The fascinating thing about the Martin-Elfride correspondence is that it extends this matrix (the Little as the existential basis of the Great) to many other aspects of the thinker’s life. What enabled Heidegger to be at the same time a National Socialist rector and the amazing modern culmination of German idealism is also at work in the relationships he had with place (the deepest provinces and the planetary destinal); with women (the seducer of female students and the sacred spirituality of marriage); with the university (the never-ending academic intrigues and the prophetic disinterestedness of solitary thought); and, finally, with everyday life in all its aspects. The existential material sublimated in Heidegger’s “saying” [dire] is admittedly pretty low quality. It is, rather, the processes of his introduction into speculative language, a few examples of which we will now give, that are fascinating to consider.
We need to begin from the beginning, namely, Martin’s courtship of Elfride during World War I. Elfride herself noted that the letters from this period are the model for all the countless letters he would later send to his successive “loves” (“The ‘Thou’ of your loving soul had struck me” [256]).1 But what was the motive behind this? Probably the thinker’s need to disguise his desire to seduce and his vigorous, metaphorically peasant sensuality as a spiritual elevation that turned each of the women into the chosen source of the work and the intellectual effort it required. Each time, the uniqueness of the encounter is presented as a new chance finally given to the grueling task that fate or the gods have allotted the philosopher on earth, namely, to save what can be saved of thought in the nihilistic world of technique. This is indeed consistent with the notion of the Muse, so aptly described by Étienne Gilson.2 But let’s be careful: Heidegger is no more of a “Platonist” in the doxic sense of the term here than anywhere else. Love occurs at the level of bodies; it appears in the guise of a beautiful young student or a cultured aristocratic woman; it is in no way “Platonic.” Yet it is accompanied by a prose that incorporates it into the philosopher’s task in such a way that that task is, of course, galvanized and revived by the joy of successful seduction, but at the same time protected and kept out of harm’s way, since it is what endures in change, what keeps love from being its own end. This is why it was unwaveringly to Elfride that the text on Plato that Martin had the constant intention of writing had to be dedicated.3
In Elfride’s case, when Martin was twenty-six the emotionalism was not yet of the kind whose force and originality we are familiar with. Religion played a prominent role linguistically in the flights of spirituality in which desire was cloaked. The overwhelming importance of religious affiliations is, moreover, very striking in the history of sexual unions. Martin, who was never particularly brave, literally shuddered at the prospect of having to tell his Catholic family that he wanted to become engaged to a Protestant girl. It was like an old prewar novel in which families and religions still kept a close watch on the course of romantic relationships in society. This religious factor also determined the sublimated horizon within which the lovers (Were they already lovers, i.e., before marriage? Yes, most likely; we shall see all the implications of this empirical question.) talked about their future in the language of religious salvation, talked about building a spiritual home in the overripe vocabulary of the eternal Heimat in which the discipline of sexual ecstasy could be accommodated.
One of the advantages of such long correspondences (covering sixty years, in this case) is that they show the gradual effects of time. We can see clearly how the religious certainty that characterized their love at its beginning, and would do so again at its end, deteriorates and slowly wears out. Particularly after World War II, following the rupture brought about by the Nazi era, religious denominations (Catholic, Protestant) were no longer an issue, except in an anecdotal way. God, nevertheless, remained. The history of this marriage is also the history of a purification of the element of belief in which it was enveloped, to the point where Martin suggests that it is up to them, his wife and him, to create the conditions for the return of the God they talk about. Thus the trajectory of the love letters goes from the lovers’ mystical celebration of a spiritual beyond of the flesh, pitting true religion against the profane and degrading course of the modern world, to the withdrawn and solitary creation, thrown toward the future like a Hölderlinian-type prophecy, of the God we are lacking.
This is no doubt why the women required for such a mission were no longer exactly devout girls destined for family life but, from Hannah Arendt to Marielene [Putscher], had a touch of the intellectual adventurer, or the jaded princess, about them.