Tim Horvath - Understories

Heidegger seems more amenable as he speaks, but in the end he continues to hem and haw. “Progress . A word to be infinitely suspicious of,” he says. “Science needs to get back to its roots, its origins. In its essence, science has no divisions. But the essence of science has little to do with its practical forms.”

“I’m afraid,” admits Schöner, “that maybe I don’t understand what you mean by the ‘essence.’”

“You’re not alone, then,” says Heidegger.

On many occasions, they loop around to a spot they’ve been that morning, and Heidegger will ask, “Were we here earlier?”

“We were.”

In these cases, Schöner is so sure that the other is thinking, “As with our conversations,” he doesn’t bother remarking it himself.

In late November, crunching through fresh-fallen snow, they come upon a veritable army of towering pines. Heidegger asks, “How old are these?”

Schöner looks over them, tightly bound with crisscrossing bands of branches at chest height and upward, a stand of the type that gives the Black Forest its name. “Probably a couple of hundred years.” Together, they search for a downed tree that will reveal its rings.

After they confirm that the trees are at least 250 years old, Heidegger gazes up, marveling at their lattice formation. “They live so much longer than us. For that, and lacking consciousness of their mortality, they call our attention to our own.”

As winter comes through, they ski, and Heidegger is a daredevil, even though he claims he did not start skiing until he was an adult. The philosopher teases him for taking turns too wide, especially on precipitous slopes, and Schöner wonders if this is how his students feel when he antagonizes them for being reluctant to climb. At some point, several minutes behind, he hears Heidegger’s scalding laughter from below, echoing off the walls of a canyon. As he skis downhill toward the sound, for a moment he feels a sudden urge to run Heidegger down. Instead, as he pulls into a stop, he tears off his skis and leaps into the lower branches of a beech tree and begins ascending, panting and calling down, “If I’m such a coward, you won’t start to look like a little mouse as I get higher and higher above you.” Heidegger stays on the ground, and his voice sounds faint as he calls up, “Schöner, you’re braver than I thought.”

By 1932, the university is beginning to feel the effects of political ferment, which are still just a ripple, not quite a shudder, throughout Germany. Freiburg may be far from Berlin and Munich, but the National Socialists have struck the universities, like the bark disease striking beeches, youngest first. Of course, soon nothing will be intact; for now, the Nazis are overrepresented in the schools but still a minority elsewhere.

Over time, Schöner has taken on greater responsibilities, sitting on various committees and administrative bodies, which all take away from time he’d rather be spending in the forest. Still, he teaches his class, and gets outside as much as possible. Heidegger, too, has increased his commitments, and while they see each other less regularly, their relationship is still cordial.

The students seem different, though, more brazen, more disaffected, less drawn in by his enthusiasm and his humor. The enthusiasm feels more forced, too. He is reluctant to prod students, even gently, with his walking stick. He doesn’t climb trees anymore, after a couple of students filed an anonymous complaint and he was reprimanded. That felt like a gut punch, and while he always suspected who it was, and that it was resentment and laziness that had motivated the complaint rather than genuine concern for the well-being of their fellow students, he could never pin it down with certainty. During classes, he has begun to feel as though he’s being watched.

Moreover, the students are more inclined to challenge him directly. “What exactly is the point of all this?” one asks.

He’s heard the question before, in a less acidic tone. Nevertheless, he holds his ground and answers patiently. “Germany’s forests are a source of her history, her greatness. If we do not understand what is around us, we will never understand who we are or where we are going.”

But the students are not as quickly appeased by this sort of answer as they once had been. “Where we are going has nothing to do with the woods and these Hansel and Gretel fairy tales,” one says. “Germany’s greatness is in its blood, its resolve. Our science ought to be about the Volk, not the trees.”

On a desk in his classroom, someone has written “Who gives a flying damn what’s in the canopy?” Because he holds class inside more often now, he is forced to look at it day after day. And in different handwriting, frighteningly neat and compact, someone has written, “Is a Jew hanging in a tree shade-tolerant?” beside a drawing of a hanged man dangling from a noose. No longer does he admonish them about carving in the trees. Recently, he has sighted a couple of swastikas etched into them, and he shook his head and said nothing. It occurred to him then that the swastika, with its many straight lines, might very well have been invented by a veteran carver of trees.

But there is one consolation for Schöner in Hitler’s rise to power: a mere five months after his ascension on January 30, 1933, none other than Heidegger is elected unanimously to the position of rector of Freiburg University. The news echoes through the hallways and from building to building, filling Schöner with some combination of euphoria and relief. It is not merely that by now he considers Heidegger a dear personal friend, although they have not spoken much in the past few months, and not been on one of their outings since they last skied during the winter holidays of the year before. Rather, it is that his colleagues have selected Heidegger, wise, sensitive, and keenly nuanced, to lead them. This can only mean that there is greater balance in the National Socialist party than meets the eye. It means that the bullies and the thugs who protest outside the Jewish Union are but one faction, albeit the one Hitler has exploited in his rise. It means that although Jewish teachers and those who have spoken out against the Nazi cause have been dismissed from their posts at universities throughout Germany, here in Freiberg there will be a beacon of reason and conscience to carry them through these dark times. Heidegger, who has never breathed an anti-Semitic word, for whom policies and notions of biological racialism would surely be as reprehensible as a proposal to clear-cut the Black Forest and supplant it with a city the size of Berlin. Heidegger, who rails against the “common sense of the they,” and thus who would turn a deaf ear to the student outcries that have turned many classrooms into courtrooms and put professors on trial.

So it is with an eagerness verging on rapture that he looks forward to Heidegger’s rectoral address. The program has been printed, and its title, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” is already creating a buzz. Heidegger will, it is thought, speak out against tyranny. He will speak up for the intellectual life, Hitler’s impatience for such things be damned. Schöner arrives in his purple robes with Kindler, a geophysicist in whom Schöner can confide these hopes. The stage is laid out with Nazi regalia, flags, and insignia. Behind the podium, gathered around Heidegger, are men who look no older than students, many in military garb. The crowd is filled with restless students, many in the nondescript brown shirts that make his own outfit feel ostentatious, even decadent. He thinks he sees a former student of his several feet away in brown, but in his studied expressionlessness he might be anyone. The ceremony opens with a few preliminary spurts of bureaucratese, flags twirling, the deafening stomp of boot heels, which rattle the stage. Next there is an oompah-pah band, and at last Heidegger takes the podium, diminutive even on his decisive day.