But there is one consolation for Schöner in Hitler’s rise to power: a mere five months after his ascension on January 30, 1933, none other than Heidegger is elected unanimously to the position of rector of Freiburg University. The news echoes through the hallways and from building to building, filling Schöner with some combination of euphoria and relief. It is not merely that by now he considers Heidegger a dear personal friend, although they have not spoken much in the past few months, and not been on one of their outings since they last skied during the winter holidays of the year before. Rather, it is that his colleagues have selected Heidegger, wise, sensitive, and keenly nuanced, to lead them. This can only mean that there is greater balance in the National Socialist party than meets the eye. It means that the bullies and the thugs who protest outside the Jewish Union are but one faction, albeit the one Hitler has exploited in his rise. It means that although Jewish teachers and those who have spoken out against the Nazi cause have been dismissed from their posts at universities throughout Germany, here in Freiberg there will be a beacon of reason and conscience to carry them through these dark times. Heidegger, who has never breathed an anti-Semitic word, for whom policies and notions of biological racialism would surely be as reprehensible as a proposal to clear-cut the Black Forest and supplant it with a city the size of Berlin. Heidegger, who rails against the “common sense of the they,” and thus who would turn a deaf ear to the student outcries that have turned many classrooms into courtrooms and put professors on trial.
So it is with an eagerness verging on rapture that he looks forward to Heidegger’s rectoral address. The program has been printed, and its title, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” is already creating a buzz. Heidegger will, it is thought, speak out against tyranny. He will speak up for the intellectual life, Hitler’s impatience for such things be damned. Schöner arrives in his purple robes with Kindler, a geophysicist in whom Schöner can confide these hopes. The stage is laid out with Nazi regalia, flags, and insignia. Behind the podium, gathered around Heidegger, are men who look no older than students, many in military garb. The crowd is filled with restless students, many in the nondescript brown shirts that make his own outfit feel ostentatious, even decadent. He thinks he sees a former student of his several feet away in brown, but in his studied expressionlessness he might be anyone. The ceremony opens with a few preliminary spurts of bureaucratese, flags twirling, the deafening stomp of boot heels, which rattle the stage. Next there is an oompah-pah band, and at last Heidegger takes the podium, diminutive even on his decisive day.
A pause, maybe for effect, then the voice Schöner knows so well, strange through the microphone. Schöner closes his eyes, and as he does, he can almost imagine they are ambling through the woods. Branches dip down upon his retina, so real-looking that he feels an involuntary urge to duck. He forces his eyes open. The words sound familiar, too, ordered just slightly differently from many of their conversations. He half-expects Heidegger’s xeric laugh, which barely leaves his jaw, and he begins to drift into the usual reverie. But he’s jarred awake. Phrases like “German destiny” and “the historical spiritual mission of the German people.” He hears “‘Knowing, however, is far weaker than necessity.’” Again and again — it is unmistakable. “German.” “Destiny.” “Historical mission.” “Spiritual.” “German.” “German.” The new rector repeats them like mantras. Wide awake now, Schöner shivers at the thunderous applause that greets each one. He looks around, expecting monsters, and sees worse: aught but the ruddy enthusiasm of a pep rally. Then he hears something about a proposal for labor service. Worse, military service. What is this doing in his speech? “Teachers. . students. . primary responsibility to the state.” “The will of the people. . asserted itself.” “This. . destiny.” Where is the assertion of the university that was promised? Where is Heidegger? Schöner turns to Kindler, who will not return his gaze. Finally, with the flourish Schöner imagines he must bring to his great lectures, Heidegger quotes Plato: “‘All that is great stands in the storm.’” And he is done.
More applause erupts. For some reason, he thinks suddenly of Max, the one who slipped out of Heidegger’s lectures early, years ago.
His final conversation with Heidegger is a blur to him now — how much more clearly he recalls the aftermath, the implication that he is on the short list of those to be considered for termination. Only because his discipline is out of alignment with the immediate goals and needs of the National movement. Heidegger never utters the words “It’s not because you are a Jew,” but the two men know each other well enough to understand that whether true or not, this is the unsaid thing. There is a certain coldness in Heidegger’s demeanor, as though by granting Schöner the ten minutes he did, he was shortchanging someone else.
But even the months afterward, before he can secure a visa to look elsewhere for teaching positions, are hazy. There are conversations with Kindler and others about options. It is still early enough to get out of the country without too much hassle if you have been dismissed from a first-rate teaching job. No one, Heidegger least of all, wants to invoke the outrage of the international scholarly community. Given the events to follow, this will soon seem like a laughable reason to have granted him a visa, but there you have it.
There are conversations with his parents, who urge him to go. He will send for them once he is established somewhere, they decide.
There are conversations with other scientists who have been cut or who know they are next to feel the ax’s swing, whether because Jewish or labeled pacifists or Communists or simply strapped with the designation “un-German.” The consensus, particularly of the physicists, is that America is where they’ll be most welcome, where they can wait out this passing era and keep pace with the relentless curve of scientific knowledge until they can return to German institutions.
Years later, when it has become apparent how narrow the window he’s slipped through is, that already two concentration camps for those deemed political enemies are operating in Baden, where Freiburg is located, he conjures a fantasy. That fantasy looks something like this: He, Schöner, Schimmler, shimmying his way up a tree and slipping effortlessly from branch to branch in the uppermost canopy, right across the border into France or Switzerland.
Even the first years in America, when he has to reckon with the fact that his lack of English means he is essentially denuded of academic laurels and qualifications, unlike the physicists, who speak a subatomic language that transcends words and who are, in fact, being courted by the American government — even these are somewhat hazy now. Like most German refugees of the time, he goes first to New York, to Washington Heights and Inwood, where other German Jews have established a veritable diaspora. Unlike most, though, he feels almost immediately confined by the city, a rat familiarizing itself with its cage. He has no Berlin in his past to become sentimental about, and while Fort Tryon and Inwood Park offer him enclaves of lushness, the city’s traffic and smells and grime threaten to smother him. For the moment, he is reborn under the sign of the ailanthus, the plant that manages to grow out of cracks in the pavement in the unlikeliest places. This sustains him long enough for it to dawn on him that he can offer himself up for a pittance as a landscaper for a family of wealthy German New Yorkers, whose handsome brownstone holds a courtyard that quickly becomes putty in his hands, transformed into a veritable slice of the Homeland. A family with whom he can communicate. With a daughter self-assured enough to choose love over social status, and who loves the sounds of the Latin names of trees and the German ones as they waltz together up the path that rims the edge of the Hudson. A family that purchases a piece of land for a summer home in Peterborough, New Hampshire, a place so far away from New York and so distinct, it seems like yet a third country.