Gratton responds on the hut

AGREED WITH ALL OF THIS.

It sounds like Peter had a more complete Freiburg experience than I did. Though I walked around alone inside the university building a few times, I never got a tour of Heidegger’s lecture hall. (Presumably this all happened at the IAPL Conference a few years ago that was based partly in Freiburg, which I did not attend.)

But 1989 was an interesting experience. That was my first trip to Europe, as mentioned. I flew into Hamburg, because I was to spend the bulk of the summer in Bremen. But I immediately took a train to Stuttgart, where a college friend was working that summer and had invited me to stay. From there I went to Freiburg and Zürich, hit Heidelberg on the way back, and finally returned to Bremen, which I think is a heavily underrated city. (And I didn’t even realize at the time that Bremen was the cradle of Heidegger’s 1949 fourfold, a concept that still struck me as unfortunate gibberish at age 21.)

But back to Freiburg… I naively thought, since it was the Heidegger Centennial that year, that there would be banners and colorful bookstore window displays of Heidegger books. In fact, I saw no evidence that he was being remembered at all. And I recognized the university building primarily because it looked exactly like the photo of it in Walter Biemel’s book.

The highlight of that summer, though, was definitely the chance I had to visit East Berlin in August 1989, just before everything came unravelled. It was fun to see the Brandenburger Tor from the other side, to be asked to take photos of Polish tourists posing in front of it, and also to be slapped in the face by an extremely nasty old DDR woman who oversaw the men’s toilet in the Friedrichstrasse station. (We had a brief argument as to whether I had already paid or not, and she slapped me and shouted “Geh zurück in deine Heimat!”, “Go back to your homeland!” My second time being slapped in the face in Germany was in 1994 in Leipzig, that time by an apparently drunk gentleman from the Middle East, who was seemingly angered that I couldn’t make heads or tails of his incomprehensible German.) And like every other academic-type tourist in the former East Berlin, I picked up those ultra-cheap subsidized volumes of Das Kapital, and also a work of Engels with a delightful glossary explaining that Kant and Hegel were the names of “German bourgeois philosophers.” I’m glad to have had a brief taste of that world before it vanished. In West Berlin I also went to a play by Brecht, though can’t remember any longer if that was on the 1989 or 1994 trip to Berlin.

Incidentally, that 1989 train ride from Hamburg to Stuttgart was a great adrenaline rush. I was exhausted from the flight, as you can imagine. Europe was still a completely foreign environment to me at age 21. I spoke shaky high school German at the time. The ride from Hamburg to Stuttgart was something like 7 hours. I kept dozing off, but then would wake up briefly at every stop along the way. And it was like a fairy tale, seeing the names of one famous German city after another on the station signs. Up to that point it was certainly the biggest adventure I had ever had.

In Stuttgart my college friend (a New Yorker) picked me up at the station. While waiting for her, I bought a Herald Tribune and read that the Chicago Bulls had just named Phil Jackson their new coach, and I doubted (foolishly) if he would be as effective as Doug Collins. We went back to my friend’s place, where there were her 3 or 4 German roommates, all of them working together at a home for severely disabled youth. One of them, Stefan, was strumming eerily on a guitar as I came in, like a character out of Dostoevsky. He invited me to go into the kitchen, where he said I would find “the ingredients to make dozens of pancakes.” While opening my luggage, the zipper caught and tore the cover of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and to this day I suspect it was Hegel’s ghost welcoming (or non-welcoming) me to his hometown. I then crashed for about 18 hours, and awoke to the clock radio playing, of all things, Shaun Cassidy’s “Hey Deanie,” a song I hadn’t heard since elementary school. Those were my first 30 hours in Europe.

20 years ago, and a lot has happened since then.

Stuttgart is another charming place, by the way. It’s not usually ranked as a tourist favorite, but I’ve always felt comfortable there.