Heidegger (und Trakl) auf der Bühlerhöhe

In October 1952, Martin Heidegger gave a lecture on Georg Trakl at the legendary Bühlerhöhe, a spa in the northern Black Forest. The timing and audience were highly symbolic: the elite of the Federal Republic, who had gathered there and who considered themselves spiritually damaged by the war and their own complicity, were to find new orientation through literature and poetry. Heidegger undertook a speculative interpretation of Trakl's work. His "song" would give Western culture a new direction. Trakl stood neither for a promise of progress nor for a connection to tradition, but for a way of thinking of "seclusion," a slow farewell to the losses and hopes of the past. Derrida exposed Heidegger's "national humanism": the idea that the German people had a special "spiritual" mission.