Melancholy and Pastorale

In the aftermath of a destructive and ultimately pointless world war, modernism reflected the realization that the traditional ideals of European culture could no longer hold. Yet Heidegger wrote much of his work at his hut in Todnauberg, deep in the Black Forest. He never felt comfortable in urban environments, nor among "the intelligentsia", preferring instead to dwell among the peasants near the wood paths, fields and forests. After declining teaching offers in cosmopolitan Berlin, the cultural epicenter of Weimar modernism, he defended his decision with Why we Remain in the Provinces, a text which may itself be read as a classic artefact of anti-modernism.

How do we interpret Heidegger's agrarian, earth-bound ontology? Peasant life, as it is more closely connected with the earth and its cycles, is more fundamentally rooted than urban life in the basic rhythms of life and death, less preoccupied with the faddish and the fashionable. But was Heidegger essentially escaping from the abyss of modernity into a romanticized "pastorale"? Heidegger's retreat to his Todtnauberg hut in the Black Forest perhaps represented Heidegger's inability to reconcile his search for solidity in an unstable world with the shifts of modernity. A number of scholars, however, have argued that Heidegger's "ruralism" is not just a benign form of quaint nostalgia, but rather central to a widespread reactionary movement among prominent German intellectuals of this time towards an ideology of rootedness in "blood and soil", a dangerous movement whose rhetoric was fundamentally tied up with Nazism. But while this may be true, it begs other questions. Exactly what was the original impetus for Heidegger's gravitation towards this reactionary outlook? It was an anti-modernism that saw all around a collapsing world and sought a return to a more fundamental truth. Of course, to seek such a truth in Nazism was a tragic mistake, because Nazism was probably the most evil regime ever to grace this planet, much more nihilistic (as Heidegger eventually discovered) than the very nihilism Heidegger sought to overcome. Heidegger should have known better what could happen in desperate times when "things fall apart". In the words of Yeats, again, "twenty centuries of stony sleep / were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, / And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"