He has watched Max carefully for the past couple of weeks. He is a superb student, and through quizzes and the first exam, he can see that Max has a knack for it, and he’ll be sad to lose him. He’ll be sadder by far, though, if it has to do with Schöner’s being a Jew. So far, he hasn’t lost any students that he knows of to this fact, but Freiburg has no shortage of anti-Semitism; odds are, he’s lost some he doesn’t even know about.
So he’s relieved when Max says, “It’s not that I want to cut out this class. It’s just that with the hour earlier, I miss out on Herr Heidegger’s lectures.”
Now it makes sense. He has asked them to gather at eight rather than nine, so that they can make the most of daylight hours and cover more ground. There has never been a conflict before. But he knows that Heidegger is the university’s true superstar. Winning him from Marburg was a great coup. Students come not only from all over Germany but from throughout the Continent to hear the author of Being and Time hold forth at the podium. Some swear to his greatness and brilliance, while others consider him the biggest sham in the university, a propounder of mystical terms, a spider weaving webs in midair. He’s heard the mockeries, as students parody his jargon—“Dasein yawns in its being-toward-bed”—and scoff at his rustic appearance. He thinks about it for a few minutes.
Then he turns to Max and says, “How badly do you want to be there for Herr Heidegger?”
Max curls his lip. “I want to do both. It’s not an insult to your class.”
“Well, suppose we leave at the original time from now on?”
“I’d still need to leave his lectures early.”
“Perhaps I can write a note to Herr Heidegger for you.”
“That might work,” says Max. “I’m always there for his seminar, and I enter into discussion a lot. I mean, he forces us to. But I feel like he notices that I’m not at all the lectures.”
Hunched over a magnifying glass the next morning, examining a diseased bit of bark, Schöner receives a knock on his office door. When he says “Come in,” he is surprised by the presence of the striking figure he recognizes immediately as Martin Heidegger. He knows him from faculty meetings, but up close, certain features are accented: the high, barren forehead, hair arching back, the mustache tightly clipped on the upper bank of the lips, and, most of all, the penetrating eyes. His outer garb is that of a peasant, though a tie lurks beneath.
“Herr Professor Heidegger,” he greets him. “Herr Schöner. What brings you to this part of campus?”
From what he has heard of Heidegger’s lectures, he expects a booming, larger-than-life figure, but the man is soft-spoken, almost shrinking his way into the tiny office. “Call me Martin,” he says. Heidegger looks him over. “So, here he is,” he goes on, the slightest trace of a smile visible. “The teacher who climbs trees.”
“Yes,” Schöner laughs. “It’s a necessary part of my job.”
“Hmmm, yes,” Heidegger says. “Well, it’s as Hölderlin says, ‘Others climb higher/To ethereal Light who’ve been faithful/ To the love inside themselves, and to the spirit/Of the gods.’”
“Well,” says Schöner. “I just do it to get the best view of the canopy.”
Heidegger looks mildly embarrassed, or perhaps disappointed. He clears his throat. “In any case, it seems that we have a student in common.”
“Ah, yes, Max.”
“Indeed. He is a talented thinker.”
“He’s a talented young man, then, because he shows signs of doing well in my class, too.”
“So he’ll be leaving my lectures a few minutes early.”
“If that’s all right. You see, I asked the students at the beginning of the term if they could leave a bit earlier for some of our walks, if they had any conflict. But if it imposes on you, I would certainly discourage him from—”
“Nonsense.” Heidegger waves him off. “It’s all right. To be frank, he’ll learn more in the open air than sitting in a hard chair daydreaming about pine trees.”
“Well, I’m sure that’s hardly the case,” says Schöner, somehow embarrassed himself now.
There is a protracted silence. Then Heidegger says, “That piece of bark. .”
Schöner looks back at his specimen. “Yes?”
The philosopher looks puzzled. “What can you learn from it? I mean, by examining it thusly?”
“Well, I’m trying to figure out what got to it first, animal, fungus, or pathogen.”
Heidegger nods, and Schöner can’t tell whether this is genuine interest or mere politeness. He hears Heidegger’s intense breath, then hears him ask, “How well do you know these woods?”
“Fairly well,” Schöner replies. Probably an understatement — he knows them, by now, better than any professor at Freiburg, surely as well as some of the woodsmen who earn a living there.
“Perhaps you can show me, sometime, some of your favored routes.”
“It would be an honor, Herr Professor Heidegger,” says Schöner.
“Please. Martin,” he says, scratching above his mustache right into his nostrils.
Schöner and Heidegger go on lengthy walks through the Schwarzwald. “How is your work?” is always the first thing Heidegger asks him the moment they’ve gone beyond the garden and through the gate at the edge of the foothills. Schöner points out the various kinds of trees, explains the dynamics of the cycles of growth, decay, and regeneration, while Heidegger holds forth on poetry, art, music. Schöner knows some scattered lines of poetry from secondary school, his Goethe and some Trakl.
On one of their earliest walks, Heidegger recoils in horror as he rattles off names with which Schöner has only the faintest familiarity. “Schlegel? Heine? Hölderlin?”
It is only when Schöner realizes he’s being, at least in part, had that he retaliates with equally exaggerated dismay: “Not know a black spruce from a red spruce? Norway from white?” This prompts a lengthy excursus from Heidegger on Goethe’s theory of colors. Schöner, accusing him of trying to change the subject, insists on bringing him back to the trees, offering up the same mnemonics he does to his students. After several misidentifications, Heidegger throws his arms up in despair, and Schöner drops it.
After they’ve gone for several of these jaunts, Heidegger gets him a copy of Schlegel’s Shakespeare. He explains that Schlegel was influenced by Herder in his translation, recognizing the playwright not merely as a great dramatist, tragedian, and shaper of characters but as a splendid wordsmith, whose puns and poetry and musicality are inextricable from the works’ greatness.
“In Schlegel’s rendering,” Heidegger says, “Shakespeare is almost German.”
Looking through it in the evening, Schöner sees that he has inscribed the volume: “To my tree climber, who lends me his forest spectacles.”
Schöner, in turn, gets him a tree-identification guide, which he inscribes: “May this be soon as dog-eared as Viburnum plicatum.” Though it is a plant he’s pointed out to the philosopher, Schöner worries that his inscription is too impersonal. Nevertheless, he cannot risk a joke such as “Great being-in-the-woods with you,” since Heidegger is highly sensitive about the accusations that he coins terms and phrases with flagrant disregard for clarity and logic.
As for Schöner, he feels certain that there is clarity in Heidegger’s thought. As they are walking, sometimes, he loses himself in Heidegger’s voice, as soothing as though they’ve been following the banks of a stream. There is always a sense of connectedness, of going somewhere, even if Schöner is lost mostly in the sounds of the words. He can distinguish the grammatical distinctions between Sosein (“Being-as-it-is”), Sein-bei (“Being-alongside”), and his namesake, Schon-sein-in (“Being-already-alongside”) but he cannot follow the conceptual distinctions that the philosopher is attempting. At times, Heidegger makes him feel a little like he doesn’t speak German at all. It is something that the scientists will often poke fun at the philosophers for, this lofty propensity for abstraction, which sometimes seems to be a peculiarly German affliction. But in Heidegger’s voice the words are infused with something that makes them as palpable as the furrows in bark.