At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails With Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone De Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others

by Sarah Bakewell

  Husserl, in the audience, was less ecstatic. He now feared the worst about Heidegger: he was no longer a protégé but a monstrous progeny. Shortly afterwards, he wrote to a colleague that he felt the need to reject Heidegger’s work completely. In another letter looking back eighteen months later, he wrote of this moment: ‘I arrived at the distressing conclusion that philosophically I have nothing to do with this Heideggerian profundity.’ Heidegger’s philosophy, Husserl decided, was of the kind that must be fought against at all costs. It was the sort of philosophy that he felt obliged to try to stamp out, and ‘render impossible forever’.

  4

  THE THEY, THE CALL

  In which Sartre has nightmares, Heidegger tries to think, Karl Jaspers is dismayed, and Husserl calls for heroism.

  Heidegger’s magnetic performances in 1929 enhanced his philosophical appeal in a country that had emerged from war and a 1923 hyperinflation crisis, only to sink into economic disaster again. Many Germans felt betrayed by the socialist government that had taken over in a kind of coup in the closing stages of the war. They muttered about Jews and Communists, and accused them of plotting to undermine the national cause. Heidegger seemed to share these suspicions. He too felt disillusioned and disoriented by the Germany of the 1920s.

  Observers who visited the country during these years were shocked by its poverty, and by the way people were responding to it by turning to extremist parties of the left and right. When Raymond Aron first arrived in 1930, his shock immediately turned into a question: how could Europe avoid being drawn into another war? Two years later, the young French philosopher Simone Weil travelled through the country and reported back to a left-wing newspaper on how penury and unemployment were destroying the fabric of German society. Those who had jobs were haunted by the fear of losing them. People who could not afford homes became vagabonds or relied on relatives to put them up, which strained family relationships to their limits. Catastrophe could strike anyone; ‘you see elderly men in stiff collars and bowler hats begging at subway exits or singing in cracked voices in the streets.’ The old suffered, while the young, who had never known anything else, did not even have good memories to escape into.

  The revolutionary potential of the situation was clear, but it was anyone’s guess which way it would go: to the Communists or to Hitler’s Nazis. Weil hoped it would be to the left, but she feared that, in desperate times, the severe uniforms and regimentation of the Nazi rallies would have more appeal than vague socialist dreams of equality. She was right. On 30 January 1933, a weak coalition government headed by President Paul von Hindenburg gave in to pressure and appointed Adolf Hitler as chancellor. Once a fringe figure of ridicule, Hitler now controlled the country and all its resources. Elections on 5 March increased his party’s majority. On 23 March, a new Enabling Act gave him near-total power. He consolidated it through the summer. Thus, between Aron’s invitation to Sartre after the apricot-cocktail conversation and Sartre’s actual move to Berlin, the country was altered out of all recognition.

  The first changes came quickly that spring, and they affected private life in the most basic and intrusive ways. In March, the Nazis awarded themselves new powers to arrest suspects and search homes at will. They created laws that allowed phone tapping and mail surveillance — areas of privacy previously considered sacred. In April, they announced ‘boycotts’ of Jewish businesses, and removed all public employees deemed Jewish or having anti-Nazi affiliations from their jobs. Trade unions were banned on 2 May. The first spectacular book burning took place on 10 May. All political parties other than the National Socialists were officially banned on 14 July 1933.

  Many Germans, as well as other people around Europe, watched this rapid sequence of events in horror but felt unable to do much about it. Beauvoir later marvelled at how little she and Sartre worried in the early 1930s about the rise of Nazism in Germany — and this from two people who later became fiercely political. They read the papers, she said, but in those days they were more interested in murder stories or tales of psychological oddity, such as the Papin sisters’ killing of the employer for whom they worked as maids, or a case in which a conventional couple brought home another couple for a sexual foursome then committed suicide the next day. Such incidents were curiosities of individual human behaviour, whereas the rise of fascism seemed an abstract matter. Sartre and Beauvoir did have a disturbing encounter with its Italian form in the summer of 1933, just before Sartre’s move to Berlin. They travelled to Rome with a discount offer from the Italian railways and, walking around the Colosseum late one evening, found themselves pinned by a spotlight and shouted at by men in black shirts. It shocked them, but did not politicise them greatly.

  Then came Sartre’s year in Berlin, but for most of it he was so absorbed in his reading of Husserl and others that at first he barely noticed the outside world. He drank with his classmates and went for long walks. ‘I rediscovered irresponsibility’, he recalled later in a notebook. As the academic year went on, the red-and-black banners, the SA rallies and the regular outbreaks of violence became more disturbing. In February 1934, Beauvoir visited him for the first time, and was struck mainly by how normal Germany seemed. But when she went again in June and travelled back with him from Berlin through Dresden, Munich and the Nazis’ favourite city of Nuremberg, the military marches and half-glimpsed brutal scenes on the streets made them both eager to get out of the country for good. By this time, Sartre was having nightmares about rioting towns and blood splattering over bowls of mayonnaise.

  The mixture of anxiety and unreality that Sartre and Beauvoir felt was not unusual. Many Germans felt a similar combination, except for those who were Nazi converts, or else who were firm opponents or direct targets. The country was steeped in the sensation that Heidegger called ‘uncanniness’.

  Sometimes the best-educated people were those least inclined to take the Nazis seriously, dismissing them as too absurd to last. Karl Jaspers was one of those who made this mistake, as he later recalled, and Beauvoir observed similar dismissive attitudes among the French students in Berlin. In any case, most of those who disagreed with Hitler’s ideology soon learned to keep their view to themselves. If a Nazi parade passed on the street, they would either slip out of view or give the obligatory salute like everyone else, telling themselves that the gesture meant nothing if they did not believe in it. As the psychologist Bruno Bettelheim later wrote of this period, few people will risk their life for such a small thing as raising an arm — yet that is how one’s powers of resistance are eroded away, and eventually one’s responsibility and integrity go with them.

  The journalist Sebastian Haffner, a law student at the time, also used the word ‘uncanny’ in his diary, adding, ‘Everything takes place under a kind of anaesthesia. Objectively dreadful events produce a thin, puny emotional response. Murders are committed like schoolboy pranks. Humiliation and moral decay are accepted like minor incidents.’ Haffner thought modernity itself was partly to blame: people had become yoked to their habits and to mass media, forgetting to stop and think, or to disrupt their routines long enough to question what was going on.

  Heidegger’s former lover and student Hannah Arendt would argue, in her 1951 study The Origins of Totalitarianism, that totalitarian movements thrived at least partly because of this fragmentation in modern lives, which made people more vulnerable to being swept away by demagogues. Elsewhere, she coined the phrase ‘the banality of evil’ to describe the most extreme failures of personal moral awareness. The phrase attracted criticism, mainly because she applied it to the actively genocidal Adolf Eichmann, organiser of the Holocaust, who was guilty of a lot more than a failure to take responsibility. Yet she stuck by her analysis: for Arendt, if you do not respond adequately when the times demand it, you show a lack of imagination and attention that is as dangerous as deliberately committing an abuse. It amounts to disobeying the one command she had absorbed from Heidegger in those Marburg days: Think!

  But what is it, to thi
nk? Or, as Heidegger would ask in the title of a later essay, Was heisst denken? This could be translated as ‘What does one call thinking?’ or ‘What calls for thinking?’ — a play on words in the German. One might expect that Heidegger, with his constant reminders to shake off forgetfulness and to question everyday reality, would be the best placed of all philosophers to think well, and to call his compatriots to the task of responsible alertness.

  Indeed, that was what he believed he was doing. But he did not do it in the way Arendt, Jaspers, Husserl or most of his other later readers would have wished.

  Being and Time contained at least one big idea that should have been of use in resisting totalitarianism. Dasein, Heidegger wrote there, tends to fall under the sway of something called das Man or ‘the they’ — an impersonal entity that robs us of the freedom to think for ourselves. To live authentically requires resisting or outwitting this influence, but this is not easy because das Man is so nebulous. Man in German does not mean ‘man’ as in English (that’s der Mann), but a neutral abstraction, something like ‘one’ in the English phrase ‘one doesn’t do that’, or ‘they’ in ‘they say it will all be over by Christmas’. ‘The they’ is probably the best translation available, except that it seems to point to some group ‘over there’, separate from myself. Instead, for Heidegger, das Man is me. It is everywhere and nowhere; it is nothing definite, but each of us is it. As with Being, it is so ubiquitous that it is difficult to see. If I am not careful, however, das Man takes over the important decisions that should be my own. It drains away my responsibility or ‘answerability’. As Arendt might put it, we slip into banality, failing to think.

  If I am to resist das Man, I must become answerable to the call of my ‘voice of conscience’. This call does not come from God, as a traditional Christian definition of the voice of conscience might suppose. It comes from a truly existentialist source: my own authentic self. Alas, this voice is one I do not recognise and may not hear, because it is not the voice of my habitual ‘they-self’. It is an alien or uncanny version of my usual voice. I am familiar with my they-self, but not with my unalienated voice — so, in a weird twist, my real voice is the one that sounds strangest to me. I may fail to hear it, or I may hear it but not know that it’s me calling. I might mistake it for something coming from afar, perhaps a thin and reedy keening like the unheard cries for help of the microscopic hero in the 1957 film The Incredible Shrinking Man — one of the best mid-century expressions of paranoia about the disappearing powers of authentic humanity. The idea of being called to authenticity became a major theme in later existentialism, the call being interpreted as saying something like ‘Be yourself!’, as opposed to being phony. For Heidegger, the call is more fundamental than that. It is a call to take up a self that you didn’t know you had: to wake up to your Being. Moreover, it is a call to action. It requires you to do something: to take a decision of some sort.

  You might think that the decision would be to defy the siren song of the they-self in the public realm, and thus to resist intimidation and the general tendency towards conformity. You might deduce that the authentic voice of Dasein would call on you not to raise your arm as the march passes by.

  But that was not what Heidegger meant.

  Rumours had been circulating about Heidegger’s Nazi associations for a while. In August 1932, the writer René Schickele noted in his diary that Heidegger was said to be consorting ‘exclusively with National Socialists’. Husserl was told that Heidegger had made anti-Semitic remarks. Hannah Arendt heard similar stories. She wrote to Heidegger during the winter of 1932–3 asking point-blank whether he was a Nazi sympathiser. He denied it, in an angry letter emphasising how helpful he had been to Jewish students and colleagues. She was unconvinced, and they lost contact for seventeen years.

  Heidegger seemed able to hide his views when it suited him. Moreover, when he was in love with Arendt, her being Jewish didn’t seem to disturb him; he later became close to Elisabeth Blochmann, also Jewish by origin. He had taught many Jewish students, and had shown no objection to working with Husserl earlier in his career. A certain amount of anti-Semitism was common in everyday speech at the time; so there could have been room for doubt that these rumours about Heidegger added up to much.

  But as it turned out, Arendt was right to assume the worst of him. In April 1933, all doubts about Heidegger were blown away when he accepted the post of rector of Freiburg University, a job that required him to enforce the new Nazi laws. It also required him to join the party. He did so, and then he delivered rousing pro-Nazi speeches to the students and faculty. He was reportedly seen attending the Freiburg book burning on 10 May, trooping through a drizzly evening by torchlight towards the bonfire in the square just outside the university library — almost on the steps of his own philosophy department. In private, meanwhile, he filled notebooks with philosophical thoughts alternating with Nazi-flavoured anti-Semitic remarks. When these ‘Black Notebooks’ were published in 2014, they provided yet more confirmation of something already known: Heidegger was a Nazi, at least for a while, and not out of convenience but by conviction.

  One gets a feel for how he spoke and thought during this time by reading the inaugural address he gave as rector, to an assembly of university staff and party members in a hall adorned with Nazi banners on 27 May 1933. Most of what he said reflects the party line: he speaks of how German students must replace the old, so-called ‘academic freedom’ with new forms of labour, military and ‘knowledge’ service. But he adds distinctive Heideggerian touches, as when he explains that this knowledge service will make students place their existence ‘in the most acute danger in the midst of overpowering Being’. As the German Volk in general confronts ‘the extreme questionableness of its own existence’, so must the students commit themselves ‘to essential and simple questioning in the midst of the historical-spiritual world of the Volk’. Thus, Heidegger used his speech to travesty two of the most profound themes of existentialist philosophy: self-questioning and freedom. He stressed this so-called ‘questioning’ again in another address that November, this time to accompany his (obligatory) ‘Declaration of Support for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State’. He also developed enthusiastic educational plans of his own, volunteering to host summer camps for faculty and students at his Todtnauberg hut. They were designed to combine physical training with seminar discussions — a kind of philosophical Nazi boot camp.

  Heidegger’s Nazism was significant because he was now in a position of real power over others’ lives. He had developed from being the nutty professor in funny clothes, writing beautiful and barely comprehensible works of genius for the few, into the official whom every student and professor would have to court. He could ruin careers and endanger people’s physical safety if he chose to. Heidegger had said that Dasein’s call would be unrecognisable, but few people reading Being and Time could have imagined that it would sound so much like a call to Nazi obedience.

  His position also led him into personal betrayals. Among the new regulations of April 1933, which Heidegger had to enforce and maintain, was one removing from public and university posts all those whom the Nazis identified as Jews. This affected Husserl: although he was retired, he lost his emeritus status and the associated privileged access to university facilities. Husserl’s son Gerhart, who was a law professor at the University of Kiel, lost his job by the same regulation — Gerhart, who had been wounded in the First World War and whose brother had given his life for Germany. The new laws were a stupendous insult to a family who had given so much. The only help the Heideggers offered was to send a bouquet of flowers to Malvine Husserl, with a letter from Elfride emphasising the Husserls’ record of patriotism. The letter was apparently designed for them to use in their own defence, should they ever need it. But its tone was cool, and Malvine, who was not the type to put up with insults meekly, took offence. In the same year, a new edition of Being and Time appeared; Heidegger’s dedication of the book to Husserl had disappea
red.

  Another friend was watching Heidegger’s new role in dismay: Karl Jaspers. He and Heidegger had become close after they met at Husserl’s birthday party — the one at which Malvine referred to Heidegger as the ‘phenomenological child’. As Jaspers lived in Heidelberg, they only travelled to see each other occasionally, but their correspondence and long-distance friendship were warm.

  They had many points of philosophical contact. Following his early encounter with Husserl’s ideas, Jaspers had gone on to develop his own work, building on his psychology background as well as on Kierkegaardian existentialism. He was especially interested in Kierkegaard’s studies of ‘either/or’ choices and of freedom: the ways in which we face up to dilemmas and decide what to do. Jaspers focused on what he called Grenzsituationen — border situations, or limit situations. These are the moments when one finds oneself constrained or boxed in by what is happening, but at the same time pushed by these events towards the limits or outer edge of normal experience. For example, you might have to make a life-or-death choice, or something might remind you suddenly of your mortality, or some event may make you realise that you have to accept the burden of responsibility for what you do. Experiencing such situations is, for Jaspers, almost synonymous with existing, in the Kierkegaardian sense. Although they are hard to bear, these are puzzles in our existence, and thus open the door to philosophising. We cannot solve them by thinking in the abstract; they must be lived, and in the end we make our choices with our entire being. They are existential situations.

  Jaspers’ interest in border situations probably had much to do with his own early confrontation with mortality. From childhood, he had suffered from a heart condition so severe that he always expected to die at any moment. He also had emphysema, which forced him to speak slowly, taking long pauses to catch his breath. Both illnesses meant that he had to budget his energies with care in order to get his work done without endangering his life.