It all began with plans for a birthday party.[1] Gerhard Stroomann, chief physician and charismatic leader of the posh spa resort and sanitarium Bühlerhöhe (imagine Thomas Mann’s character Hofrat Behrens, transplanted to a postwar “magic mountain” in the Black Forest) would be turning sixty-five in 1952, and he wanted to celebrate it with a weekend of events devoted to his beloved poet Georg Trakl. Even more, he wanted to hear the philosopher Martin Heidegger speak about the poet. Heidegger had already given a few lectures at the spa while he was still prohibited from teaching at the university, including one on language under the guise of a commentary on Trakl’s poem “A Winter Evening.” Although irritated by the overeager, elite milieu of the luxury retreat—“it was,” as one eyewitness reported about the event, “very highbrow, […] teeming with counts and princesses, a bit snobbish”[2]—Heidegger accepted Stroomann’s invitation.
The “Trakl-Celebration” featured readings of Trakl’s work by several authors (including the “conservative revolutionary” Friedrich Georg Jünger, brother of Ernst Jünger). It also marked the start of a lasting friendship between Heidegger and Trakl’s former patron Ludwig von Ficker. Von Ficker’s extemporaneous speech at the event, which moved Heidegger to tears, recounted the collapse and suicide of the twenty-seven-year-old poet, who had been traumatized by his experiences in a field hospital after the gruesome battle of Gródek in the early days of World War I. Yet it was Heidegger’s own lecture, which was published shortly after the celebration in the influential postwar intellectual periodical Merkur, that would become a touchstone for almost all Trakl-scholarship since. In his lecture, Heidegger presented Trakl as a redemptive successor to Hölderlin, the putative poet of the German language. However, while it is true that, as Thomas Mann’s son Klaus once wrote, Trakl “picked up the lyre that Hölderlin had let sink down,”[3] it is difficult, at first blush, to understand how, of all people, Trakl—the drug-addled, Austrian expressionist in love with decay and obsessed with his sister—could become for Heidegger the next “poet of the Germans”[4] and take on the role of savior of the German people and indeed of the entire Occident.
***
This is just one of the contradictions bound up with Bühlerhöhe. The former spa and luxury hotel, located in the northern Black Forest at an altitude of 800 meters near the town of Bühl, was designed by the architect Wilhelm Kreis in the early 1910s as a tribute to Kaiser Wilhelm II. The founder of the institution was Hertha Isenbart (née Schottländer), who wanted to honor her deceased second husband, a major general, by establishing a luxurious convalescent home for officers of the imperial army. Although the adjacent sanatorium could begin accepting patients already in 1913, the main building, due to the onset of war, never served the function for which Isenbart had intended it. This, and the financial ruin her ambitious project caused her, prompted her to take her own life in 1918.
In the 1920s, the main building was transformed into a successful spa resort. Stroomann, enthusiastic about this “monument” in the “fairyland” of the Black Forest,[5] became one of the first doctors in residence and soon rose to the position of head physician in 1929. He was to remain at Bühlerhöhe for more than three decades, treating prominent figures from politics, art, and culture who traveled there not only for medical reasons but also for recreation. Among them were politicians from various parties of the Weimar Republic, such as Gustav Stresemann, Heinrich Brüning, and Hermann Müller. In 1933, Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels met there. Other guests at the spa included Georgy Chicherin, the first foreign minister of the Soviet Union, Nobel Prize winners Carl Bosch and Werner Heisenberg, and actors Gustav Gründgens and Werner Krauß. In the 1950s it was the favorite vacation destination of Konrad Adenauer, then the first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany.
During the Allied occupation, French soldiers were billeted at Bühlerhöhe. It reopened in March 1949. Just three months later, Stroomann inaugurated a celebrated lecture series at the spa under the title “Wednesday-Evenings,” which would bring many well-known intellectuals and artists to the Black Forest and make Bühlerhöhe synonymous with a place of retreat and discourse for the elite of the young Federal Republic. The “Wednesday-Evenings” also offered a stage for the most famous and controversial German philosopher: Martin Heidegger. In 1933–1934, as Rector of the University of Freiburg, Heidegger had been involved in the National Socialist seizure of power. A denazification committee accordingly banned him from teaching in 1945. Although the ban was lifted in 1949, Heidegger was not able to lecture at the university again until 1951, after he had been granted emeritus status. He therefore sought out other forums in the meantime. He first found them in the elitist “Bremen Club,” where in 1949 he gave a long four-part lecture entitled “Insight into That Which Is” (later known as the “Bremen Lectures”). In a letter to the poet Gottfried Benn, a friend from Bremen tells him what sort of people went to listen to the philosopher there:
Heidegger was met by a social class that did not exist in such a compact majority in the university towns, the towns of civil servants, or even at Bühlerhöhe: major businessmen, overseas specialists, shipping and shipyard directors—all people for whom a famous thinker is a mythical creature or a demigod.[6]
***
The Black Forest spa was nevertheless attractive enough for Heidegger to repeat his Bremen lecture at Bühlerhöhe in March 1950. Here, too, Heidegger’s performance was a complete success. As Stroomann reports in his memoirs,
each time there was the utterly exceptional excitement with which people inundated his lecture, his appearance at the lectern, as with no other contemporary figure. … [W]ho can shut themselves off from the prying force of his thinking and knowledge, which becomes evident in a newly creative way with every word: that there are still undiscovered sources? Our Wednesday-Evenings owe so much to him![7]
To others the lectures seemed scandalous. The philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who had caused a sensation in 1953 with a critical review of Heidegger’s Introduction to Metaphysics, wrote six years later that the “most devoted” of Heidegger’s followers were gathering in places outside the university:
These small circles, sometimes formed into sects, are scattered across the country and difficult to get an overview of. In one respect they befit the appearance of a thinker who avoids the conferences of his professional colleagues and prefers to face the councils of lay brothers. Among them are the captains of industry who have already achieved proverbial fame seeking relaxation at Bühlerhöhe. Perhaps here, in these charming attempts to interest managers in “field paths,” we have the other side of Heidegger’s contact with reality, the one that is, so to speak, opposite to Being. Detractors see in all this a mysticism meshed with a scam.[8]
Habermas is right to say that Heidegger was interested in bringing his thought to an influential audience and that, to a certain extent, he ingratiated himself. But what made Heidegger attractive to the “managers” becomes clear only when one works out what Heidegger hardly mentions in his published texts and what Habermas fails to grasp with his criticism of Heidegger’s “scam.” The “Wednesday-Evenings,” whose ideology Heidegger and his style of thinking were representative of, were the attempt of an elite group to find orientation and to work through the events of World War II and its own complicity. These individuals believed themselves to be intellectually and spiritually damaged. Stroomann thought his lecture series could go a long way toward healing them. As he wrote on the invitation to “Insight into That Which Is,” connecting the series’ conversational-therapeutic function with the myth of the post-Nazi “Zero Hour”:
Everything is a beginning. Anything can arise. Nothing must be undertaken, let alone organized. But we must make progress. Conversation must be enabled in a better way. People must be able to get closer.[9]
However, if we are to believe the polemical report published in the magazine Der Spiegel, there was no real conversation after Heidegger’s lecture. Heidegger rebuffed questions about human freedom. He castigated a flattering question about the significance of philosophy for the public as a “typical relapse into enframing [Gestell].” To another question, the reporter only says that “Heidegger’s expansive answer gave ample opportunity to return to the solemn silence of the lecture. Then the spell was broken. Outside on the terrace there was sunshine and coffee and cake.”[10]
The content of Heidegger’s lecture fits into this context of a failed—perhaps never seriously intended—conversation. “Insight into That Which Is” responds to the need for self-assurance by questioning the meaning and possibility of any conscious self-understanding. Heidegger goes all the way back to ancient philosophy to paint a picture of modernity in which technological processes threaten genuine philosophizing, true speech, and human agency in equal measure. In this way, he relieves his audience of personal responsibility for the past. This is particularly clear in the much-quoted passage in which he refers to the Holocaust and to the World War that had just ended—a passage that he removed from the published version of his lecture in 1954. Heidegger considers the Shoah and technological organization to be of essentially equal rank: “Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps.”[11] As though nothing could be done about it.
But Heidegger not only offers to replace responsibility with fate. His lecture also responds to the need for consolation and orientation, not, however, with an appeal to therapeutic conversation, but with an abstract reference to a verse from Hölderlin’s poem “Patmos”: where there is danger—i.e., in Heidegger’s eyes, the technological thinking of modernity—the saving power also grows. Hölderlin was also at the center of Heidegger’s second contribution to the “Wednesday-Evenings,” the lecture “… Poetically Man Dwells ….” The promise of consolation becomes most apparent at the end of this lecture, when Heidegger quotes one of Hölderlin’s late poems in its entirety in order to sketch “‘the life of man’” as “a ‘dwelling life’”:
des Himmels Höhe glänzet
Den Menschen dann, wie Bäume Blüth’ umkränzet.
heaven’s radiant height
Crowns man, as blossoms crown the trees, with light.[12]
If Heidegger’s appearances at Bühlerhöhe are indeed characterized by this combination of psychological repression, exculpation through theory, and poetic consolation, then his philosophy reentered the public arena in a manner that is eerily reminiscent of his own biography. Heidegger suffered a mental breakdown in December 1945 and underwent treatment in Schloss Hausbaden, a private psychiatric clinic near Badenweiler. His doctor Victor von Gebsattel provided talk therapy as a means to “Christian serenity [Gelassenheit],” i.e., “the blessed readiness to accept everything as it comes, including pain, disappointment, and above all death,” as von Gebsattel put it in a short book published during the war.[13] In a letter sent from the clinic, Heidegger composed a variation on this theme, in which he makes the sort of healing that his audience was seeking and that Stroomann and von Gebsattel aimed to provide dependent on “whether the dwelling human being is again touched by Being as what is whole and healing, & disaster does not lapse into a mere meaninglessness to be ignored ‘once the war is over.’”[14]
This interpretation of psychological suffering as the result of an event—whether associated with the promise of bliss or healing through Being—is similar to what fascinated Stroomann about Trakl. In one of his many letters to von Ficker, Stroomann explains why I am summoning the apparition of Georg Trakl: “on a harrowing mission, he signifies, for our generation and for the future, the poetic [das Dichterische], with which, in my view (the view of a physician), humanity, sick humanity, must be permeated”.[15]
Stroomann was not concerned with the occasional prospect of reconciliation in Trakl’s poetry, regardless of whether one interprets it in Christian terms or, like Heidegger, as another beginning in the history of Being, i.e., as a sign of an epochal break in the deep history of human thought and action. What Stroomann admired was rather Trakl’s ability to maintain spirit and poise (von Gebsattel would have said “serenity”) in the face of the madness of the First World War. In a postcard to Benn, Stroomann explains that Trakl was for him “the phenomenon in which even schizothymia and toxicomania,” unlike in Hölderlin,
did not break the form. […] Probably Ludwig v. Ficker, certainly Horwitz, and various literary figures call Trakl a Christian poet and make his “reaching into the abyss” a matter of guilt and atonement and grace. I am confronted with a phenomenon of form, the apparition of a biological exception.[16]
Heidegger, from whose lecture “… Poetically Man Dwells …” Stroomann took the formulation that Trakl’s poetry reaches into the abyss, would have nevertheless rejected Stroomann’s medical interpretation. Yet he shared Stroomann’s opinion that Trakl’s resilience after two world wars was of special importance for the Germans. In a letter to Stroomann, Heidegger even identifies with Trakl to the extent that the latter is the “poet of our generation.”[17] In his philosophy, however, Heidegger does not interpret Trakl’s resilience as the ability of a psychic life to maintain its form. Rather, it is language itself that, as an overarching context, promises to restore the meaning that Heidegger, like his audience, believes to have been lost.
Heidegger went on to develop these thoughts for a celebration that Stroomann organized in 1950 in memory of the writer and literary scholar Max Kommerell. Heidegger did so by way of a close, idiosyncratic reading of Trakl’s poem “A Winter Evening.” The key verses of this poem clearly refer to Christian salvation:
Wanderer tritt still herein;
Schmerz versteinerte die Schwelle.
Da erglänzt in reiner Helle
Auf dem Tische Brot und Wein.[18]
Wanderer, step in so still;
Pain has petrified the threshold.
Shining there in purest brightness
On the table bread and wine.
Yet Heidegger rejects this interpretation. Instead, Trakl’s poem becomes an occasion to articulate the idea that meaning is established in the happening of language itself. Fundamentally, it is not we who speak, nor even the poet; instead, “language speaks.”[19]
It did not go unnoticed that this idea was also a means of relief from responsibility, since it undermined any need for active communication. In a newspaper article about the Kommerell-memorial at Bühlerhöhe, Adolf Frisé, the later editor of Robert Musil’s literary work, writes that Heidegger’s self-referential language runs the risk of “monologuing, of becoming a thinking which spins about in its own head.” This may well suit those who flocked to the “aseptic and poison-free air up there” and took refuge in “the deceptive security in social conventions that have become problematic.” But this “encapsulation” is also an expression of a need to be told what to think rather than to think for oneself: “Like hardly any other people, we [Germans] tend to absolutize an intellectual-spiritual [geistige] figure without criticism or restraint; Stefan George was an example of this. Today, it looks like Heidegger is the next in line.”[20] Heidegger never gave up on this idea of intellectual-spiritual leadership. On the contrary, in Heidegger’s lecture for the 1952 “Trakl-Celebration” at Bühlerhöhe, it takes on one of its most radical forms.
***
This event in honor of Trakl, whose “vast lyrical substance and form” Stroomann described on the invitation as “expressing much decay and melancholy,”[21] is noteworthy as a problematic case of intellectual history not because of the introductory remarks of Trakl-biographer Eduard Lachmann, nor even because of von Ficker’s moving report about the poet’s final days, but because of Heidegger’s peculiar attempt to situate the entirety of Trakl’s poetry. Some of those present, including von Ficker, praised Heidegger’s lecture. It was, in von Ficker’s words, one of the “irruptions of light that matter today.”[22] Others were more skeptical. Benn refused Stroomann’s repeated invitations “to come to Heidegger.”[23] Ruth Horwitz, daughter of Trakl-editor Kurt Horwitz, considered “this kind of intellectual exchange to be dishonest: it dazzles, still more, it bluffs.”[24] Literary critic Walter Muschg called Heidegger’s interpretation “abracadabra” and “an assassination attempt on the German language.”[25] And although Hannah Arendt defended Heidegger’s attempts to survey the “space of the unsayable,” “from which and for whose sake the whole work emerged and was organized,” she also noted that,
in the process, of course, the ‘interpreter’ can become more important than what he ‘interprets’; then, but only then, does everything turn ‘violent,’ simply because, instead of making the work come to life, he shatters it. It seems to me that this happened to [Heidegger] with Trakl.[26]
One year after the celebration, even Stroomann would distance himself from Heidegger, at least when communicating with political scientist and Heidegger-critic Dolf Sternberger: “one thing is now certain to me: the Germans’ vulnerability to the magus.”[27]
If one reads Heidegger’s Trakl-lecture with these critiques in mind, it will not be difficult to see what caused such offense. Although the explicit subject of the “Trakl-Celebration,” and despite Heidegger’s empathetic reaction to von Ficker’s speech, Trakl’s person disappears behind what Heidegger calls his Gedicht, which is less an individual “poem” than the gathering of a complex body of work around a single catchword. This reading is anticipated by what Heidegger says about his procedure of Erörterung: it is not about “interpretation,” “discussion,” or “exchange,” but about the condensation of language and the concentration of the poetic work into a single point. For Heidegger, the fact that an Erörterung considers the Ort or “place” of the poetry and that Ort in Old High German means the tip of a spear is argument enough to be able to bundle and localize Trakl’s poetry as a whole. The place of Trakl’s poetry, according to Heidegger, is apartness, or a state of perpetual departure (Abgeschiedenheit). The final stanzas of Trakl’s “Autumnal Soul” give us a sense for how Heidegger arrived at this thought:
Bald entgleitet Fisch und Wild.
Blaue Seele, dunkles Wandern
Schied uns bald von Lieben, Andern.
Abend wechselt Sinn und Bild.
Rechten Lebens Brot und Wein,
Gott in deine milden Hände
Legt der Mensch das dunkle Ende,
Alle Schuld und rote Pein.[28]
Fish and game soon slip away.
Blue soul, darksome wand’ring, soon did
Sever us from loved ones, others.
Evening changes sense and image.
Bread and wine of proper living,
God, into your mild hands
Layeth man the darksome ending,
All the guilt and scarlet torment.
Although here, too, there are allusions to the Christian hope of redemption, Heidegger understands the departure of the soul not as a flight toward heaven, but as a return to the earth. Taking recourse once again to etymology, Heidegger interprets the word fremd in Trakl’s famous phrase Es ist die Seele ein Fremdes auf Erden[29] not as “foreign” or “strange,” but as “on the way …,” that is, in line with the Old High German fram. The soul is not “something strange on earth,” as anyone who reads the German today would expect. It is “headed toward the earth.” “The soul,” in Heidegger’s gloss, “only seeks the earth; it does not flee from it.”[30] As Heidegger explained during a question-and-answer period at Bühlerhöhe the day after his lecture, the final stanza of “Autumn Soul” thus pertains to the “loved ones” and “others” who are in search of Christian transcendence, not to the earthbound Fremdling who is in the process of severing himself from them.[31]
Es ist die Seele ein Fremdes auf Erden—Heidegger repeats this verse nine times in his lecture, thereby turning it into an incantation that expresses the distance of its addressees from the present and enlists them in the movement he is describing. This movement does not lead to a specific destination; rather, the departure and the journey are themselves transformed into a new homeland. Heidegger violently pieces together an interpretation from quite different poems. In this interpretation, “Trakl’s poetry” becomes the “song of the soul” that no longer strives for a Beyond, but “is only just about to gain the earth by its wandering, the earth that is the stiller home of the homecoming people [Geschlecht].”[32] Incomprehensibility and remoteness from reality are precisely what makes this idea attractive: “Dreamy romanticism, at the fringe of the technically-economically oriented world of modern mass existence? Or—is it the clear knowledge of the ‘madman’ [‘Wahnsinniger’] who sees and senses [sinnt] other things than the reporters of the latest news”?[33] In Trakl’s poem “Springtime of the Soul,” the line about the soul’s strangeness on (or movement toward) the earth is followed by the words:
Geistlich dämmert
Bläue über dem verhauenen Wald.[34]
Spiritually dawns
blueness over the thrashed forest.
Heidegger takes this as an occasion to bring the “clear knowledge of the madman” together with that overdetermined and enigmatic concept which has been claimed again and again for what cannot be lost: Geist. Heidegger inscribes himself in a complex conceptual history when, in the last third of his lecture, he takes “spirit” as the key word for the movement of the soul.
Among the motifs that Heidegger associates with spirit, three stand out. First, the motif of a unity that overcomes an injured separation; for only in “wandering through the spiritual night” does the “simple oneness of pain’s converse character come into pure play.”[35] Second, the fact that Trakl speaks of spiritual night and spiritual twilight allows Heidegger to reinterpret the topos of departure toward the Occident or ‘Land of Evening’ (Abend-Land) as a spiritual home and to connect it with Friedrich Nietzsche’s apotheosis of descent: “The land of evening concealed in apartness does not go under, but remains, awaiting those who will dwell in it as the land of descent into the spiritual night.”[36] Third, “‘the spirit of one who died early,’”[37] as Heidegger says in the words of another Trakl poem, is in oblique but unmistakable reference to Trakl and to all those who were lost in the two world wars. Instead of the redemption and the dawn of resurrection, which the Christian metaphors suggest, Heidegger offers the promise of twilight, which alone will overcome loss and heal pain, if only we learn to inhabit it. In the third year after the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, Heidegger makes Trakl “the poet of the yet concealed evening land”[38]—a poet who promises neither awakening to a new future nor coming clean with the past in which “those who died early” met their demise. Trakl’s “apartness,” his exemplary resilience, contains all the consolation Heidegger and his audience may hope for.
***
It was on account of this promise that Jacques Derrida situated Heidegger’s lecture for the Trakl-Celebration in the history of the “national humanism”[39] of German philosophy and interpreted it as the consummation of the idea that the Germanic should serve as the exemplar of the Occident or even of humanity as such. Heidegger hears in Trakl’s poetry the appeal to a “certain Germany,” which is supposed to become the place of the true Occident.[40] For those who are familiar with Heidegger’s reading of Hölderlin during the period of National Socialism—a reading that even Kommerell could not help calling a “train wreck” (albeit a “productive” one)[41]—it should come as little surprise that Heidegger was still looking for a poetic guide after the war. For he wanted to be able to present himself not just as a leader, but as someone who was likewise being led. The Trakl-Celebration shows, in any case, that Heidegger, like many of the conservative elite who went to hear him lecture on that weekend in October 1952, could not manage after the war without a poeta vates or even without a “poet as leader” (to recall the title of a controversial product of the George Circle penned in 1928).[42] Reading Heidegger on Trakl allows us to make sense of what the survivors of his generation had repressed rather than overcome. Stroomann establishes this connection between the two world wars in an invitation to a “Wednesday-Evening” poetry reading that Heidegger would introduce in February 1952. Stroomann explains his choice of topic as follows:
We wish to begin with the topic: ‘New Poetry.’ Whoever experienced the redevelopment of spirit after the first war will be disconcerted by how little of the poetic has emerged from the chaos this time. “Yet,” as Hölderlin’s words admonish, “what remains, the poets establish.”[43]
***
Yet Trakl and his work do not readily lend themselves to this appropriation. If we are to believe later reports, during the celebration at Bühlerhöhe a question made the rounds as to whether Trakl, if he should come back from the dead, would be granted entry into the illustrious event. Likely not, we answer. But it is not surprising that the question arose. It illustrates the mixture of foreignness and fascination that the audience associated with Trakl. The comforting, if violent, appropriation of the poet’s work responds to a need, but it also avoids accountability and moral judgment, only to half-consciously turn it into a joke.
Would Trakl have accepted the role he was given in 1952? This is not to be assumed, either. In 1914, Trakl gave von Ficker a slip of paper on which he had written: “Feeling in the moments of death-like being: all humans are worthy of love. Awaking, you feel the bitterness of the world; therein is all your unresolved guilt; your poem an imperfect atonement,” only to add verbally: “But of course no poem can atone for an iniquity.” It is hard to imagine that Trakl would have been allowed to utter these words if he had actually been present at the celebration dedicated to him.
In any case, things did not end well with the spa resort either. Stroomann, the “intellectual-spiritual mediator” who made Bühlerhöhe a “place of trust,” died in 1957. “If,” as his obituary in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung continues, “one may speak of a class of leaders [Führerschicht] in our country, for decades much of it passed under the unmistakable eyes of this man.”[44] The spa business continued after Stroomann’s death until 1986, at which point it was converted into a luxury hotel. The clinic in the adjacent building is still in operation today. However, the hotel closed in 2010, and the main building has been vacant ever since. Occasionally, it serves as a backdrop for movies. Otherwise, what lives on here is only a spirit from another time.
Tobias Keiling is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is the author of Seinsgeschichte und phänomenologischer Realismus: Eine Interpretation und Kritik von Heideggers Spätphilosophie [The History of Being and Phenomenological Realism: An Interpretation and Critique of Heidegger’s Later Philosophy] (2015).
Ian Alexander Moore is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author of Eckhart, Heidegger, and the Imperative of Releasement (2019) and Dialogue on the Threshold: Heidegger and Trakl (2022).
[1] This text is a slightly modified translation, prepared by the authors, of Tobias Keiling and Ian Alexander Moore, Heidegger (und Trakl) auf der Bühlerhöhe (Marbach am Neckar: Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 2023).
[2] Georg Britting, Briefe an Georg Jung 1943 bis 1963, ed. Georg-Britting-Stiftung (Höhenmoos: Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Werke Georg Brittings, 2009), 211. Here and below, translations for which an English edition is not supplied in a footnote are by us.
[3] Der Wendepunkt: Ein Lebensbericht (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1963), 104.
[4] Martin Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine,” trans. William McNeill and Julia Ireland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2014), 195, 201.
[5] Die Geschichte der Bühlerhöhe 1913–1993 (Bühl: Schlosshotel Bühlerhöhe, 1993), 60.
[6] In Gottfried Benn, Briefe an F.W. Oelze 1950–1956, ed. Harald Steinhagen and Jürgen Schröder (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1982), 342.
[7] Gerhard Stroomann, Aus meinem roten Notizbuch: Ein Leben als Arzt auf der Bühlerhöhe, 2nd edition, ed. Heinrich W. Petzet (Frankfurt: Societäts-Verlag, 1960), 207.
[8] Jürgen Habermas, “Martin Heidegger: On the Publication of Lectures from the Year 1935,” trans. Dale Ponikvar, Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 6, no. 2 (Fall 1977): 164–65; translation modified.
[9] Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, HS.1989.0010.07111.
[10] “Heidegger: Rückfall ins Gestell,” Der Spiegel, April 6, 1950.
[11] Martin Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures: Insight Into That Which Is and Basic Principles of Thinking, trans. Andrew J. Mitchell (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013), 27.
[12] Cited in Martin Heidegger, “… Poetically Man Dwells …,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Perennial, 2001), 227.
[13] Viktor Emil von Gebsattel, Von der christlichen Gelassenheit (Würzburg: Werkbund-Verlag, 1940), 5.
[14] Martin Heidegger, Letters to His Wife 1915–1970, trans. R. D. V. Glasgow (Cambridge: Polity, 2008), 197.
[15] Nachlass Ludwig von Ficker, Forschungsinstitut Brenner-Archiv, 041-048-025-006, http://edition.ficker-gesamtbriefwechsel.net/#/briefe/nach-partnerinnen/5918a905-70df-4122-9b6c-dff94fa96147.
[16] Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, 86.9760/4.
[17] As reported in a letter from Stroomann to von Ficker, in Nachlass Ludwig von Ficker, 041-048-025-001, http://edition.ficker-gesamtbriefwechsel.net/#/briefe/nach-partnerinnen/eb9e7a4c-d896-4b88-a6d3-0885d1960072.
[18] Georg Trakl, Dichtungen und Briefe: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe, ed. Walther Killy and Hans Szklenar, Vol. 1., 3rd edition (Salzburg: Otto Müller, 1974), 57.
[19] Martin Heidegger, “Language,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, 207.
[20] Adolf Frisé, Spiegelungen: Berichte, Kommentare, Texte 1933–1998 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2000), 126–27.
[21] Nachlass Ludwig von Ficker, 48-25-5.
[22] Ludwig von Ficker, Briefwechsel 1940 –1967, ed. Martin Alber et al. (Innsbruck: Haymon, 1996), 529.
[23] Benn, Briefe an F.W. Oelze 1950–1956, 142.
[24] In von Ficker, Briefwechsel 1940–1967, 244.
[25] Walter Muschg, Die Zerstörung der deutschen Literatur, 3rd edition (Bern: Francke, 1958), 223.
[26] In Hannah Arendt and Martin Heidegger, Letters, 1925–1975, trans. Andrew Shields (Orlando: Harcourt, 2004), 259–60.
[27] Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, 1989.0010.07111.
[28] Trakl, Dichtungen und Briefe, 60.
[29] Ibid., 78.
[30] Martin Heidegger, “Language in the Poem: A Discussion on Georg Trakl’s Poetic Work,” in On the Way to Language, trans. Peter D. Hertz (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 163.
[31] “Martin Heidegger deutet Georg Trakl. Bühlerhöhe am 4. Oktober 1952,” Forschungsinstitut Brenner-Archiv, 65/33–1, p. 17.
[32] Heidegger, “Language in the Poem,” 196; translation modified.
[33] Ibid., 196–97.
[34] Trakl, Dichtungen und Briefe, 78.
[35] Heidegger, “Language in the Poem,” 189; translation modified.
[36] Ibid., 194; translation modified.
[37] Ibid., 185; translation modified.
[38] Ibid., 197.
[39] Jacques Derrida, “Onto-Theology of National Humanism (Prolegomena to a Hypothesis),” Oxford Literary Review 14, no. 1 (1992): 3–23.
[40] Jacques Derrida, Geschlecht III: Sex, Race, Nation, Humanity, trans. Katie Chenoweth and Rodrigo Therezo (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 136–37.
[41] Max Kommerell, Briefe und Aufzeichnungen 1919–1944, ed. Inge Jens (Olten: Walter, 1967), 403.
[42] Max Kommerell, Der Dichter als Führer in der deutschen Klassik (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1928).
[43] Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, 23795IV.
[44] Friedrich Sieburg, “Unter den Tannen von Bühlerhöhe.” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (April 15, 1957), 2.
