in the 1949 Bremen Lectures, and (the impression is irresistible) the swastika that one can easily extract from this figure.
Throughout these interpretations, he stresses the mystery of the German essence. The course begins with a reference to the fatherland as a riddlesome “origin withheld in silence” and a “forbidden fruit” (GA 39: 4/4); it ends with Hölderlin’s saying that what is most difficult of all is the free use of the national (GA 39: 290–94). In the middle of the course, Heidegger uses an image reminiscent of Kafka’s “Before the Law”: the being of the people is a “closed door,” and it will remain closed—but the poet can point us toward it (GA 39: 120/108). The mood of the lectures is a painful longing, a feeling of abandonment and forgotten possibilities endured with forbearance. Not only do we not know who we are, we have forgotten how to ask who we are (GA 39: 49–50)—and forgotten that the question “Who are we?” has to remain a question “throughout our entire short lifetime” (GA 39: 59/55).
This melancholy evocation of a secret Germany is an awkward fit with “patriotism full of noise” (GA 39: 120/108) and “the needs of the day” (GA 39: 4/4). The creator of a state is mentioned a few times in the abstract, but Heidegger does not name Hitler—although we could speculate about his remark that a Führer is not a God, but finite (GA 39: 210). Heidegger “has no need to talk about the ‘political’” (GA 39: 214/195), and looks down on political maneuvers: “The crude regimentation of the all too many within a so-called organization is only a makeshift expedient, but not the essence” (GA 39: 8/7). The Germans are gifted with the ability of “setting in order to the point of organization,” but their greater task is to be touched by being (GA 39: 292).
Still, these lectures concern politics in a higher sense (GA 39: 214): the question of who the German people are and can be. “We have no desire to bring Hölderlin into line with our times. On the contrary: We wish to bring ourselves, and those who are to come, under the measure of the poet” (GA 39: 4/4). The poet—like the thinker and the statesman, but more primordial than both, it would seem (GA 39: 51, 144)—stands on the “peaks of time” (GA 39: 52/50) where he insistently waits upon “the event” (GA 39: 56/53). The poet’s primordial language founds the historical being of a people; in everydayness, this language is degraded into prose, and finally into idle talk (GA 39: 64). But at the peaks of time, time itself arises (GA 39: 109)—ecstatic, historical time that retrieves what has been for the sake of what may be. The poet, dwelling on such a peak, challenges us to attain this primordial historicity and enter a space where the divine may appear or disappear (GA 39: 111, 147).
Our being, at its highest, is “originary time” (GA 39: 109/99): human beings are challenged to retrieve what we have inherited for the sake of a