In Heidegger’s Hut
Amlan Dasgupta In 1966 or 1967 (the year is variously reported) the poet Paul Celan journeyed to a place called Todtnauberg , in the Black Mountains in Germany. He was visiting the mountain cabin, or as it is famously known, the hutte or hut, of the philosopher Martin Heidegger. Little is known of what transpired between the two that day. Heidegger had – albeit idiosyncratically – supported the Nazi regime, and had abandoned his major work on the Pre-Socratics to take up the rectorship of Freiberg in 1933. During the denazification years, he had increasingly withdrawn to his mountain retreat. Celan, survivor of the Nazi labour camp, was an unlikely guest, but there is no doubt that the two were drawn to each other intellectually, Heidegger to the poetry, Celan to the philosophy of language, which he commented favourably on several times and incorporated into his poetry. On this enigmatic occasion, Celan signed his name in the visitor’s book, and apparently went on a walk with his host. There are many reconstructions of this day’s events, some based on the poet’s later comments on the experience. More to the point is the poem that emanated from the encounter: one of Celan’s richest and most puzzling poems, one that teases the imagination and challenges hermeneutic skill. Todtnauberg Arnica, eyebright, the draft from the well with the star-die on top, in the Hütte, written in the book – whose name did it record before mine – ? in this book the line about a hope, today, for a thinker’s word to come, in the heart, forest sward, unleveled, orchis and orchis, singly, crudeness, later, while driving, clearly, he who drives us, the man, he who also hears it, the half- trod log- trails on the highmoor, humidity, much. Did then Celan first refresh himself with water from the well, washing the dust from his eyes, the water itself like the old remedies for failing eyesight, arnica and eyebright? But was he also struck by the star engraved on wood (star-die) on the top of the well: the star that must have reminded him of the yellow star worn by Jews in Nazi Germany. Heidegger is said to have commented on Celan’s knowledge of botany, and perhaps the two conversed on the flora of the mountain. Celan speaks of “a hope, today for a thinker’s word”; that word never came, the begegnung, encounter, remaining unproductive. The word encounter was favoured both by the poet and the philosopher, and Celan was later hurt at Adorno’s judgement that the word had been impossibly corrupted by its use by the Nazis. The two seemed to have walked casually and separately, (“orchis and orchis/singly”), the walk itself being interrupted and half finished. The thinker’s word does not come: Celan may have hoped for some formal word of apology or expression of grief from the philosopher, heute, today, on that day itself: a word bearing burning force in the poem. The moment of encounter – or failed encounter – remains uneasily in the relationship. For a relationship it was: Celan, retaining his interest in Heidegger’s thought, and the latter continuing to value the poet’s work openly. In a letter of 1971 to his friend Klaus Demus the old philosopher wrote warmly about a gift of an original manuscript poem by Celan that he had received. Demus had written that Celan had remembered Heidegger in one of their last encounters (Begegnungen). This had emboldened Demus to send him the poem. Heidegger responded with generosity and enthusiasm: When I opened your letter of Easter Sunday, my glance fell first on the sheet with the familiar handwriting of the “untranslatable” poem by Paul Celan that I know by memory, or more elegantly, par coeur. I don’t know how to thank you both for this valuable gift. After my death, it and your latter, as part of my posthumous manuscript papers, will go to the German Literary Archives in Marbach am Neckar. But even a detailed enquiry into the circumstances of the relationship between Heidegger and Celan, does not further clarify the event on Todtnauberg, the grimly and suggestively named location – Todt is death in German. What happened in the hut, and on the mountain, it remains in some sense unrepresentable, beyond representation. So much of Celan’s poetry grapples with the unrepresentable, and this is certainly a place where his engagement with Heidegger becomes particularly important. Two major valuations of Celan have come from two writers themselves deeply marked by Heidegger’s thought, Jacques Derrida and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. I will not detain you with summaries of these richly suggestive readings, beyond drawing attention to a place in the essay “ Shibboleth for Paul Celan” in which Derrida meditates on the word shibboleth, the word of life and death in the OT with which the inhabitants of Gilead tested the Ephraimites: Gilead then cut Ephraim off from the fords of the Jordan, and whenever Ephraimite fugitives said, ‘Let me cross,’ the men of Gilead would ask, ‘Are you an Ephraimite?’ If he said, ‘No,’ they then said, ‘Very well, say “Shibboleth”.’ If anyone said, “Sibboleth”, because he could not pronounce it, then they would seize him and kill him by the fords of the Jordan. Forty-two thousand Ephraimites fell on this occasion. (Judges, 12) Derrida speculates on how the word (if it is one) names in the broadest sense the most insignificant and arbitrary mark – like the phonemic difference between Shi and Si – that becomes discriminative, decisive and divisive. For Derrida the difference, meaningless in itself becomes that essential property that one needs to inhabit a place – a hut, a mountain, a poem, a place of death – to be within, to be enclosed by the border, to have the right of asylum, the legitimacy of habitation. It is not enough to