Place as Palimpsest

Paul Celan and Martin Heidegger and the Haunting of Todtnauberg

Mark Riley

There is no landscape whether natural or thought, that is not inscribed, erased and re-inscribed by histories and ghosts. In particular, the German landscape is populated by emotive places and experiencing them is intensified by the complex interweaving of topography and histories with personal and collective memory and forgetting and haunting.

In this chapter I will investigate one particular site: the location of German philosopher Martin Heidegger's hut situated in the mountains of the Black Forest south of Freiburg at Todtnauberg. It has been a contentious building/location since its construction in the 1920s and has reflected and articulated Heidegger's concerns with landscape in relation to rootedness, dwelling, language and homeland. Heidegger recognized Todtnauberg as a locale 'haunted' by uncertainty and open to possibilities, to a sense of becoming — a site of appearances and disappearances.

However, I will draw attention to the more complex spectral qualities of the site as inscribed by Paul Celan's poem, 'Todtnauberg'. This poem was written in response to a meeting between Heidegger and Celan at the hut at Todtnauberg in July 1967. It presents the site as a palimpsest, haunted by histories and in particular Heidegger's nefarious involvement with National Socialism. In the poem, Celan's appreciation of Heidegger's mountain life was mediated by ghosts and his imaginings of what had happened there before.

Philipe Lacoue-Labarthe argues that 'Todtnauberg' is barely a poem at all. It is not an outline or a map but the remainder or residue of an abortive narrative. The poem presents a site that has not only been actually and symbolically tainted by the fascist past, but also serves as an imperfect setting for events that fractured the poet's own past (Lacoue-Labarthe 1998).

I want to consider Todtnauberg in relation to a distinction that I will make between the ideas of 'landscape' and 'terrain'. I will argue that 'landscape' should be understood as a symbolic setting for an individual's passage through time and is a continuous and coherent whole. 'Terrain' is a more fragmentary experience onto which a coherent sense of self cannot be projected. The concept of 'terrain' suggests a 'de-coherence' that exceeds the geographic setting; it is a place of haunting and ghosts. The place of the poem presents past and present as a 'terrain' that can be described only in abstract fragments rather than a coherent whole. Both locale and poem are traced with the paths of inscriptions and erasures.

This chapter will explore this spectral experience of remnants and shards evident in Celan's poem 'Todtnauberg'. It will consider how these qualities transform Heidegger's familial home into a fractured and residual place: a palimpsest.

On the northern slope of a secluded valley in the Black Forest, a small shingle-clad building is situated. It was the thinking place of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976). The site of this hut, and the 'site' of Paul Celan's poem 'Todtnauberg' are inextricably linked by ideas of haunting and de-coherence in relation to place. Heidegger wrote extensively on the significance of 'dwelling' and 'place' in relation to 'Being' and the importance of poetic language to philosophical thought. One of his published collections of essays is titled Wegmarken (1998) and is an edited collection that maps a landscape of thinking. The title reflects this desire to orientate oneself in thought through relational strategies that suggest the importance of a proximal experience of the world. This sense of an understanding of intimacy and proximity through language permeated his writing as did the importance and particularity of place. However, to one particular place Heidegger claimed 'an emotional and intellectual intimacy' (Sharr 2007, 3). This was a small wooden hut (the footprint measuring approximately 6 × 7 metres), built for him and situated on the north side of a valley facing south, in the mountains of the Black Forest south of Freiburg and close to the village of Todtnauberg. This building and its surrounding landscape have been interpreted at different times as a retreat for a thinker from the intensities of academic and political concerns, a place of intense routines of living, thinking, writing and work, and a site of significant historical encounters. In his book, A Phenomenology of Landscape, Christopher Tilley argues:

A landscape is a series of named locales, a set of relational places linked by paths, movements and narratives. It is a 'natural' topography perspectivally linked to the existential Being of the body in societal space. It is a cultural code for living, an anonymous 'text' to be read and interpreted, a writing pad forinscription, a scape of and for human praxis, a mode of dwelling and a mode of experiencing. (1997, 34)

Tilley's proposal that a landscape is a 'text' to be 'read and interpreted' is a useful starting point; however, I want to introduce an additional topographic theme of 'inscription' and 'erasure' at Todtnauberg. I will argue that this event of inscribing, erasing and re-inscribing can be expressed as 'terrain'. Whereas 'landscape' suggests a literal reading, 'terrain' offers a more ambiguous and palimpsestic interpretation of a locale.

Historian Claude Magris argues that 'the Black Forest surrounding (Heidegger's) hut had become a transcendental, universal landscape of philosophy. In the luminous clearing in the wood in which ... there is nothing that can be grasped, but only a horizon within which things...