspect idea of authenticity daughter Gertrud, was prompted by monograph titled Heidegger’s thankfully canceled out by the refresh- House does not seem forth­ his appointment to a chair in philosophy coming. Adam Sharr, ing banality of a villa that Heidegger at the city’s centuries-old university, Heidegger’s Hut (Cambridge, carefully sought to dissociate from his MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 6 following in the footsteps of his erst- p. ix. thinking for most of his public life. while mentor Edmund Husserl.) This I have since managed to locate the house, sited on the Rötebuckweg 47, actual hut, and have seen it in vivo. was much more easily found, which It is, thankfully, also rather banal I took to be not only philosophically in appearance—‌ ‌and as such, significant, in some vague way or other, an inspiring disappointment.

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Heidegger in Todtnauberg, Wittgen- Salzburg, as well as Edvard Grieg’s stein in Skjolden: there evidently exist cabin in the western Norwegian village many more examples of such exact of Lofthus; Dylan Thomas’s writing structures. (As for Adorno’s hut: shed or “word-splashed hut” in the besides the Finlay sculpture, perhaps Welsh village of Laugharne; Malcolm his wartime Hollywood home will do? Lowry’s squatter’s shack in the Dollar- But we shall be returning to this matter ton mudflats north of Vancouver, where in due time.) There exists a long history he wrote Under the Volcano; Virginia of thinkers’ abodes built on the literal Woolf’s “Monk’s House” cottage in East and /or metaphorical outskirts of Sussex and Roald Dahl’s Buckingham- civilization and /or society—‌ ‌for that shire writing hut dubbed “The Gipsy is of course precisely where much House”; George Bernard Shaw’s shed 7 This is a reference to Caspar David Friedrich’s philosophy has either long been, or, called “London” but located in rural St. iconic 1818 painting Wanderer more pointedly, imagined itself to be Albans; and, most famous of all, Henry Above a Sea of Mists, one of the most widely used images most productive, from ancient times David Thoreau’s programmatic house in the visual history of philoso‑ phy. We shall be returning to the present day: in the desert, among in Walden Pond in Concord, Massachu- to the implied association the mountaintops—‌ ‌above the sea of setts. Should such a history also high- of retreat with elevation— 7 to rise above—shortly. ‌mist or line of trees —‌in the wilder- light the travails of Antonio Gramsci ness, “away” and outside. Et in Arcadia and Antonio Negri in their prison cells? ego, and there I shall build myself a What about Ted Kaczynski’s notorious house for thinking‌—‌or writing, or Unabomber cabin?) Might we say that composing. (A parallel history of the history of this powerful fantasy purpose-built composers’ and writers’ begins with Saint Jerome’s sojourn retreats would have to include Gustav in the desert, years spent inside a cave Mahler’s cottage built in the 1890s in during which time the Church Father Steinbach am Attersee, east of translated the Septuagint into Latin,

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thereby giving the world the Vulgate 9 A programmatic text, in death in 1778, his incomplete Reveries this regard, is Heidegger’s Bible for which he is best remembered 1951 lecture “… dichterisch of a Solitary Walker; Alexander Pope’s wohnet der Mensch …” today? In the present philosophical (translated as “… Poetically grotto and Voltaire’s garden; Friedrich exercise, Saint Jerome plays the role Man Dwells… ”), based on Hölderlin’s tower on the Neckar in a phrase taken from a late of a patron saint of sorts: the first Hölderlin poem. In it, Heideg‑ Tübingen, the poet’s home for thirty- ger noted that “Poetry builds philosopher whose thinking practice up the very nature of dwelling. six years after being diagnosed an in- was predicated on a housing strategy. Poetry and dwelling not only curable hypochondriac in 1805 (Hölder- do not exclude each other; As one scholar confirms concerning on the contrary, poetry and lin, of course, was Heidegger’s very dwelling belong together, 8 Eugene F. Rice, Jr., Saint the historical Jerome: “Although each calling for the other.” own guiding light and patron saint‌— Jerome in the Renaissance 9 In Martin Heidegger, (Baltimore: The Johns Hop­- Jerome probably did live in a natural Poetry, ‌the Saint Jerome of Todtnauberg ); , trans. kins University Press, 1985), Language, Thought Albert Hofstadter (New York: p. 10. Jerome became a cave, it must have been a spacious one, the rooms occupied by Friedrich Harper & Row, 1971), p. 225. hermit in the Syrian Desert, because he tells us himself that he Incidentally, Hölderlin also Nietzsche in the so-called Nietzsche- somewhere in the neighbor‑ figured prominently in hood of Chalcis, between brought his considerable library into Haus in Sils Maria, where, in the Adorno’s intellectual cosmos, Antioch and Palmyra, and in the postwar years living in the wilderness the desert with him. Nor was he always summer of 1883, much of Also 8 Adorno, who, as one Heideg‑ from 372 to 374. alone.” In many Renaissance depic- ger’s most vocal philosophical Sprach Zarathustra was composed; tions of Saint Jerome, we see the origi- antagonists, became a and finally, a well-known recent in- member of the Hölderlin nary cave transformed into something Society in June 1963, was carnation: Arne Naess’s Tvergastein even “concerned to snatch more akin to a study, a writer’s retreat [Hölderlin’s poetry] from hut high up in the Hallingskarvet of sorts—‌ ‌a machine for thinking, the jaws of Heidegger’s mountains in southern Norway, fundamental ontology,” prefiguring the outlines of a long in the words of one of his the probable site of conception of biographers. Stefan Müller- history of lived-out philosophical Doohm, Adorno: A Biography his hugely influential concept of fantasies of escape and retreat: (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2005), “deep ecology.” Building, p. 361. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s cabin in dwelling, thinking: dwellings the forest of Ermenonville, where built for thinking, all. the philosopher spent the last years of his life, leaving behind, upon his

42 43 Interlude: DIETER ROELSTRAETE of Space In 1958, the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard published his perennially popular La poétique de l’espace, translated as The Poetics of Space in 1964. Its opening chapter is titled “The House: From Cellar to Garret. The Significance of the Hut.” In it, Bachelard muses:

[The hut] appears to be the taproot of the function of inhabiting. It is the simplest of human plants, the one that needs no ramifications in order to exist. Indeed, it is so simple that it no longer belongs to our memories—‌ ‌which at times are too full of imagery—‌ ‌but to legend; it is a center of legend. When we are lost in darkness and see a distant glimmer of light, who does not dream of a thatched cottage or, to go more deeply still into legend, of a hermit’s hut?

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A hermit’s hut. What a subject for The hermit is alone before God. His hut, an engraving! Indeed real images are therefore, is just the opposite of the engravings, for it is the imagination monastery. And there radiates about that engraves them on our memories. this centralized solitude a universe They deepen the recollections we have of meditation and prayer, a universe experienced, which they replace, thus outside the universe. The hut can receive becoming imagined recollections. The none of the riches “of this world.” hermit’s hut is a theme which needs no It possesses the felicity of intense

variations, for at the simplest mention 10 Gaston Bachelard, The poverty; indeed, it is one of the glories of it, “phenomenological reverberation” Poetics of Space, trans. Maria of poverty; as destitution increases Jolas (Boston, MA: Beacon 10 obliterates all mediocre resonances. Press, 1964), pp. 32–33. it gives us access to absolute refuge. The hermit’s hut is an engraving that would suffer from any exaggeration Let us now turn to the inhabitants, of picturesqueness. Its truth must derive their poverty and vows. from the intensity of its essence, which is the essence of the verb “to inhabit.” The hut immediately becomes central‑ ized solitude, for in the land of legend, there exists no adjoining hut. And although geographers may bring back photographs of hut villages from their travels in distant lands, our legendary past transcends everything that has been seen, everything that we have experienced personally. The image leads us on towards extreme solitude.

48 49 The Facts:

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 1. L.W.

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Writing about Mark Manders’ a droning voiceover recites frag- sculptural work in the early 2000s ments from Thomas Bernhard’s 11 Paul Wittgenstein also Ludwig Wittgenstein was born on April occasioned the author’s first in-depth hypnotic 1985 novel Alte Meister commissioned single-hand engagement with the philosophy (Old Masters), a pitiless take- piano compositions by Paul 26, 1889 in Vienna into one of the weal- of Martin Heidegger, specifically down, in part, of Heidegger’s Hindemith, Erich von Korngold thi­est families in the Austro-Hungarian with regards to the enigma of thing- petty pastoralism. and Sergey Prokofiev. Interest‑ ness so central to Manders’ world— ingly enough, Ludwig’s musi‑ Empire, whose home was frequented by a universe in which many familiar Guy Moreton’s photographs of cal tastes were of a much everyday objects are regularly ren- the landscape surrounding Ludwig more conservative bent: he the likes of Johannes Brahms, Gustav dered on a disorienting 88% scale. Wittgenstein’s cabin in Skjolden had no interest whatsoever Klimt, Arnold Schoenberg and Richard It is partly in honor of the inspira- were made in response to an invita- in any music composed Previous pages tion derived from Manders’ art that tion from the artist and poet Alec post-Brahms (whose clarinet Strauss. As the youngest child in a family Sophie Nys the replicas of both Heidegger and Finlay to collaborate on a project sonatas and quintet were Multiple, 2009 51 Wittgenstein’s huts at the heart of seeking to shed light on the thinker’s debuted at the Palais Wittgen‑ of talented and tormented musicians this exhibition have been reimagined lifelong (and ultimately fruitless) stein in the Alleegasse, Guy Moreton and music lovers—his‌ brother Paul on the same 88% scale. Concerning search for his place in the world, which may well have inspired LW 109, Skjolden Norway, the philosopher to take up 2002 / 2005 52 the sculpture shown here, the artist philosophical or otherwise. They would become famous after losing an has said, “For this work, I ended first appeared in the collaborative the clarinet himself later in life, Mark Manders up giving the femur a small, raised project There Where You Are as part of his teacher-training arm in World War I combat, as the A Place Where My Thoughts bump so that the cup and the bone Not, published in 2005 alongside in the 1920s), and was espe‑ cially devoted to the music petulant dedicatee of Maurice Ravel’s Are Frozen Together, 2002 54 could hold a sugar cube. It looks like Alec Finlay’s poetry and a 11 something has grown out from inside biographical sketch compiled by of the little known, blind Piano Concerto for the Left Hand ‌ Unknown Romantic composer Josef Scholar’s rock, n.d. 55 the bone in a way comparable to the Michael Nedo, director of the relatively slow process during which Wittgenstein Archive in Labor. The posthumous —‌Ludwig did not initially appear espe- Sophie Nys the handle of the coffee cup evolved. Cambridge—the very place Witt- anthology of non-philoso­- cially gifted. In 1903, he was sent to the Die Hütte, 2007 56, 58 I think it is beautiful how both of genstein sought to escape when he phical writings Culture and Value ­contains a four-measure Goshka Macuga them, powerless and armless, hold first sailed to Norway in 1913. Realschule in Linz, possibly crossing the sugar cube.” The quasi-natural composition believed to be Heidegger, 2018 57 evolutionary process which the artist Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Head the philosopher’s own, which paths with Adolf Hitler, six days his Jan Bontjes van Beek discerns in the phenomenology of a Girl is the only sculpture the one commentator has senior.12 Once again, his school marks Bowl, 1960–66 59 of the cup invokes the spirit of Austro-British philosopher is known suggested “the amateur clari‑ netist probably wrote down Giulio Paolini Martin Heidegger’s widely- to have made. It dates back to showed little promise for someone who publicized fascination with ceramic the late 1920s, i.e. around the time as an accompaniment to a L’arte e lo spazio. Quattro forms: cups, jars, jugs, pots— Wittgenstein was working on recurring phrase of self- later came to embody the very idea of illustrazioni per Martin vessels of a platonic thingness. the design of an arch-modernist doubt.” The strongest musical Heidegger (3), 1983 60 Viennese townhouse for his sister memory associated with tortured genius; remarkably, he only Gerhard Richter Sophie Nys’ 16mm filmDie Margarethe—in whose private Wittgenstein, however, received top marks for religious train- Jan 92, 1992 62 Hütte was shot during a visit collection the sculpture ended up concerns his virtuoso whistling skills, which the villagers of ing. (Raised in the family’s adopted Guy Moreton to Heidegger’s Black Forest retreat surviving. Both projects, architecture in the summer of 2007. The artist’s and sculpture, belong to a ten-year Skjolden were apparently LW 205, Skjolden Norway, especially impressed with. Catholic faith, Wittgenstein’s Jewish 2002 / 2005 64 camera-eye methodically scans the gap between philosophical chapters hut’s humdrum environs (which commonly referred to as “Wittgen- ancestry would go on to exert a decisive Ludwig Wittgenstein yielded the discovery of a wooden stein I” and “Wittgenstein II.” 12 Kimberley Cornish’ contro‑ Head of a Girl, 1925–28 66 toilet seat in the process) while versial suggestion, made in influence on his later intellectual his 1998 book The Jew of Linz, 68 69 TROIS MACHINES À PENSER DIETER ROELSTRAETE that Hitler’s juvenile antipathy development, and religious reflection 14 Just three months into escape from the constraints of academic towards the well-educated his acquaintance with Wittgen‑ scion of a Viennese aristocratic was to preoccupy him throughout his stein, Russell wrote in a letter life and polite society: somewhere “away” family with Jewish roots to his lover Lady Ottoline played a decisive role in life: he was a particularly keen reader Morrell: “I love him & feel and “outside” that could become a more planting the seed of a virulent of Augustine, especially his Confessions, he will solve the problems productive home for his developing antisemitism that would lead I am too old to solve [Russell to Mein Kampf, World War II, and repeatedly toyed with fantasies of was 40 years old at the time, brand of thinking—‌ ‌a philosophical and ultimately even the 13 ed.] … He is the young man Holocaust, has been widely monkhood .) In 1906, following in the one hopes for.” Monk, revolution in the making. debunked as detective footsteps of his father—steel tycoon op. cit., 41. fiction at best. and prominent arts patron Karl Witt- Wittgenstein first visited Norway in 13 The closest Wittgenstein ever came to life in a religious genstein—he moved to Berlin to study 1913, in late summer in the company of order was as a gardener in a engineering, followed in 1908 by a move friend and fellow Cambridge student monastery in Hütteldorf, just outside Vienna, in the spring to Manchester, to study aeronautics. David Pinsent; and a second time in late of 1926, during which time he is said to have lived in a tool Around this time Ludwig began to culti- October, when—boarding a steam ship shed. Years before, during vate an obsession with logic and the in Bergen and sailing east—he first set World War I, it had been the experience of reading Leo philosophical foundations of mathemat- foot in the village of Skjolden at the far Tolstoy’s The Gospel in Brief while stationed at the eastern ics, leading to his arrival at Cambridge end of the Sognefjord. (Skjolden had front in Galicia that had sharp‑ University’s Trinity College in 1911, been suggested to him by the Austro-­ ened Wittgenstein’s resolve to give away his vast personal where he met, and entranced, Bertrand Hungarian consul in Bergen, Jacob fortune once the war was over (upon his father’s death in 1913, Russell, the presiding doyen of philo- Kroepelien.) Wittgenstein had evidently Ludwig briefly became the rich­- sophical logic. Russell quickly recog- come to Norway in search of the peace est man in Austria). To conclude this brief theo­logico-philoso­ nized Wittgenstein’s genius‌—‌before and quiet deemed necessary to prepare phical excursion: when Witt‑ genstein finally returned—for long the teacher-student relationship for his definitive statement on the logical good—to Cambridge on Janu‑ was reversed14. Life in Cambridge foundations of language and thought, ary 18, 1929, he was greeted at the station by John Maynard would soon prove intolerable for the the Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung Keynes, who later that day reminisced in a letter to a friend ascetic, depression-prone and exces- or Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (the that “God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train.” Ray Monk, sively self-doubting Austrian, who, German publication of 1921 was dedi- Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty by 1912 was entertaining fantasies of cated to Pinsent, who had died in a of Genius (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1991), p. 255. 70 71 TROIS MACHINES À PENSER DIETER ROELSTRAETE

piloting accident towards the end of the 15 In letters to his friends in philosophical work in exile, so to speak, worldly, jovial Cambridge, World War I; the English translation, Wittgenstein would cease‑ Wittgenstein decided to build a little lessly repeat his need for prefaced by Bertrand Russell, was absolute solitude, continually house overlooking a body of water published in 1922). expressing his gratitude for called Eidsvatnet, just outside the “hardly meeting a soul in this Present-day visitors to Skjolden, place.” This is not exactly true: village proper: a cabin, cottage or hut Wittgenstein made enough especially outside of the tourist season, friends in the village of custom-built on the edge of a mountain may feel they have reached the end of Skjolden to become quite for the most demanding of thoughts. fluent in Norwegian over time. the world. This was certainly not the As Ray Monk puts it in his (Even the village center had been too authoritative biography: case in Wittgenstein’s time, when the “[Wittgenstein] was not lively and loud to Ludwig’s liking—‌ Lustrafjord, the Sognefjord’s northern- entirely divorced from human ‌a nearby steam-powered lemonade contact. But he was—and most arm, was frequently abuzz with perhaps this is most import‑ factory in particular would challenge ant—away from society, free aquatic trade, also of the tourist variety. from the kind of obligations long stretches of concentrated work, (Planning this trip with Pinsent, Witt- and expectations imposed by come berry-picking season. One day, bourgeois life, whether that genstein was adamant they avoid the of Cambridge or that of scouting for a potential construction Vienna.” Monk, op. cit., p. 93. tourist trail; oddly, they opted for west- It is this hatred of bourgeois site, one particularly appealing option ern Norway’s well-mapped, thoroughly society, which evidently also was rejected out of hand when he dis­ led him to take up a job as an travelled fjords: prior to World War I, elementary school teacher in covered footprints other than his own a string of Austrian villages 15 for instance, the German emperor in the mid-1920s, that is to say, in the snow. ) Only in his Norwegian Wilhelm II had visted the fjords for “after philosophy.” sanctuary, Wittgenstein declared to twenty-five consecutive summers.) 16 In the prologue to his a puzzled Russell upon returning to Tractatus, Wittgenstein In any case, during this first stay in famously claimed that “the Cambridge in October 1913, would Skjolden, while fine-tuning quasi- truth of the thoughts communi‑ it be possible to solve the problems cated here seems to me unas‑ 16 mystical musings on logic that would sailable and definitive. I am, of logic once and for all. therefore, of the opinion that culminate, seven years and a world war the problem [of philosophy] have in essentials been finally later, in the Tractatus, and hardened in solved.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, his conviction that he could only do real Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, trans. Charles Kay Ogden 72 73 TROIS MACHINES À PENSER DIETER ROELSTRAETE

(London: Routledge & Kegan Construction began—at the agreed- mentioned ultra-modernist Paul Ltd, 1922), p. 29. In this essay, I will refrain by and upon site thirty meters above the water Stonborough-Wittgenstein villa, large from discussing the surface‌; only reachable by a long-wind- the genesis of which is mired in myriad content of Wittgenstein’s (or Heidegger’s, or Adorno’s) ing rocky mountain-path, or by boat anecdotes concerning his obsessive, philosophical thought. In the aforementioned introduction, across Lake Eidsvatnet, which froze near-fanatical attention to detail, having Wittgenstein helpfully suggests that his book’s into a walkable surface during winter—‌ ‌ had no hand in the conception of his “whole meaning could be under the supervision of Halvard Norwegian machine à penser. Briefly, summed up somewhat as follows: What can be said Draegni, the lemonade factory owner, in the late 1920s, the former logician at all can be said clearly; and whereof one cannot speak in 1914, and building proceeded largely was so enamored of the building trade thereof one must be silent.” in the philosopher’s absence. The cabin that he styled himself “Ludwig Witt- He had in mind the clarity of the villagers’ talk and the measured seven meters by eight; its genstein, architect.”) The house was silence of his hut, no doubt. dimensions and simple layout (a living finally finished in the fall of 1914, room, kitchen, and bedroom) corre- months after the outbreak of World sponded with that of the area’s typical War I, during which time Wittgenstein tenant’s farm, though the unconven- volunteered as a gunner in the Austrian tional positioning and gabled roof were army. Another eventful seven years somewhat exotic for the befuddled would pass before he finally clapped eyes locals, who took to calling the land on on his prize; he only returned to Skjolden which the hut was built “Austria.” Even in 1921, a dramatically changed man: today, maps of the Skjolden area still not only had he finished the philoso­ contain the bizarre marker “Østerrike.” phical work begun in Norway in 1913 No building plans of the house survive; and come to the conclusion that his most likely, none ever existed, making career in philosophy had come to a it difficult to ascertain Wittgenstein’s logical, ethically sanctioned end, he involvement in its design. (It is hard had in the meantime also become an to imagine the co-author of the afore- ascetic of necessity rather than choice.

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Visiting Skjolden in 1913, he was a 1951, Wittgenstein died in Cambridge, fabulously rich man; in 1921, free from three days after his 62nd birthday. the shackles of his family fortune—‌ Years earlier Wittgenstein had left ‌much of which had been dispersed the house to Arne Bolstad; his family among luminaries of the Austro-­ now took possession of it, and in 1958 German avant-garde such as Oskar the cabin was dismantled, brought Kokoschka, Adolf Loos, Rainer Maria down the cliff using the same pulley Rilke, and George Trakl—‌ ‌his was truly system installed there in 1921, and reas- a hand-to-mouth existence, kept afloat sembled in the village center, where it by work in Draegni’s lemonade factory stood, unrecognizable in its coarse clad- and odd jobs in a carpentry workshop. ding of asbestos and minus the original Repeated visits to Skjolden and balcony, for around fifty years. Those the hut followed in 1931, 1936, 1937—‌ who visit “Østerrike” today see little ‌during which time he was preoccupied more than the (by now quasi-famous) primarily with the “philosophical stone base on which the hut once stood, investigations” of everyday language, the breath-taking view of Eidsvatnet, to be published posthumously, as Skjolden, and the pit of the Sognefjord Philosophische Untersuchungen—‌ ‌ beyond it. Attempts to rebuild the and, accompanied by a former medicine house‌—‌whose wooden components student named Ben Richards, in 1950. I was able to see stored away, like a (Only three pictures exist of Wittgen- jigsaw, in Skjolden in October 2017‌— stein’s hut; one of them was taken by ‌on its original site may bear fruit. Richards while rowing across the lake.) Plans to visit Skjolden again the year after were cut short by his worsening medical condition, and on April 29,

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2. M.H. Martin Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889 in the small town of Messkirch in the Upper Danube and Swabian Alps region, to the village sexton and his far-­ mer wife. At an early age Martin and his younger brother Fritz were enlisted to help their father out with running the village church, the most fondly remem- bered task being the ringing of the church bells. Neither rich nor poor but solidly lower middle class, the Heidegger family was encouraged by the parish priest to send their gifted elder son to the Catholic seminary in nearby Constance, and later to the archiepiscopal convent in Freiburg: his was ostensibly going to be a clerical career. In 1909, Heidegger enrolled in the university of nearby Freiburg to study philosophy and theology, where he was first exposed to the work of Edmund Husserl, the founding father of modern phenomenology and eventual dedicatee of his magnum opus Sein und Zeit, published in 1927. (This was followed, in 1928, by Heidegger taking over Husserl’s position at his alma mater.)

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Although he abandoned his plans to (She was certainly the one “organizing become­ a priest shortly after entering the and supervising” con­struction, which university, a decisive break with the Heidegger does not appear to have been “system of Catholicism” only occurred involved with much. For a philosopher in 1919, after he had spent the war years so singularly devoted to thinking, build- working in the censorship office. In 1923, ing, equipment, the present-at-hand and Heidegger took up an academic post in ready-to-hand, he seems to have been

Marburg‌—‌the first time he left his beloved 18 This text, originally written rather hands-off here.) The region was Black Forest region behind for a longer as a radio address explaining of course well-known to the proudly his reasons for rejecting an period‌—‌where he met and famously fell offer to join the university in parochial Heidegger‌—‌the author, in Berlin and stay in his beloved in love with his student Hannah Arendt, Freiburg instead, is reproduced later years, of a tract defiantly titled 18 who would much later, with unwarranted in this volume on pp. 323–330. ‌“Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?” — ‌ generosity, describe her former men­tor’s and a photograph taken of the young 17 Ursula Ludz (ed.), Hannah philosophy as a “gale” blowing in from philosopher in confident conversation Arendt & Martin Heidegger: times immemorial, primordial‌—“not of with Edmund Husserl in the summer of Letters 1925-1975 (New York: 17 Harcourt, 2003), pp. 148–162. our century.” At this point in time, Hei- 1921 just outside of Todtnauberg confirms

degger had already been married for a 19 Adam Sharr, Heidegger’s that a philosophical context, so to speak, number of years and fathered two sons, Hut (Cambridge, MA: The was already in place. (“Also, more prac- MIT Press, 2006), p. 54. Much and it appears to have been his wife Elfride of what follows is based on tically for a commuting academic, the Sharr’s comprehensive study who was a driving, guiding force behind of the building, the dwelling, locality has the only railway in the Black 19 the philosopher’s decision, made sometime and the thinking. Forest highlands.” ) In any case, the hut, around the moment of his appointment to which was finished and taken into use in the chair in Marburg—‌ ‌ indeed, because the summer of 1922, would provide an of his impending appointment to a chair all-important refuge for thinking now in Marburg—‌ ‌to build a hut for himself in that Heidegger was fully embarked on the Black Forest village of Todtnauberg. ‌a career in academic philosophy—‌

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a home for philosophizing away from the bureaucratic toil of the German

20 Heidegger’s oft-quoted Professoriat in Marburg and later Freiburg. (but probably much less widely Indeed, it is here, among the gently roll- read) contribution to architec‑ tural theory and the philoso‑ ing hills of the Schwarzwald, among its phy of the built environment, Building Dwelling Thinking, is peasants and farming families, that much a typical example: published in 1954 as “Bauen Wohnen of the groundwork was laid for his most Denken,” it was based on a famous and influential work,Being and lecture given in Darmstadt in 1951 as part of a colloquium Time, for instance‌—‌and from then on, dedicated to thinking “Man and Space.” The text contains Heidegger’s life would unfurl almost references to Schwarzwald exclusively between the symbolic oppo- building traditions, singles out homelessness as a quint‑ sites of Freiburg and Todtnauberg, essentially modern affliction in both philosophical terms a mere forty kilometers apart—‌ ‌with and the acute sense of post- the nadir of his Nazi affiliation as the war Germany, and asserts that “dwelling is the basic university’s short-lived rector doubt- character of Being in keeping with which mortals exist”— lessly counting as Freiburg’s darkest etcetera. Another locally hour: “city” and “country,” inside(r) flavored sample sentence or two: “Only if we are capable and outside(r), but also, just as impor- of dwelling, only then can we build. Let us think for a tantly, “lowlands” and “mountains” while of a farmhouse in the of course. (Kultur versus Zivilization? Black Forest, which was built some two hundred years ago Gemeinschaft versus Gesellschaft?) by the dwelling of peasants. Here the self-sufficiency of the The even more enigmatic, gnomic power to let earth and heaven, philosophical utterances that together divinities and mortals enter in simple oneness into things, constitute “late,” i.e. postwar Heideg- ordered the house.” See Martin Heidegger, Poetry, ger, could scarcely have dreamt of a Language, Thought, trans. more fitting place of conception: not just Albert Hofstadter (New York: 20 Harper & Row, 1971), p. 158. out there, but also, notably, up there. 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 DIETER ROELSTRAETE

Heidegger’s hut was not just meant to be erected outside the stifling circle of polite, academic philosophical society, so to speak, but also above the prover- Previous pages: bial treeline of urban convention and Digne Meller Marcovicz Martin Heidegger in his hut lowlander pragmatism. (Wittgenstein in Todtnauberg, 1966–68 83 had his cabin likewise built on a perch.) Martin Heidegger in his hut in Here too, the sage of Todtnauberg Todtnauberg with his wife Elfride, 1966–68 84 tapped into a well-established imaginary Martin Heidegger’s desk in tradition of opposing the virtues of the Todtnauberg hut, 1966–68 86 mountain air to the corrupting miasma Martin Heidegger with his wife of harbors and low-lying metropolises Elfride in Todtnauberg, 1966–68 88 with their roving populations of root- Martin Heidegger in his hut less cosmopolitans of all stripes. The in Todtnauberg, 1966–68 90 single most powerful summation of this complex, so clearly rooted in Nietzsche’s Digne Meller Marcovicz famously visited Martin and Zarathustra and other tropes of 19th- ­ Elfride Heidegger in their Freiburg villa and Schwarzwald mountain century romanticism, can be found in home in the fall of 1966 and Thomas Mann’s magisterial Bildungs- summer of 1968 for an extensive photo shoot organized in conjunction roman The Magic Mountain, first with Heidegger’s notorious Der Spiegel interview—a conver- published in 1924, at the height of our sation so candid, in the eyes of the philosophical protagonists’ intellectual philosopher, that it could only be publ­ished after his death in May notoriety. (Wittgenstein was already a 1976. Heidegger evidently appears to have enjoyed posing for village schoolteacher in the mountains Marcovicz’ camera, playing the south of Vienna at the time.) Mann rustic hermit with at times unchar- acteristically jocular levity. famously set his Nobel-Prize-winning

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21 This fascinating encounter novel in the Swiss mountain resort of Todtnauberg”—which Heidegger’s hut, which its primary is the subject of an entire book, Safranski accurately calls the Peter E. Gordon’s aptly titled Davos, the setting of a widely reported “snail’s house of his philoso‑ exegete Adam Sharr has accurately Continental Divide: Heidegger, confrontation, in 1929, between Ernst phy.” Rüdiger Safranski, op. termed “a philosophical event as much Cassirer, Davos (Cambridge, cit., pp. 277–279. Let us return, MA: Harvard University Press, Cassirer and Martin Heidegger, an also, to Nietzsche’s quote with as an architectural one,” still stands 2012). Cassirer was trained which this essay begins. as a philosopher in the Neo-­ urbane Jew representing the sobriety “German philosophy as a today on the edge of a forest about Kantian bastion of Marburg, whole […] is the most funda‑ where, years later, “Heidegger and economic achievement of mental form of romanticism a kilometer outside of the village cut a striking figure […] in his Hamburg and other cities like it versus and homesickness that has of Todtnauberg proper, at an elevation personal appearance. On ever been. […] One is no winter days he could be seen the diminutive prophet of philosophical longer at home anywhere.” of around twelve hundred meters. walking out of the town with 21 It continues: “at last one longs his skis shouldered. Occasion‑ mountain-scaling. Huts belong to back for that place in which Its location can hardly be called remote ‌ ally he would turn up for his mountains like cities to the plains. alone one can be at home, —‌so much for the philosophical drama lectures in his skiing outfit.” because it is the only place in In Rüdiger Safranski, which one would want to be of retreat, one might be tempted to Heidegger: Between Good and Evil at home: the Greek world!” (Cambridge MA: Harvard Heidegger made a number of journeys think‌—‌yet the hut itself is surprisingly University Press, 1998), p. 131. abroad in the postwar period (most 23 A door handle. Was the hard to find. A loosely circling network The only photograph docu‑ photographer of this image menting the aforementioned notably to Greece, the long longed-for aware of the iconic stature of of Heidegger paths and Heidegger meeting shows both thinkers 22 the door handles in Wittgen‑ posing in front of a wall full of spiritual home ), and frequent lectures stein’s modernist Viennese walking routes is draped across the skis. For more on Heidegger’s in Bremen, Munich and elsewhere, but villa? Perhaps not. In an essay valley, yet there are no actual signs relationship to skiing, see titled “Wittgenstein’s Handles,” note 30. overall his was indeed a life defiantly, Christopher Benfey pointedly pointing the way towards the hut‌— asks: “What was it about han- 22 In a discussion of Heideg‑ almost theatrically, lived in the prov- dles—door-handles, axe-han‑ ‌only a single board (adorned with a ger’s wish to reorient himself inces, away from both the traditional dles, the handles of pitchers photograph of a door handle, of all after the disappointments of and vases—that transfixed 23 the post-1933 political scene centers of power and hubs of forward- thinkers in Vienna and Berlin things ) that hints at its presence some- and the fiasco of his Nazi during the early decades of the Rektorat in particular—raising looking cultural production, and when 20th century, echoing earlier where behind this clump of trees or the question, not so much he died, aged 86, on May 26, 1976, it considerations of handles in that, reminding the eager pilgrim that of what, but rather of where to America and ancient Greece?” think next—Rüdiger Safranski surprised no one that his last wishes had Indeed, Benfey points out, the hut itself is sited on private prop- observes “the places of his “to details like the door-han‑ thinking can be quite accu‑ included a traditional Catholic funeral dles, in particular, Wittgenstein erty: the hut is not a museum, but still rately determined: an imagi‑ accorded what [Ray] Monk nary and a real place—ancient and interment in the village cemetery calls “an almost fanatical exac‑ in the hands of the Heidegger family, Greece of his philosophy and of Messkirch. titude,” driving locksmiths and and clearly still in holidaying use. his province, more accurately engineers to tears as they 92 93 TROIS MACHINES À PENSER sought to meet his seemingly “No trespassing.” (The best way to see impossible standards. The unpainted tubular door-handle the hut is from a trail running along that Wittgenstein designed for Gretl’s house remains the the opposite side of the valley; this prototype for all such door- view captures something of the original handles, still popular in the 21st century.” See www. sense of the hut’s isolation.) The hut nybooks.com/daily/2016/05/24/ wittgensteins-handles. measures approximately six meters I personally first got to by seven and is made of timber, framed see said door handle photo‑ graphed on the cover of and clad with timber shingles under- an early Dutch translation of the Tractatus, my introduc‑ neath a distinctive roof that is almost tion to Wittgenstein’s world. as high as the walls; “the building surveys the landscape, sheltered and 24 24 Sharr, op. cit., p. 22. framed by trees.” When I visited the hut in November 2017, a mere week after visiting the site of Wittgenstein’s erstwhile hut in Norway‌—‌two very different ideas of retreat indeed—‌ ‌ the doors and window panes seemed newly painted in the same deep-bright blue familiar to us from the color photographs made by Digne Meller Marcovicz in the late 1960s, when the German-Jewish photographer and daughter of the Bauhaus-trained cera- mist Jan Bontjes van Beek was sent to portray the aging Heidegger couple in their Todtnauberg mountain home

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for a series of photographs meant 25 The title for the interview where guests could be served something­ was taken from the following to accompany a lengthy interview sequence: “philosophy will be to drink or eat; a cooking area that unable to effect any immediate with German weekly Der Spiegel. change in the current state of also contains a bed; the main bedroom, (I am mentioning the fact of Meller the world. This is true not only tightly packed with four beds, above Previous page: of philosophy but of all purely Jan Bontjes van Beek Marcovicz’ ceramist-father in recog- human reflection and which at one point a picture of a young Bowl, 1953–69 95 endeavor. Only a god can save nition of Heidegger’s well-publicized us. The only possibility avail‑ woman in traditional Black Forest garb Jan Bontjes van Beek was a obsession with the philosophical able to us is that by thinking was hung; and the philosopher’s study, leading modernist ceramist and and poetizing we prepare a the father, through his marriage imagery of ceramics, and of crockery readiness for the appearance its bookshelves oddly empty, its window to German-­Jewish interior architect in particular: it is tempting to imagine of a god, or for the absence looking out across the eastern end of the Rahel-Maria Weisbach, of photog- of a god in [our] decline, inso‑ 26 rapher Digne Meller Marcovicz. some of Bontjes van Beek’s jars and far as in view of the absent god valley. The first object to encounter (A daughter from an earlier we are in a state of decline.” marriage, Cato Bontjes van Beek, jugs and vases and bowls aligned on In Thomas Sheehan (ed.), the gaze outside this window is almost was executed by the Nazis in Heidegger: The Man and the Berlin-Plötzensee prison in 1943 the Heidegger family’s dining table.) Thinker (Chicago, ILL: as famous, or rather emblematic, as the for her antifascist activities.) These photographs now constitute Precedent Press, 1981), p. 66. hut itself: the well, with its hollowed- Attentive pottery enthusiasts will doubtlessly notice the strategically the most extensive record to date of life 26 Besides the image of a out log and a wood-carved star atop placed crockery in many of the young woman in Schwarzwalder photographs Marcovicz made of in Heidegger’s hut. The Spiegel inter- Tracht, the only other picture its spout‌—‌the Sternwürfel (“star- Heidegger in his hut. Though view took place on September 23, 1966, found on the walls of Heideg‑ crowned die”) immortalized by the Bontjes van Beek’s stoneware ger’s hut appears to have been would probably have struck the and was granted on condition that it be a portrait of Johann Peter great German-Jewish poet Paul philosopher as too sleek, too Hebel, a local poet best modern, possibly too urban, it published only after the philosopher’s remembered for his Aleman- Celan in his elegiac Todtnauberg, is nonetheless worth noting death. It finally appeared in print on nische Gedichte (“Alemannic written shortly after visiting the Heidegger’s long-standing in- poems”) rendered in the juicy fatuation with the potter’s primal May 31, 1976, under the provocative dialect of Heidegger’s Heimat. former, unrepentant Nazi party imagery and generalized ceramic Hebel, as it so happens, also metaphors: a seminal post-war title “Nur noch ein Gott kann uns ranked among Wittgenstein’s member in his mountain retreat text tersely titled “Das Ding” retten,” or “Only a God Can Save favorite writers; the latter in the summer of 1967: plainly asks, and replies, “What 25 frequently gave out copies of is a thing? [...] The jug is a thing.” Us.” Partly on the basis of Meller ​ Hebel’s Schatzkästlein, a trea‑ A more widely read essay on the sure trove of folksy anecdotes “origin of the work of art,” Marcovicz’ photographs, it is possible and pastorals, to friends and published in 1936, likewise invoked to draw up a floor plan of the hut: acquaintances alongside the figure of the jug as the artful Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief. Johann quintessence of thingness. a Vorraum with a table and chairs, Peter Hebel also makes a couple of appearances, finally, 96 97 TROIS MACHINES À PENSER DIETER ROELSTRAETE in Adorno’s writings, where Arnica, eyebright, the perverse knitting enthusiasm, Adam Sharr relates the following ac­‑ he is credited, at some point, draft from the well with the ceaselessly knits winter socks with having written “one of for him from the wool she has count of Celan’s meeting with Heidegger, the most beautiful pieces of star-die on top, shorn from their own Heideg‑ prose in defense of the Jews ger sheep. I cannot visualize quoting from John Felsteiner’s 1995 that was ever written in in the Heidegger other than sitting biography of the poet: “Heidegger German.” In Theodor Adorno, Hütte, on the bench outside his Black The Jargon of Authenticity Forest house, alongside his told me,” says Hans-Georg Gadamer, (Evanston: Northwestern written in the book wife, who all her life totally University Press, 1973), p. 54. dominated him and who knitted “that in the Black Forest, Celan was ‌—‌whose name did it record all his socks and crocheted all better informed on plants and animals 27 Taken from Breathturn into before mine?‌—‌, his caps and baked all his bread Timestead: The Collected Later and wove all his bedlinen and than he himself was.” They also talked Poetry, trans. Pierre Joris (New in this book who even cobbled up his York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, the line about sandals for him. […] Heidegger about contemporary French philosophy, 2014). Not surprisingly, Heide‑ in his worn plus-fours in front but Celan’s attention was elsewhere. gger’s hut has attracted its fair a hope, today, of that lie of a log cabin at share of literary attention in for a thinker’s Todtnauberg is all I have left […] The Jewish Dichter [poet] accom- the German-speaking world word as an unmasking photograph, after Celan’s epochal passing: the philosophical philistine with panied the German Denker [thinker] in 1992, the Austrian Nobel to come, his crocheted black Black Forest to his mountain retreat at Todtnauberg, Prize-winning novelist Elfride in the heart, cap on his head, under which, Jelinek wrote a play titled when all is said and done, noth‑ noticed midsummer blossomings Totenauberg restaging a meet‑ forest sward, unleveled, ing but German feeble-minded‑ ing between Heidegger and ness is warmed up over and along the way, took a drink from his Jewish lover Arendt in an orchis and orchis, singly, over again.” In fact, Bernhard Heidegger’s much publicized well unidentified Alpine setting; a repeatedly returns, in his signa‑ more widely known caricature raw exchanges, later, while driving, ture manic style, to the topic of with its star-shaped wooden cube on of the hut-loving Heidegger is clearly, Digne Meller Marcovicz’ photo‑ trotted out in Alte Meister (Old graphs: “Heidegger is a good top, and signed the guestbook “with 28 Masters), a satirical short novel he who drives us, the mensch, example of how nothing is left a hope for a coming word in the heart.” published by Jelinek’s compa‑ but a number of ridiculous triot Thomas Bernhard in 1985. he also hears it, photographs,” and “I have seen The “coming word” in Celan’s heart Here are two representative a series of photographs which excerpts: “Heidegger, after the half- a supremely talented woman (and in that of countless others, no whom the wartime and post‑ trod log- photographer made of Heideg‑ doubt) would have been one of repen- war generations have been ger, who in all of them looked chasing, showering him with trails on the highmoor, like a retired bloated staff offi‑ tance and shame over past sins. But of revolting and stupid doctoral cer.” Thomas Bernhard, Old theses even in his lifetime— humidity, Masters, trans. Ewald Osers course Heidegger never expressed any I always visualize him sitting much.27 (Chicago, ILL: The University on his wooden bench outside of Chicago Press, 1992). public remorse over his activist role in his Black Forest house, along‑ the early years of the Third Reich‌— ‌ side his wife who, with her 28 Sharr, op. cit., p. 82. 98 99 DIETER ROELSTRAETE

29 There is no definitive proof and Celan committed suicide by that Arendt, a regular guest after the war in Heidegger’s drowning himself in the Seine in Paris Freiburg home, ever visited the hut; it seems unlikely, judg‑ on April 20, 1970, Adolf Hitler’s birth- ing from the tone of her corre‑ day. In any case, in this guest book, spondence with Karl Jaspers in the immediate postwar Celan may have come across the names years: “This living in Todtnau‑ berg, ranting against civiliza‑ and signatures of other luminaries tion, and writing Sein with a ‘y’ of German-Jewish culture such as is surely in reality just the bolt- hole into which he has with‑ Hannah Arendt and Herbert Marcuse: drawn, because he rightly the hut had already become something assumes that there he needs 29 to see only those people who like a site of philosophical pilgrimage. make a pilgrimage to him full of admiration; surely hardly In earlier years, Husserl, Gadamer, anyone will climb 1200 meters just to make a scene.” Quoted Karl Jaspers and Karl Löwith were in Safranski, op.cit., p. 374. all regular visitors; after the war, 30 Heidegger appears to have a planned visit to Todtnauberg by been especially enchanted with those passages in Sartre’s Jean-Paul Sartre was called off at the Being and Nothingness—a Heide‑ last minute, though both Alain Resnais ggerian title if ever there was one, of course—in which he (!) and Jean-François Lyotard managed philosophized about skiing, something Heidegger himself to make the pilgrimage to Heidegger’s had briefly considered doing Black Forest retreat—‌ ‌a telltale sign in his early Marburg years (but, according to Safranski, “in the that the royal road of Heidegger’s end had lacked the courage to do in a published work”). philosophical revalidation would At some point Heidegger wind through Paris.30 A guest book wrote to Sartre: “It would be great if you could come and that “reads like a veritable catalogue see us in the course of the winter. We might jointly philos‑ of 20th-century European intellectual ophize in our small ski hut and 31 from there make ski tours in history”‌ —‌a very different kind of the Black Forest.” Similarly, in retreat, in short, than that envisaged, a letter sent to Cambridge don 100 101 102 103 TROIS MACHINES À PENSER DIETER ROELSTRAETE

G. E. Moore from Skjolden realized and practiced by Heidegger’s his villa in Freiburg. Eventually, a small in January 1914, Ludwig Wittgenstein noted that he exact contemporary and seeming philo- single-story structure—‌ ‌the cost of was learning to ski and found sophical antipode Ludwig Wittgen- which Elfride Heidegger briefly consid- it “great fun.” A philosophy of skiing may be worth the initiat‑ stein: the idea of Wittgenstein inviting ered to cover with the sale of the Being ing effort after all… As for Lyotard’s memory of his a photographer, say, into his Skjolden and Time manuscript to an American Todtnauberg experience: “I remember a sly peasant abode to chronicle his thinking life University‌—‌was built in the garden in his Hütte, dressed in tradi‑ there is quite simply inconceivable—‌ of his residence on the Rötebuckweg tional costume, of sententious speech and shifty eye, appar‑ ‌leading one to look back at Heidegger’s to provide a comfortable setting for the ently lacking in shame and anxiety, protected by his hut not just as a philosophical statement waning years of his life. It is here that knowledge and flattered by in wood and stone, but also as a rhetori- Heidegger must have written down the his disciple. This picture was enough to prevent me from cal device or theatrical ploy: the stage last utterance, as far as we know, in his becoming a ‘Heideggerian’.” Jean-François Lyotard, Political on which the philosopher was able to own hand—‌ ‌a greeting on the occasion Writings (Minneapolis, MN: choreograph the drama of retreat for of the awarding of Messkirch’s honor- University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 137. the camera, for the world’s watching ary citizenship to the Freiburg professor

31 Charles Bambach, Heideg- eye‌—‌escape and exile, in essence, of theology Bernhard Welte: “Cordial ger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National as performance. greetings to the new honorary citizen Socialism, and the Greeks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, Sometime in the late 1960s—‌ ‌shortly of their common hometown Messkirch ‌ 2003), p. 1. after Digne Meller Marcovicz’ second ‌—‌Bernhard Welte‌—‌from an older one… and last visit to Todtnauberg, perhaps ‌ May this feastday of homage be joyful Previous pages: —‌as Heidegger’s old age began to make and life-giving. May the contemplative Digne Meller Marcovicz Martin Heidegger collecting traveling back and forth between Freiburg spirit of all participants be unanimous. water from the well of his hut and the Schwarzwald countryside an For there is need for contemplation in Todtnauberg, 1966–68 100 increasingly challenging prospect, whether and how, in the age of a uni­

Digne Meller Marcovicz the hut began to recede from the hori- form technological world civilization, 32 Martin Heidegger in front of zon of the philosopher’s daily life, 32 Safranski, op. cit., p. 432. there can still be such a thing as home.” his hut in Todtnauberg, 1966–68 102 which became largely limited to

104 105 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 3. T.A.

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33 Stefan Müller-Doohm, Theodor Adorno was born Thomas Sekles and piano with Eduard Jung Adorno: A Biography (Cambridge, UK: Polity, Ludwig Wiesengrund-Adorno on and dashing off string quartets in the 2005), p. 39. Friday September 11, 1903 in Frankfurt staccato style of the Second Viennese

Previous pages am Main to an assimilated Jewish father School. The music of Alban Berg Paolo Chiasera running a successful wine-exporting would prove especially influential, Condensed Heidegger’s Hut, 2009 107, 108, 110 business and a Catholic mother of and in 1925 Adorno departed for Condensed Heidegger’s Hut, Corsican descent who instilled into Vienna to continue his musical studies 2009 109 their only child a life-long love of there under Berg’s guidance—‌ ‌but not Spazierstock, 2009 112 Heidegger’s Walk 5, 2009 113 music. (He only became Theodor W. before obtaining his doctorate in philos- Heidegger’s Walk 2, 2009 114 Adorno in the course of the 1930s, ophy at the university of Frankfurt Paolo Chiasera’s Condensed while applying for US citizenship.) with a thesis on the phenomenology Heidegger’s Hut is a multi-faceted work built around a life-size replica Young Wiesengrund’s upbringing and of Edmund Husserl. Adorno must have of Martin Heidegger’s cabin that youth were a cosmopolitan, sheltered been minimally aware of Heidegger’s was constructed on a vacant lot behind the artist’s Berlin gallery affair that seems to have been impacted work at the time, in other words, in September 2009. In a first phase of the project, the hut was burnt only faintly and indirectly by the though it wouldn’t be until much later down, the resulting ashes used to upheavals of World War I, the disso­ that he would engage Heidegger’s produce a monochrome gray paint- ing that conjures the fiery logic of lution of the German Empire, and the philosophy head on. (It would have the philosophy of transformation of one of Heidegger’s pre-Socratic frenetic, frenzied crises of the early been harder, during his time immersed teachers, Heraclitus (nicknamed Weimar years. (“Did Adorno even in Vienna’s dazzling musical life, to “the obscure”). In a second phase, Chiasera created a series of ellipti- notice that, from the summer of 1922 catch a glimpse of Wittgenstein’s pres- cal drawings imagining the Black Forest landscape Heidegger would on, inflation had begun to transform ence, if only metaphorically‌—‌but not have taken in during one of the urban life in Frankfurt?,” his biogra- impossible. Berg would certainly have many rambles around his mountain retreat. The ghost of philosophy’s pher Stefan Müller-Doohm pointedly been aware of the Wittgenstein family’s deep historical relationship to walk- 33 ing haunts the ensemble’s lone asks. ) In the early twenties, he en-­ musical legacy.) Returning to Frankfurt sculptural presence, an artist’s rolled in the Hoch Conservatory, in the late 1920s, Adorno finally decided impression of the oracular thinker’s walking stick. studying composition with Bernhard to choose the path of philosophy once

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and for all with a Habilitationsschrift 34 Müller-Doohm again, with thought in particular until his death exquisite terseness: “[Adorno] on Kierkegaard—‌ ‌the basis for his first now took the opportunity in the Swiss Alps (!) decades later. created by his stay in Oxford properly philosophical work, published to become better acquainted (“The highest form of morality is not in 1933 under the title Kierkegaard: with modern analytical philos‑ to feel at home in one’s own home.”) ophy, in particular that of G. E. Construction of the Aesthetic. (Its Moore, as well as the history Adorno’s first port of call on his of logic. It is not clear how publication coincided with the notori- deep his studies went. He did fifteen-year odyssey through an Anglo- ous Enabling Act of 1933, awarding not come in contact with Witt‑ phone world that would in essence genstein, who was a fellow the newly elected chancellor Adolf of Trinity College, Cambridge.” always stay foreign to him was Oxford, Op. cit., p. 193. A. J. Ayer, Hitler full dictatorial powers.) In the another figurehead of the where he was once again returned to meantime, Adorno had befriended Anglo-Saxon analytical tradi‑ a study of Husserlian phenomenology. tion in philosophy, “recalled the likes of Walter Benjamin and in his autobiography that no Working closely with the analytic one in Oxford took [Adorno] Max Horkheimer; the latter had been seriously but regarded him as philosopher Gilbert Ryle there, Adorno appointed director in 1930 of the a dandy.” Stuart Jeffries, must have been exposed to the work of Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of Institut für Sozialforschung, the institu- the Frankfurt School (London: Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was back at Verso, 2017), p. 122. Jeffries tional home of what was to become likewise dwells on the sadly Trinity College in nearby Cambridge at the so-called Frankfurter Schule of missed opportunity of Adorno the time‌—‌though there are no records meeting Wittgenstein while 34 Critical Theory with which Adorno’s in shared exile: “A great of them ever meeting. (Ryle and shame: they had so much name would forever after be associated. in common—their negative Wittgenstein were on friendly terms Because of the Institute’s solidly Jewish philosophical sensibilities, for most of the 1930s, though Ryle cultural iconoclasm and pedigree and its members’ Marxist lean- pessimism. What’s more, would later come to lament Wittgen- given Wittgenstein’s temper ings, its work was forced underground and Adorno’s waspishness, stein’s “detrimental” influence on his soon after the Nazi seizure of power, the former‘s lack of interest students.) During his four-year stay in dialectical method and the its leading theorists scattered abroad in latter’s scorn for what he took in the UK, he also met with Heidegger’s as English philosophy’s posi‑ exile in the UK and US‌—‌an experience tivism, the results of any meet‑ old philosophical antagonist Ernst ing between the two would of radical, violent uprooting and home- probably not have been pretty. Cassirer. In February 1938, following lessness that would haunt Adorno’s Wittgenstein was charged with in the footsteps of his primary having attacked Karl Popper 118 119 TROIS MACHINES À PENSER DIETER ROELSTRAETE with a poker during a interlocutor Max Horkheimer, Adorno 36 The daily lives of the old Western world after 1933. Indeed, meeting at the Cambridge German émigré community Moral Sciences Club; what sailed for New York, initially taking up of 1940s Hollywood—really Adorno lived a literal stone’s throw he would have done to the subject for another essay, Adorno is anybody’s guess.” residence on Riverside Drive, where he another exhibition—is the away from Bertolt Brecht, Hanns may or may not have bumped into Paul stuff of legend, chronicled Eisler‌—‌with whom he co-wrote a most compellingly in Ehrhard Wittgenstein, another recent transatlan- Bahr’s Weimar on the Pacific: book, published in 1947, titled Compos- German Exile Culture in Los tic arrival. Hannah Arendt was another Angeles and the Crisis of Modern- ‌ing for the Films—‌Otto Klemperer, forced newcomer to New York’s Upper ism (Berkeley, CA: University of Thomas Mann, Arnold Schoenberg California Press, 2008) and, West Side during his sojourn there less scholarly but no less and other aristocrats of the Austro- enlighteningly, John Russell 36 (they all lived literally blocks away Taylor’s Strangers in Paradise: German Geist. One could speculate from each other), though it is unlikely The Hollywood Emigrés, 1933- that Adorno’s perfectly nondescript 1950 (New York: Holt, Rinehart 35 Adorno’s address in that they would have sought out each and Winston, 1983). Another bungalow located on 316 South New York was 290, Paul key source is Salka Viertel’s Wittgenstein’s 310, and other’s company much: Arendt famously memoir The Kindness of Strang- Kenter Avenue is perhaps the closest Arendt’s 370 Riverside ers: A Theatrical Life, Vienna – Drive. They never met: lashed out at Adorno, describing him the cantankerous critic ever got to a hut Berlin – Hollywood, published “der kommt uns nicht ins as “half-Jewish and one of the most in 1969. Viertel was the sister of his own; it certainly has something Haus,” Arendt is reported of the Polish-Jewish pianist to have said about her con-­ repulsive human beings I know,” in a Eduard Steuermann, Adorno’s of the Hieronymian desert oasis about temporary; she denounced old music teacher in Vienna the entire Frankfurter Schule letter to Karl Jaspers about the postwar it, a perfect “refuge for the homeless,” and a prominent advocate coterie as “truly an abomina‑ of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone ble crowd.” Safranski, fate of their former friend and mentor as the title of one of his entries in his 35 composing technique in , p. 417. op. cit. Martin Heidegger. In any case, soon America later on. acerbic anthology Minima Moralia after, in winter 1941 Adorno journeyed would have it.37 (In a letter to the Amer- 37 Minima Moralia was further west, to Los Angeles, where he published in 1951, the same ican composer Virgil Thomson dated year Heidegger delivered would settle down in the city’s Pacific his “Bauen Wohnen Denken” October 21, 1942, Adorno wrote: Palisades neighborhood, later dubbed lecture. In the short vignette “We live in a quiet nice little house in “Refuge for the Homeless” “Weimar on the Pacific” because of (reproduced in its entirety Brentwood, not far, by the way, from elsewhere in this book), 38 its dense population of German literary Adorno bluntly states: Schoenberg’s place.” ) Accepting the “Dwelling, in the proper and musical luminaries exiled to this sense, is now impossible. […] fundamental and irreconcilable absur- sun-kissed, palm-tree-lined edge of the The house is past.” Theodor dity of having to live and work under Adorno, Minima Moralia: 120 121 TROIS MACHINES À PENSER

Reflections from Damaged Life, the never-setting sun of the emerging trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London: Verso, 1974), p. 38. entertainment capital of the world, The publication of Minima Adorno finally returned to Germany in Moralia upon his return to West Germany helped cement 1949, just in time to witness the birth of his reputation as the damaged nation’s moral compass; the Federal Republic, and spent the last he himself explained the book’s remarkable critical twenty years of his life teaching at the and commercial success by university in Frankfurt and gathering claiming that the German audience had grown tired acclaim for such classics of 20th-cen- of incessant “Heideggerei.” tury philosophy as Negative Dialectics 38 Virgil Thomson, Selected ‌and Aesthetic Theory—‌the latter only Letters of Virgil Thomson (New York: Summit Books, 1988), published posthumously in 1970, a year p. 181. While living in Brent‑ wood, Adorno acted as his after his premature death on August 6, neighbor Thomas Mann’s 1969, an event some say was brought on principal musical adviser for the latter’s 1949 masterpiece by one particularly graphic incident Doctor Faustus, the compos‑ er-protagonist of which was in the long summer of student discon- clearly modeled after the tent when the grand old man of Critical figure of another neighbor, Arnold Schoenberg (who Theory was “attacked” at the lectern by had little appreciation for the ploy). three young women baring their breasts at him. (“Following inconclusive dis­ cussions between the few supporters of this disruption and their critics, the lecture hall emptied. The Grassroots Sociology Group distributed leaflets with the title ‘Adorno as an Institution 39 Müller-Doohm, 39 op. cit., p. 476. is Dead.” ) After that, not even moun- tain air could save him any longer.

122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 Interlude:

Previous pages: Ewan Telford Captive Audience (Scientific Experiences of an Exile in Los Angeles). Theodor Adorno House, 316 S. Kenter Ave, 2018 123 Goshka Macuga Adorno, 2018 124 Susan Philipsz Part File Score IV and VII, 2014 125 Anselm Kiefer Hirnhäuslein (für Alexander), 2017 126 Alexander Kluge Triptychon, 2018 128 Franz Hubmann Portrait of Theodor Adorno, 1958 130 Susan Philipsz’ Part File Score and Eisler’s day—of Philipsz’ is based in part on the travails and installation. Part File Score also tribulations of leftwing German- includes a suite of prints derived Jewish composer Hanns Eisler who, from Eisler’s FBI file compiled at while living in exile in Los Angeles’s the height of the “red scare” early Pacific Palisades neighborhood in in the Cold War, one page of which the 1940s, co-authored the treatise prominently lists the contact details Composing for the Movies together of other denizens of “Weimar on with fellow expatriate Theodor the Pacific.” Eisler and his wife were Adorno. This book included the eventually expelled from the US and composition Fourteen Ways to settled back in East Berlin in 1948, Describe Rain by way of exem- where he would go on to compose the plary exercise, a piece that consti- nascent GDR’s national anthem in tutes the sonic backbone—given the the decidedly non-modernist popular dodecaphonic treatment so current idiom that he had switched musical and politically topical in Adorno allegiances to years before.

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Being and 1922 Heidegger’s hut was built and readied for occupation in 1922, the year of his appointment to a chair of philosophy at the University of Marburg and of the publication of his first major philosoph- ical work, the two-volume Phänomeno­ logische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles. In 1922, Wittgenstein no longer consid- ered himself a philosopher—‌ ‌he was a teacher at village schools in Tratten- bach, Hassbach and Puchberg at this point in time, locales not in­comparable perhaps, to Todtnauberg ‌—‌though he remained deeply involved in the translation of his Abhandlung into the Tractatus, finally published that same year. Adorno was just nineteen years old in 1922, though reading Georg Lukacs’ landmark History and Class Consciousness published that year would exert a decisive influence on the development of Adorno’s own funda- mental contribution to the tradition of “western” Marxism. (One word: reification.) An eventful year, in short, from the perspective of our current

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project‌—‌but not just from our perspec- 1922 first witnessed the assassination tive alone. 1922, in retrospect, appears of the Weimar republic’s figurehead to have been enough of a halcyon Walther Rathenau—‌ ‌the first major year to warrant its own monograph: blow to Germany’s faltering experi- a book titled Constellation of Genius, ment in democratic politics‌—‌followed the subtitle of which names 1922 soon after by the spiraling inflation “Modernism’s Year One.” Its author, crisis that would culminate in the noto- Kevin Jackson, primarily dwells on rious billion and trillion Mark notes the Anglophone literary sphere‌— ‌ of 1923. A fitting backdrop for the with good reasons: 1922 was book- release of F. W. Murnau’s expressionist ended by the publication of James masterpiece Nosferatu: eine Symphonie Joyce’s Ulysses and T. S. Eliot’s The des Grauens, in other words, or for the Waste Land, and the former in particu- jarring dissonances of Paul Hindemith’s lar was taken by Ezra Pound to be the 1922 piano suite, which Adorno beginning of a new age. (On May 18, (a Frankfurter like Hindemith) 1922, so Jackson tells us, a dinner was would doubtlessly have heard and organized at the Hotel Majestic in Paris condoned‌­—‌soundscapes and visions bringing together Clive Bell, Sergei that are unlikely to have traveled Diaghilev, Joyce, Pablo Picasso, Marcel to the Black Forest highlands Proust, Erik Satie and Igor Stravinsky. or rural Lower Austria. On the other side of the globe, 1922 is also celebrated as Brazil’s “Modernism Year One.” Etcetera.) In the German- speaking world, the all-consuming concerns were of course political and economic first and foremost:

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Contemporaries, hut-dwelling col-­ leagues, self-made post-philosophical mystics: their obvious biographical and temperamental differences not­- withstanding, it seems only natural to assume that Heidegger and Wittgenstein had something to say to each other, and Wittgenstein’s interest in the work of Heidegger in particular is fairly well, if mostly indirectly, documented. (How tantalizing to imagine an actual meeting… In whose hut would they have convened?) Still, we know of only one occasion when Wittgenstein actually addressed Heidegger’s philoso- phy more or less head on‌—‌in a remark dated December 30, 1929, made in the home of either Moritz Schlick or Fried- rich Waismann, leading members of the Wiener Kreis or Vienna Circle, the coterie of logicians and philosophers of science called into life in the course of the 1920s with the almost exclusive initial goal of dissecting Wittgenstein’s Tractatus for everyday epistemological use. The remark goes as follows:

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On Heidegger I can very well think what Heidegger meant about Being and Angst. Man has the drive to run up against the boundar‑ Previous pages: Joseph Semah ies of language. Think, for instance, of Tracing Martin Heidegger’s hut and Paul Celan’s clouds: […], the astonishment that anything exists. 2010 139, 142, 143 This astonishment cannot be expressed Alexander Kluge Triptychon, 2018 140, 144 in the form of a question, and there is Ian Hamilton Finlay also no answer to it. All that we can say Adorno’s Hut, 1986–87 146 can only, a priori, be nonsense. Never­ The present selection of artworks is part of a larger, multimedia theless we run up against the boundaries body of work conceived by Dutch- of language. Kierkegaard also saw this Israeli artist Joseph Semah in direct response to the unsettling running-up and similarly pointed it out memory of Martin Heidegger’s meetings with the Romanian-born (as running up against the paradox). Jewish poet Paul Celan in Freiburg This running up against the boundaries and Todtnauberg in 1967. Celan had survived World War II in a Nazi of language is Ethics. I hold it certainly to labor camp in his native Czernowitz region, an experience immortalized be very important that one makes an end in his oft-quoted Todesfuge (Death to all the chatter about ethics—‌ whether‌ Fugue) poem, written around 1945. The shadow of the Shoah haunted there can be knowledge in ethics, wheth‑ Celan until his suicide in Paris in 1970—a shadow that can be er there are values, whether the Good discerned in Semah’s reimagining the contours of Heidegger’s hut as can be defined, etc. In ethics one always lugubriously twinned to those of a makes the attempt to say something Nazi-built crematorium. Celan’s meeting with the former NSDAP which cannot concern and never con‑ member concluded with an oblique plea on the poet’s behalf for some cerns the essence of the matter. It is a pri‑ explication or other for past errors, ori certain: whatever one may give as a but no such closure ever appeared to have been on Heidegger’s mind. definition of the Good—‌ it‌ is always only

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40 Quoted in Paul M. Living‑ a misunderstanding to suppose that the successor in Cambridge, in whatever he liked.” And indeed, ston, “Wittgenstein Reads 1977: “Philosophie dürfte man Heidegger, Heidegger Reads expression corresponds to what one eigentlich nur dichten” (alter‑ “sometimes, to the surprise of his audi- Wittgenstein: Thinking actually means (Moore). But the tenden‑ nately translated as “really Language Bounding World,” one should write philosophy ence, Wittgenstein would turn his back in Jeffrey Bell (ed.), Beyond cy to run up against shows something. only as one writes a poem” on them and read poetry. In particular the Analytic-Continental Divide: or “philosophy ought really Pluralist Philosophy in the Twen- The holy Augustine already knew this to be written only as a poetic […] he read them the poems of Rabin- ty-First Century (Oxford: Rout‑ when he said: “What, you scoundrel, composition”) Ludwig Wittgen‑ ledge, 2017), pp. 222–223. stein, Culture and Value, trans. dranath Tagore, an Indian poet much According to Livingston, you would speak no nonsense? Go ahead Peter Winch (Chicago, ILL: in vogue in Vienna at that time, whose the remark was first published 40 The University of Chicago in the January 1965 issue of ‌and speak nonsense—‌ it doesn’t matter!” Press, 1980), p. 24. Compare poems express a mystical outlook the Philosophical Review. Living‑ this to a poem written by diametrically opposed to that of ston’s essay begins on a taut Martin Heidegger in 1947 42 dramatic note: “This is a tale It is certainly amusing to imagine that lists, in verse, the follow‑ the members of Schlick’s Circle.” of two readings, and of a ing “danger that threatens non-encounter, the missed the scene. As Ray Monk noted, thinking”: “The bad and thus It would take another forty years encounter between two philos‑ muddled danger / is philoso‑ ophers whose legacy, as “Saint Augustine, Heidegger, Kierke­ phizing.” In writers such as for Heidegger to return the favor, so to has been noted, might jointly gaard‌—‌these are not names one expects Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg speak; the only recorded remark about define the scope of problems Trakl, Heidegger and Wittgen‑ and questions left open, in the to hear mentioned in conversations stein definitely shared idiosyn‑ the philosophy of Wittgenstein dates wake of the 20th century, for cratic lyrical enthusiasms. philosophy today.” with the Vienna Circle—‌ ‌except as back to the very end of Heidegger’s targets of abuse.”41 Monk recalls that active teaching life, namely to the semi- 41 Monk, , p. 283. op. cit. Moritz Schlick’s attempts, starting in nars conducted in the French Provençal 42 Ibid., p. 243. The writings of Tagore rank among the the summer of 1927‌—‌Schlick first met town of Le Thor in the years 1966 to handful of books that Wittgen‑ Wittgenstein in February at the house 1969. (These seminars were initially stein was fond of gifting to his friends, like Tolstoy’s Gospel in of the latter’s sister Gretl, a couple conducted at the house of the French Brief and the stories of Johann Peter Hebel. Around this of months after the iconic building’s poet and Resistance veteran René Char.) time—the mid 1930s—Witt‑ completion‌—‌to persuade Wittgenstein Here is the fragment in question, dated genstein jotted down a remark that was only to see the light to attend the meetings of the Wiener September 2, 1969, worth quoting in its of public scrutiny much later, namely in Culture and Value, Kreis, had included the assurance entirety to better convey the magnitude, the body of “vermischte Bemerkungen” compiled “that the discussion would not have in fact, of Heidegger’s fundamental and edited by Georg Henrik to be philosophical; he could discuss misreading of Wittgenstein’s: von Wright, Wittgenstein’s 148 149 TROIS MACHINES À PENSER DIETER ROELSTRAETE

What does “the question of being” as it lets itself be seen, and this means: mean? One says “being” and from the that which is there before the eyes, outset one understands the word meta‑ as it brings itself forth from itself. physically, i.e. from out of metaphysics. Thus the mountain lies on the land However, in metaphysics and its tradi‑ and the island in the sea. tion, “being” means: that which deter‑ Such is the Greek experience mines a being insofar as it is a being. of beings. As a result, metaphysically the question of being means: the question concerning For us, being as a whole–ta onta–is only the being as a being, or otherwise put: an empty word. For us, there is no longer the question concerning the ground that experience of beings in the Greek of a being. sense. On the contrary, as in Wittgenstein, To this question, the history of meta‑ “the real is what is the case” (“Wirklich physics has given a series of answers. ist, was der Fall ist”) (which means: that As an example: energeia. Here reference which falls under a determination, lets is made to the Aristotelian answer to the itself be established, the determinable), question, “What is the being as a being?” actually an eerie (gespenstischer) state‑ –an answer which runs energeia, and ment. For the Greeks, on the contrary, not some hypokeimenon. For its part, this experience of beings is so rich, the hypokeimenon is an interpretation so concrete and touches the Greeks to of beings and by no means an interpreta‑ such an extent that there are significant tion of being. In the most concrete terms, synonyms (Aristotle, Metaphysics A): hypokeimenon is the presencing of an ta phainomena, ta alethea. For this rea‑ island or of a mountain, and when one is son, it gets us nowhere to translate ta in Greece such a presencing leaps into onta literally as “the beings.” In so view. Hypokeimenon is in fact the being doing, there is no understanding

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of what is being for the Greeks. enthusiastically embraced. An undated It is authentically: , what 43 Martin Heidegger, ta alethea remark, almost haiku-like in its order- Four Seminars (Studies in is revealed in unconcealment, what ing, made sometime in 1938 or 1939 Continental Thought), trans. Andrew J. Mitchell and postpones concealment for a time; simply states: François Raffoul (Bloomington, it is ta phainomena, what here shows Indianapolis: Indiana Univer‑ 43 sity Press, 2012), pp. 35–36. itself from itself. Wittgenstein‌— ‌/ In a lecture in Vienna: “The real is what is the case” “The absolute is the proposition.”‌—‌ (“Wirklich ist, was der Fall ist”), i.e., the assertion. Heidegger is quoting Wittgenstein 44 Martin Heidegger, as saying—‌ ‌an obviously erroneous Ponderings VII–XI: Black The editors helpfully add a footnote Notebooks 1938–1939 (Studies reference to the famous opening in Continental Thought), trans. stating that “neither the “lecture,” sentence of the Tractatus Logico- Richard Rojcewicz (Blooming‑ nor the quotation, nor Heidegger’s ton, Indianapolis: Indiana 44 Philosophicus, which really states University Press, 2017), p. 203. source is known.” Did Heidegger that “the world is all, that is the case” attend a lecture by Wittgenstein in (“Die Welt is Alles, das der Fall ist”). Vienna? Or rather a lecture by one of Interestingly enough, a much earlier his disciples, schooled in the ways of reference to Wittgenstein in Heideg- the Wiener Kreis? The former seems ger’s writings recently came to the unlikely: Wittgenstein had become a surface in the notorious “Schwarze British citizen after the Anschluss of Hefte” or “black notebooks,” diaries March 12, 1938, and it is hard to imagine kept by Heidegger starting in 1930 until him lecturing in the Austrian capital the end of his life, with much interest at a time of extreme distress for his evidently directed towards the ponder- brother and sisters. (“One morning ings jotted down in them during the in late March, Paul [Wittgenstein] Third Reich’s twelve-year rule he so came into the room where Hermine

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45 Alexander Waugh, was sitting, his face white with horror, never read anything of his. Hermann The House of Wittgenstein: and said to her: “Wir gelten als Juden!” Mörchen once tried to convince me to A Family at War (New York: 45 Anchor Books, 2008), p. 205. (We count as Jews!).” ) As for the 46 Richard Wisser (ed.), read Adorno. I didn’t.” About Negative latter: the Vienna Circle had effectively Martin Heidegger in Gespräch Dialectics, which he didn’t read but (Freiburg: K. Alber, 1970). ceased existing after the Nazi annex- Hermann Mörchen, a student heard Wisser speak about at evidently of Heidegger’s from his ation of Austria, and its spiritual leader Marburg days, wrote two tiring length, Heidegger merely notes, Moritz Schlick had been assassinated books about Adorno and with the unshakeable condescension Heidegger, the second one two years earlier on the central staircase of which, published in 1981, of his highland living: “So he is a was titled Untersuchung einer of Vienna’s main university building philosophische Kommunikations- sociologist and not a philosopher.” by a former student whose deed was verweigerung: a study of The conversation ends with a question: a “philosophical refusal 46 later celebrated by the rising tide of to communicate.” “With whom did Adorno study?” Austrofascism as an attack on “Jewish doctrines alien and detrimental to the nation.” (Schlick himself, it should be noted, was not Jewish.) There are no noteworthy traces of any sustained intellectual engagement on Heidegger’s part with the philoso- phy of Adorno. In an interview with the philosopher Richard Wisser conducted in 1969, Heidegger simply said the following: “When Adorno came back to Germany, he said, ‘I was told: In five years, I’ll have cut Heideg- ger down to size.’ You see what kind of man he is.” He then admits: “I have

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We already discussed the missed oppor- Identität und Differenz as his “tracta- tunity of a meeting between Adorno tus”: Adorno’s blistering critique of and Wittgenstein during the former’s Heidegger is a critique of both Heideg- English exile. It appears fairly certain ger and Wittgenstein. Elsewhere in his that Wittgenstein never read any of writing, we come across the following Adorno’s writings and may never even fragment: “It no doubt sounds very have heard of Adorno; he was not heroic when Wittgenstein declares that known to follow contemporary philo- one should say only that which can be sophical developments all that closely. said clearly. It also conveys a mystical-­ It is best to imagine that, should they existential aura that many today find ever have met, they would have stuck, appealing. But I believe that this famous wisely, to discussing musical matters. Wittgensteinian proposition is of an The relationship, conversely, of indescribable spiritual vulgarity inas- Adorno to Ludwig Wittgenstein is much as it ignores the whole point of best summed up in an underhanded philosophy. It is precisely the paradox comment recorded in The Jargon of this enterprise that it aims to say of Authenticity, which was really 48 Theodor Adorno, Philoso- the unsayable, to express by means a screed directed against the stifling phische Terminologie I (Frankfurt of concepts that which cannot be am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 48 grip of Heideggerian philosophy on 1973), pp. 55–56. expressed by means of concepts.” the postwar German imagination: Or, in Against Epistemology: “As long 47 Theodor Adorno, The Jargon of Authenticity “the term ‘commitment’ unites as philosophy is no more than the cult (Evanston: Northwestern Heidegger and Jaspers together of what ‘is the case,’ in Wittgenstein’s University Press, 1973), 47 p. 69. with the lowest tractatus-writers.” formula, it enters into competition Indeed, further on in the same book, with the sciences to which in delusion Adorno refers to Heidegger’s writings it assimilates itself‌—‌and loses. If it compiled, in 1957, under the rubric dissociates itself from the sciences,

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however, and in refreshed merriment About Adorno’s relationship to

49 Theodor Adorno, Against thinks itself free of them, it becomes a Heidegger, finally, one can be brief—‌ ‌ Epistemology, trans. Willis powerless reserve, the shadow of shad- all the more so since it is the subject Domingo (Cambridge, MA: 49 The MIT Press, 1982), p. 42. owy Sunday religion.” And finally: of an entire book of Adorno’s, namely “Wittgenstein’s maxim, ‘Whereof the aforementioned Jargon of Authen- one cannot speak, thereof one must ticity. The pathos-laden, frequently be silent’, in which the extreme of self-defeating animosity of the younger positivism spills over into the gesture thinker towards his ageing foe can of reverent authoritarian authenticity, hardly obscure the bare facts of a and which for that reason exerts a kind shared agenda. (Only privately does of intellectual mass suggestion, is utterly Adorno appear to have admitted‌—‌as antiphilosophical. If philosophy can in a letter to Max Horkheimer in 1949‌— be defined at all, it is an effort to express ‌that Heidegger was “in a way […] not 51 51 Safranski, op. cit., p. 413. 50 Theodor Adorno, Hegel: things one cannot speak about, to help all that different from us.” ) It is Rüdi- Three Studies, trans. Shierry express the nonidentical despite the fact ger Safranski who perceptively noted W. Nicholson (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1971), that expressing it identifies it at the that the inevitable rapprochement of pp. 101–102. same time.”50 Too many misreadings these polar opposites in some way had to disentangle here: exile resembles to occur in the sphere of art—‌ ours‌ , i.e. a Tower of Babel, misunderstanding the sphere of the image of the hut—‌ a method of choice. ‌rather than that of academic philosophy or even public opinion:

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The Cassandras up on the mountain “Adorno’s hut,” after all, could only peaks of bad prospects are calling to ever be imagined as a work of art. each other, exchanging their gloomy insights across the lowlands where efficiency and “Carry on as you are” hold sway. The 1950s and early 1960s 52 Ibid., pp. 408–409. Note have given rise to a disaster discourse Safranski’s paraphrase of the rote opposition of the that coexists peacefully with reconstruc‑ mountain peaks of deep philosophical reflections tion zeal, with smug prosperity, with to the lowlands’ lowly ethos optimism in small things and in the of everyday busy-ness. Refer‑ ring back to our earlier remarks short term. The critics of culture provide about Heidegger and Wittgen‑ stein’s shared love of mountain a gloomy minor-key accompaniment air, it is worth noting that to the cheerful hustle of the prospering Adorno was likewise an en- thusiast of amateur alpinism Federal Republic. […] Heidegger, the (if of a far less physically demanding variety), and espe‑ critic of his time, suffered a fate similar cially fond of holidaying in Sils Maria, Nietzsche’s philo‑ to Adorno’s—‌ ‌he was being listened to sophical home in the Swiss like an artistic oracle. Not the academies Engadin. It is in Sils Maria, interestingly enough, that of sciences but the academies of fine arts a meeting between Adorno and Paul Celan should have were wooing Heidegger, just as they taken place in August 1959. would soon woo Adorno. Fundamental The planned encounter never came to pass, and shortly critique, which did not wish to become thereafter Celan wrote a darkly comic short story inspired political and which was fighting shy of by the non-event and titled religiousness, was inevitably received “Conversation in the Moun‑ 52 tains,” published in 1960. on the aesthetic plane.

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The places!, and spaces!, one runs into Heidegger, one way or the other—‌ ‌as an epigraph, most recently, prefacing

Previous pages: Homi Bhabha’s milestone of postcolo- Robin Gillanders nial studies The Location of Culture, Eclogue, 1995–98 163 for instance: “a boundary is not that Aircraft Carrier, 1995–98 164 at which something stops but, as the Hegel Stile, 1995–98 165 Greeks recognized, the boundary is Golden Head, 1995­–98 166 Temple, 1995–98 167 that from which something begins Panzer, 1995–98 168 its presenting”—‌ ‌a quote taken from Herding, 1995–98 169 his “Building, Dwelling, Thinking” Ian Hamilton Finlay, essay so beloved of aspiring 1995–98 170 architect-theorists. From 1995 until the poet’s death in 2006, Robin Gillanders was While visiting Ian Hamilton Finlay’s Ian Hamilton Finlay’s photogra- pher of choice for the realization “retreat,” Little Sparta south of Edin- of a number of collaborative burgh in September 2017, another book projects as well as the documenta- tion of Finlay’s sculptural work, title caught my eye in the late poet’s most notably the sculpture garden of Little Sparta in Dunsyre, sizable library: Charles Bambach’s south of Edinburgh, which Finlay Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National famously styled “an attack, not a retreat.” Many of the artworks Socialism, and the Greeks. Its introduc- documented in these photographs attest to Finlay’s obsession with tion starts with a consideration of “the both the iconography of warfare hut,” worth quoting in its entirety here: and the tragic trajectory of German philosophy. Gillanders’ elegiac black-and-white images powerfully capture the militant melancholy animating Finlay’s aphoristic art of “silence, exile, and cunning.”

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The hut is still there. It still stands unob‑ philosophize. The list of visitors to the trusively at the top of a long sloping hill cabin‌—‌Hans-Georg Gadamer, Karl some 3000 feet in elevation, nestled just Löwith, Hannah Arendt, Alfred Baeum‑ below a densely clustered patch of dark ler, Ernst Tugendhat, Günther Anders, and towering fir trees. The small ski hut, Jean Beaufret, Paul Celan, Carl Friedrich built for Heidegger in 1922 when he was von Weizsäcker, and others‌—‌reads like a young professor, still bears witness to a veritable catalog of 20th-century Euro‑ the lost world of a rural peasant farm pean intellectual history. But what community of the 19th century. No num‑ marked the life-world of the hut more ber marks its front doorway; no tele‑ than its social interactions or philosophi‑ phone, gas, or electric lines obstruct its cal tête-à-têtes was its isolation and soli‑ view of the valley below. High above the tude. And it was this sense of solitude small village of Todtnauberg in the that marked Heidegger’s work-world at southern Black Forest, the cabin still pro‑ the cabin. As Heidegger himself claims its proud independence from the expressed it: interlocking structures of modern exis‑ tence with its urban-industrial vision of People in the city often wonder implacable progress and irremediable whether one gets lonely up in the consumerism. In the early days, Heideg‑ mountains among the peasants for ger would retreat to Todtnauberg during such long and monotonous periods semester breaks and prepare for the rig‑ of time. But it is not loneliness, it is orous regime of thinking and writing by solitude. In large cities one can easily chopping wood for the fireplace. When be as lonely as almost nowhere else. he was still at Marburg, students in But one can never be in solitude Youth Movement circles would come out there. Solitude has the peculiar and to ski, hike, camp, play guitar, sing, and originary power not of isolating us

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but of projecting our whole existence After leafing through this book (which out into the vast nearness of the pres‑ also references the poignant formula ence [Wesen] of all things. coined by Ernst Bloch of a “pastorale To the outside observer, the hut pre‑ militans,” a militant pastoralism), sented itself as a small three-room I wandered about Finlay’s deserted cabin with a low-hanging roof that sculpture garden for an hour or so stood against the outline of a scenic in the Scottish afternoon gray. I had mountain landscape: a charming cot‑ come to visit the place in part to solve tage with kitchen, bedroom, and the mystery of the Finlay installation, study for summer vacationing and referred to in the beginning of this winter sports. For Heidegger, howev‑ essay, that was so enigmatically titled er, it stood as an entryway into the “Adorno’s Hut,” and so hard to find nearness and abiding simplicity of traces of out there in both the analogue authentic existence—‌ ‌a site for dwell‑ and digital world. (I was half success- ing and thinking that safeguarded the ful‌—‌something to do with the bicen- 53 Charles Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, old world of the peasant community tennial of the French Revolution, the National Socialism, and the against the incursions of modernity. Greeks (Ithaca, NY: Cornell French art-critical establishment, and University Press, 2003), “This cabin-Dasein,” as Heidegger pp. 1–2. The Heidegger quote the artist’s polarizing interest in Nazi is taken from Denkerfahrungen, called it, did not merely constitute a aesthetics…). I did come across other 1910-1976 (Frankfurt: Kloster‑ mann, 1983). It is also here pleasant background for his work but hut-like structures on the grounds of that Bambach comes across became for him an essential element Little Sparta, and many a nod to the notion of “Hüttensein,” 53 or “cabin-Being.” in the experience of thinking. German intellectual history—‌ ‌one in the shape of a stone-carved fragment from a Hölderlin poem paying homage to “the plowman’s cottage”‌—‌but it was the experience of Finlay’s house and

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garden as a whole, of course, that provided conclusive enlightenment, not just about Adorno’s Hut, but about the huts under consideration in this essay in general. The crucial insight is encapsulated in the notion that, as Finlay put it only half-ironically in 54 Alec Finlay (ed.), Ian Hamilton Finlay: Selections his “Detached Sentences on Gardening,” (Berkeley, CA: University of “garden centres must become the California Press, 2012), 54 p. 179. Jacobin Clubs of the new Revolution” ‌—‌that the garden, or the hermit’s cave, or the philosopher’s hut, the writer’s cabin and the composer’s cottage, is not a retreat: it is an attack.

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