Wednesday, September 19, 2007

"But he also never left the party and wore a Swastika in his lapel even when abroad—including a visit to Löwith’s apartment in Rome a few years later. Some compared him to Plato in Syracuse, the philosopher a prisoner to the tyrant; some suggested that his naiveté was still greater and that, like Thales, he had been staring so intently up at the philosophical sky that he fell into a political well. And others saw his choice as a cunning one—and, still worse, in line with his philosophy and its stress on authenticity and connection to the land. Years later, Elfriede Jelinek was to write a play called Totenauberg (changing the title of Heidegger’s second home from death to the dead) mercilessly attacking Heidegger and his attachment to a murderous Heimat."