B. Events under Trees and Stars
Hans Castorp was no dandy, nor an environmentalist. He wasn't a Held either, neither a «Held von Verdun» nor some other Held. And he was no Heros. Without knowing how, he stumbled into World War I as it burst into the last four pages of Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain . Nonetheless, like the «Helden von Verdun,» Hans Castorp too ran forward, he too listened to some call of the Volk, and he too gave voice to the call he was hearing. But he was not singing the German national anthem. Rather, he sang some love song, a song of Heimat, homeland, and love, "Der Lindenbaum" ("The Lime Tree"):
Up he gets, and staggers on, limping on his earth-bound feet, all unconsciously singing:
"Its waving branches whi—ispered
A mess—age in my ear—"
and thus, in the tumult, in the rain, in the dusk, vanishes out of our sight. [25]
He wasn't in the first line, and he didn't seem to be very enthusiastic, or skillful. For, he didn't have the German Volk, or some of its blonde women in mind. Rather, he had fallen in love with the foe, with Madame Chauchat, Clavdia Chauchat, the Russian with a French husband; with her peculiarly gliding step, her broad cheek-bones, and her Kirghiz eyes that went through him «like a knife»[26] when he passed her by in the dining room. We don't know what happened to Hans Castorp. The author, son of the haute bourgeoisie in the open-minded Lübeck, for one moment feels tempted «to press a finger delicately to our eyes at the thought that we shall see you no more, hear you no more for ever.»[27] However, he immediately er-mann-t sich (pulls himself together), and even confesses that it is without great concern that he leaves Castorp's fortunes open.
"The Lime Tree" is part of the collection of poems "Winter Journey" ("Winter Reise"), written by the disappointed and persecuted democrat Wilhelm Müller, and set to music by Franz Schubert. Without its fifth angry and political stanza, it became very popular, a Volkslied. Heinrich Heine, a Jew, also wrote a poem that became a Volkslied, "Die Loreley." During National Socialism, in anthologies of folk songs, Heinrich Heine's name as the author was replaced with «author unknown,» or simply «Volkslied.» I don't know whether Heidegger liked "The Lime Tree." Maybe it doesn't particularly fit areas like the Black Forest, or the Harz about which Heine wrote his Die Harzreise . Nor does it seem to fit, or to respond, to erwidern, Heidegger's specific melancholia. Probably, there are folk songs about fir trees that he would have liked more. [28] o be sure, trees show up not only in Germany. After all, there is the Porphyrean tree in logic and ontology, and it was under a tree, notably, a fig tree, the Geschlecht of the mother, that Saint Augustine was converted:
So I stood up and left him where we had been sitting, utterly bewildered. Somehow I flung myself down beneath a fig tree and gave way to the tears which now streamed from my eyes, the sacrifice that is acceptable to you. . . . I was asking myself these questions, weeping all the while with the most bitter sorrow in my heart, when all at once I heard the sing-song voice of a child in a nearby house. Whether it was the voice of a boy or a gift I cannot say, but again and again it repeated the refrain 'Take it and read, take it and read' {tolle lege, tolle lege}.[29]
Nonetheless, there might be something special to the Deutsche Wald, even for those who have no sense for the German Soldier. Even in Benjamin, at a crucial point, namely, in his explication of aura, a tree shows up. [30] One might read as an implicit criticism of the theological abuse of the tree in Augustine the aphorism,
Commentary and translation stand in the same relation to the text as style and mimesis to nature: the same phenomenon considered from different aspects. On
the tree of the sacred text both are only the eternally rustling leaves; on that of the profane, the seasonally falling fruits. [31]
The same might hold true of a short piece in the context of aura not translated into English:
I climbed up a slope and lay down under a tree. The tree was a poplar or an alder. You ask why I have forgotten its species? I did so because, as I looked into the foliage and followed its movements with my eyes, language in me was absorbed by it so that, in my presence, language at that moment consummated again the very old marriage with the tree. The branches and the top swayed in consideration or bent in refusal. The branches presented themselves as inclined or as high-handed. The foliage fought against a rough draft of wind, shuddering before it or complying with it. The trunk had its good ground to stand on. And the leaves cast their shadows upon each other. A soft wind played for the wedding and soon took away the children, quickly sprouted from this bed, carded them into the world as an image-language. [32]
Maybe, these sentences show that, sometimes, even Benjamin could write somewhat kitschig. Nonetheless, they also show a little bit of Benjamin's tender nominalism as in contrast to the call in Augustine and Heidegger. Notably, they bear witness to Benjamin's concern with nature. After all, already in 1928, in One-Way Street , Benjamin wrote, «If society has so degenerated through necessity and greed that it can now receive the gifts of nature only rapaciously, that it snatches the fruit unripe from the trees in order to sell it most profitably, and is compelled to empty each dish in its determination to have enough, the earth will be impoverished and the land yield bad harvests.»[33] Thus, Benjamin was the first environmentalist, not Heidegger! «I'm just kidding,» as one often hears in this country after some joke, even after not very good ones of which, as I frankly admit, my book might contain some. Anyway, I started with the «Helden von Langemarck,» and I referred to Max Scheler's hymn on the war. Most probably, Heidegger had also read Ernst Jünger's In Stahlgewittern , and, immediately after its publication, he studied carefully Jünger's Der Arbeiter (SB 24f MH 17f.). Let me finish by just quoting the last, and pretty strange, piece, "To the Planetarium," of Benjamin's One-Way Street :
If one had to expound the doctrine of antiquity with utmost brevity while standing on one leg, as did Hillel that of the Jews, it could only be in this sentence: "They alone shall possess the earth who live from the powers of the cosmos." Nothing distinguishes the ancient from the modern man so much as the former's absorption in a cosmic experience scarcely known to later periods. Its waning is marked by the flowering of astronomy at the beginning of the modem age. Kepler, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe were certainly not driven by sci-
entific impulses alone. All the same, the exclusive emphasis on an optical connection to the universe, to which astronomy very quickly led, contained a portent of what was to come. The ancients' intercourse with the cosmos had been different: the ecstatic trance. For it is in this experience alone that we gain certain knowledge of what is nearest to us and what is remotest to us, and never of one without the other. This means, however, that man can be in ecstatic contact with the cosmos only communally. It is the dangerous error of modem men to regard this experience as unimportant and avoidable, and to consign it to the individual as the poetic rapture of starry nights. It is not; its hour strikes again and again, and then neither nations nor generations can escape it, as was made terribly clear by the last war, which was an attempt at a new and unprecedented commingling with the cosmic powers. Human multitudes, gases, electrical forces were hurled into the open country, high-frequency currents coursed through the landscape, new constellations rose in the sky, aerial space and ocean depths thundered with propellers, and everywhere sacrificial shafts were dug in Mother Earth. This immense wooing of the cosmos was enacted for the first time on a planetary scale, that is, in the spirit of technology. But because the lust for profit of the ruling classes sought satisfaction through it, technology betrayed man and turned the bridal bed into a bloodbath. The mastery of nature, so the imperialists teach, is the purpose of all technology. But who would trust a cane wielder who proclaimed the mastery of children by adults to be the purpose of education? Is not education above all the indispensable ordering of the relationship between generations and therefore mastery, if we are to use this term, of that relationship and not of children? And likewise technology is not the mastery of nature but of the relation between nature and man. Men as a species completed their development thousands of years ago; but mankind as a species is just beginning his. In technology a physis is being organized through which mankind's contact with the cosmos takes a new and different form from that which it had in nations and families. One need recall only the experience of velocities by virtue of which mankind is now preparing to embark on incalculable journeys into the interior of time, to encounter there rhythms from which the sick shall draw strength as they did earlier on high mountains or at Southern seas. The "Lunaparks" are a prefiguration of sanatoria. The paroxysm of genuine cosmic experience is not tied to that tiny fragment of nature that we are accustomed to call "Nature." In the nights of annihilation of the last war the frame of mankind was shaken by a feeling that resembled the bliss of the epileptic. And the revolts that followed it were the first attempt of mankind to bring the new body under its control. The power of the proletariat is the measure of its convalescence. If it is not gripped to the very marrow by the discipline of this power, no pacifist polemics will save it. Living substance conquers the frenzy of destruction only in the ecstasy of procreation. [34]
After this, one might turn back a few pages and compare to Heidegger the notions of decision and resoluteness in "Madame Ariane—Second Courtyard on the Left." [35] Isn't that more interesting and much better written as well?
After all, it is you, dear readers, who are called upon to make up your minds, to make a decision , and «to have the last word»! Anyway, don't forget the end of "Madame Ariane—Second Courtyard on the Left":
Each morning the day lies like a fresh shirt on our bed; this incomparably fine, incomparably tightly woven tissue of pure prediction fits us perfectly. The happiness of the next twenty-four hours depends on our ability, on waking, to pick it up.