3.50 JOURNAL IN THE NIGHT By THEODOR HAECKER Edited and translated^ with an introduction by AIJCK DRU Haecker, a German philosopher and re- ligious thinker, tran.slator of 'Kierkegaard and Newman, was deeply concerned with the harmony of faith and reason. This is the central theme of the Journal. Con- verted to Catholicism in 1920, Haecker was among the few who immediately recognized the character of ihe Nazi re- gime. He published his first article at- tacking it at the moment in which Hitler came to power. In consequence, he was arrested and, after his release, forbidden to lecture or to broadcast. His Journal was written at night, arid the pages hidden, as they were written, in a house in the country. This book, reminiscent in form of Pascal's Pensees, is his last testimony to the Lruth and a confession of faith that is a spon- taneous rejoinder to a particular moment in history. It is "written by a man intent, by nature, on the search for truth, and driven, by circumstance, to seek for it in anguish, in solitude, with an urgency that grips the reader. JACQUES MARATAIN on TUKODOR HAECKKK: Theodor Haecker was a man of deep in- a sight qnd rare intellectual integrity f "Knight of Faith" to use Kierkegaard s expression. The testimony of this great Christian has an outstanding value. I thank Pantheon Rooks for making so mag- nanimoits and* moving a work as his diary available to ^ American reader. DDD1 DS7t,fl 68-09952 193 H133J 193 H133J 68-09952 Haecker $3*50 Journal in the night Missouri gUpM lunsjs city, ** only Books will b2 issued of library card. on presentation cards and Please report lost promptly change of residence for Card holders are responsible records, Wns, pictures all books, materials or other library their cards. checked out on JOURNAL IN THE NIGHT in the Journal^ Night by THEODOR HAECKER Translatedfrom the German by Alexander Dm PANTHEON BOOKS Printed in Great Britain for Pantheon Books Inc., 333 Sixth Avenue, New Tork City First Edition 1950 Printed by William Clowes & Sons, Ltd., London an,d Becclet To M. H. in gratitude for continual kindness. Pixton: May September 1948 PREFACE The Introduction needs a word of explanation, and perhaps of apology. Haecker's Journal in the Night is clear, and as it stands is complete intelligible ; but Haecker so little known outside Germany, that this seems the right occasion on which to say something about Haecker's importance. The Introduction is only concerned with that point, with so presenting the intellectual and historical background that Haecker's importance can be seen. There is little, therefore, about Haecker's books individually, a subject which may well be left aside until some of them are translated into English. Instead, there is a summarised account of the move- ment of thought in which his work took shape. This will, I hope, prepare the reader for the Journal, and forestall the misunderstandings that so easily supervene when the per- spective is left to chance. This compressed account includes a number of themes, any one of which might be treated at length. It would have been possible, and even easier, to omit one or another; but the clarity attained by not over-crowding the pages of the Introduction would, I believe, have been fictitious. Haecker's importance as a writer derives from his breadth of view, and this can only be conveyed by pointing out how and where the many themes in his work are related to the movement of thought of which it forms part. This movement of thought is fashionable at the moment under the name and guise of Existentialism'; but as a fashion it is a tree shorn of its branches and roots. The aim this of the Introduction is, in one respect, to go behind fictitious simplicity and to stress the historical links that, as a fashion, existentialism seems bent upon ignoring or perhaps denying. When existentialism is considered simply vn XII JOURNAL IN THE NIGHT for a year or two he was at last able to realise his ambition, and through the generosity of a friend, went to the University in Berlin. It was there he laid the foundation of a thorough and wide knowledge of ancient and modern literature, though he could not afford to remain long enough to take a degree. On leaving Berlin he went into the offices of an export company, a life that was not made more congenial by being in Antwerp. A year or so later he was again rescued by a friend and was taken into Heinrich Schreiber's small publishing firm in Munich, in conditions which made it possible for him to go on with his studies. From that time, till he was forced to leave Munich in the last year of the war, his life, as far as I know, never altered. He worked in his office during the day, and when he began to write, it was at night. He married late in life, and for the last twenty years lived with his wife and three children in a flat above his office, in a house overlooking the gardens on the further bank of the Isar. As a youMig man Haecker's ambition had been to be an actor, until after a long illness, due to an infection of the sinus, an operation left him badly disfigured. It would be difficult to imagine anyone who seemed less fitted for the part he had chosen for himself, though perhaps, by its very incongruity, it suggests to us the mobility of mind and the quick sympathy that lay behind a massive reserve and a disconcerting silence. His silence and reserve were in fact the only surface which he presented! to the curious, and he was so lacking in affectation or eccentricity that the most that could be said of him was that he made nothing of himself. Outwardly his life was as ordinary as could well be conceived. He rarely travelled, and took no part in the official learned and literary life that was so well defined in the Germany of that period. Though perhaps here, too, he might have taken a different turn if the Nazi regime had not come at the moment when his books were beginning to have some success, and he had begun to lecture occasion- ally at the Universities, INTRODUCTION XIII Haecker's first essay Kierkegaard and the Philosophy of Inwardness was published by Schreiber in 1913 as something of a curiosity, for no one had heard of Haecker, and few had heard of Kierkegaard, whose works were only then appearing in German. It was anything but a conventional biography or an impersonal study. The articles which he wrote during the next five or six years, afterwards published under the title Satire und Polemik (1914-1920), gave full vent to his contempt for the literary and philosophical pundits of the day of whom probably only Thomas Mann and Rathenau are even names to the English public. The vituperative power of these articles is considerable, and I doubt whether anyone but Karl Krauss, in Vienna, with whom Haecker later became friends, could have surpassed him in violence. There was nothing reserved about Haecker's style, and though he soon afterwards turned his back on 'polemics' for very different fields, what he wrote always had an edge. The change came in 1920 when Haecker was received into the Catholic Church. For the next few years he wrote little, devoting himself mainly to translations from Kierke- gaard and Newman. His introductions and postscripts, together with a criticism of Scheler (which Scheler found remarkable), were published under the title Christentum und Kultur in 1927; it was only two years later that he wrote the first short book, from which may be dated the beginning of his work. Haecker neither wished, nor had the gifts to become a 'figure'. His books were too distant from the German academic tradition, and too wanting in airs and graces, to gain him an audience quickly; they are not easy books to label and it is difficult and dangerous not to be a specialist in Germany. Strangely enough it was probably his grasp of his at the form which political and social changes and alarm the revolution took after the defeat of Germany that carried most weight among Catholics. And here his friendship with Karl Muth, the editor of Hochland, should perhaps be XIV JOURNAL IN THE NIGHT mentioned. Haecker's work is not of the impersonal schematic kind which provides the frame-work for a school; and where style is an essential ingredient, the immediate influence is often deceptive. How far his influence took root, how far it may still stimulate and permeate his compatriots remains to be seen. Haecker had maintained from the first that the Treaty of Versailles was a disaster for Europe, not least because it weakened all the forces that had hitherto done something to contain and limit the Prussian hegemony. And though, as the Journal shows, he altered his opinion to some extent, he remained acutely sensitive to the signs of the coming upheaval. Haecker was among the first to discern the real character of the Nazi movement, and his first article attacking its philosophy was published at the time that Hitler came to power. He was arrested a few weeks later and was released only through the help of Karl Muth and Cardinal Faulhaber. From that moment he was a marked man; he was forbidden to speak on the wireless and refused permission to lecture.