Ennis reposts Todtnauberg photos

In response to my posting the Lingis anecdote about Todtnauberg, Paull Ennis has reposted his LOVELY PHOTOS of the place.

I’ve never been up there, despite having been to Freiburg a number of times. I had always pictured it as such an isolated residential area that I didn’t want to stick out as an annoying intruder. But after reading the accounts by Ennis and the surprisingly non-annoying book Heidegger’s Hut</em> by Adam Sharr, I’ve changed my mind and will go there sometime. (I’m sure you’ll forgive me for assuming from the title and topic that Sharr’s book would be stomach-turning hagiography; it’s actually a charming little work from which one does gain a better sense of Heidegger the person.)

My first-ever trip to Germany was in summer 1989. No one knew that would be a big year for Eastern Europe and for Germany, so I was focused at the time on the fact that it was the Heidegger Centennial. I went to Freiburg on that trip, in the perfectly naive expectation that there would be huge commemorations of Heidegger in Freiburg all summer long. But I didn’t see anything with his name on it at all. In later years I became aware, from meeting countless German students who simply took it for granted that Adorno is a much more significant thinker, that Heidegger’s status in Germany remains much lower than it is in the Anglophone and Francophone worlds, among a few other worlds such as Japan.