Free At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell Page B

handle to make small hammers hit wood, producing a rattling, pocking sound.

    (Illustrations Credit 3.1)
    The sound of hammers striking wood or metal resonated through Martin’s world, as his father was also the town’s mastercooper, making barrels and other ware. (A quick online search reminds us that coopers used to make ‘casks, barrels, buckets, tubs, butter churns, hogsheads, firkins, tierces, rundlets, puncheons, pipes, tuns, butts, pins and breakers’ — a beautiful list of objects that now sounds like a half-remembered dream.) The boys would go out in the nearby forest after woodcutters had passed by,collecting pieces which their father could use. Heidegger later wrote to his fiancée describing his memories of the cooper’s workshop, and also of his grandfather, a shoemaker, who would sit on his three-legged stool hammering nails intosoles, by the light of aglass globe. All this is worth dwelling on because, for Heidegger even more than for most writers, these childhood images remained important to him all his life; he never abandoned his allegiance to the world they evoked.

    (Illustrations Credit 3.2)
    When the ‘helpful son’ jobs were done, Martin would run out past the church and through the park of the equally grandiose Messkirch castle into the forest, and sit with his homework on a roughhewn bench at the side of a path in the deep woods. Thebench and path helped him to think through any tangled text he was studying; later, whenever he was bogged down in a tough philosophical task, he would think back to the bench in the woods, and see his way out. His thoughts were always filled with images of dark trees, and dappled forest light filtering through the leaves to the open paths and clearings. He gave his books titles like Holzwege (Forest paths) and Wegmarken (Trailmarks). Their pages resound with the ringing of hammers and the serene tolling of village bells, with rustic crafts and the heft and feel of manual labour.
    Even in his most rarefied later writing — or especially there — Heidegger liked to think of himself as a humble Swabian peasant, whittling and chopping at his work. But he was never exactly a man of the people. From boyhood, there was something set apart about him. He was shy, tiny, black-eyed, with a pinched little mouth, and all his life he had difficultymeeting people’s eyes. Yet he had a mysterious power over others. In an interview for a BBC TV programme in 1999, Hans-Georg Gadamer recalled asking an old man in Messkirch if he had known Martin Heidegger as a boy. The man replied:
‘Martin? Yes, certainly I remember him.’
‘What was he like?’
‘ Tscha [Well],’ answered the man, ‘What can I say? He was the smallest, he was the weakest, he was the most unruly, he was the most useless. But he was in command of all of us.’
    As he grew up, Heidegger attended seminary schools, then went to Freiburg where he studied divinity. But meanwhile, his encounter with Brentano’s thesis led him to immerse himself in Aristotle, and to feel drawn towards philosophical rather than theological inquiry. He picked up the Freiburg university library’s copy of Husserl’s Logical Investigations ,borrowed it, and kept it in his room for two years. He was fascinated to see that Husserl’s philosophy took no account of God. (Husserl, although a Christian, kept his faith separate from his work.) Heidegger studied Husserl’s method of proceeding by close description and attention to phenomena.
    He then followed Husserl in switching to philosophy, and building his career by scraping a living as an unsalaried Privatdozent for years. Also like Husserl, he acquired a family to support: he married Elfride Petri in March 1917, and they had two sons, Jörg and Hermann. Elfride was a Protestant, so they covered all bases by having a registry office wedding followed by two religious ones, Protestant and Catholic — after which they both broke with their churches completely. Heidegger officially