Haunted Landscapes

Super-Nature and the Environment

Ruth Heholt, Niamh Downing

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783488834
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Gothic, Romance, & Horror Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Haunted Landscapes offers a fresh and innovative approach to contemporary debates about landscape and the supernatural. Landscapes are often uncanny spaces embroiled in the past; associated with absence, memory and nostalgia. Yet experiences of haunting must in some way always belong to the present: they must be felt. This collection of essays opens up new and compelling areas of debate around the concepts of haunting, affect and landscape. Landscape studies, supernatural studies, haunting and memory are all rapidly growing fields of enquiry and this book synthesises ideas from several critical approaches – spectral, affective and spatial – to provide a new route into these subjects. Examining urban and rural landscapes, haunted domestic spaces, landscapes of trauma, and borderlands, this collection of essays is designed to cross disciplines and combine seemingly disparate academic approaches under the coherent locus of landscape and haunting. Presenting a timely intervention in some of the most pressing scholarly debates of our time, Haunted Landscapes offers an attractive array of essays that cover topics from Victorian times to the present.

Part I

Landscapes of Trauma

Chapter One

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 ¹ (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.² 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 for inscription, 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 appear’ (2001, 47). This suggests a haunted topology manifest in the folding, unfolding and refolding of histories in both poem and locale. It indicates, as Celan noted in his ‘Meridan Speech of October 1960,³ an animation of ‘tremors and hints’ that are both inclusive to and exclusive of the ‘poetic event’. These are the tracings of ‘what is’, ‘what has been’ and ‘what will be’—the variance of protentions and retentions marking the visibility of invisibility that is both transcribed and partially erased in the plurality of the poem and the ‘place’ as the ‘locale’ of the hut.

Figure 1.1.Heidgger’s hut at Todtnauberg from the east.

This building represented not just a thinking place for the philosopher but also a recreational space for his family and invited guests (see figures 1.1–1.4).

In 1922, Martin Heidegger’s wife Elfride commissioned a local carpenter, Pius Schweitzer, to build a cabin on land she had purchased on the hillside above Rütte and close to the village of Todtnauberg. This building represented not just a thinking place for the philosopher but also a recreational space for his family and invited guests. In his 1934 essay Why Do I Stay in the Provinces? Heidegger wrote:

On the steep slope of a wide mountain valley in the southern Black Forest at an elevation of 1150 meters, there stands a small ski hut. The floor plan measures six meters by seven. The low hanging roof covers three rooms: the kitchen which is also the living room, a bedroom and a study. Scattered at wide intervals throughout the narrow base of the valley and on the equally steep slope opposite, lie farmhouses with their large over-hanging roofs. Higher up the slope the meadows and pasture lands lead to the woods with its dark fir-tress, old and towering … This is my work world. (Heidegger in Sheehan 2010, 27)

In Why Do I Stay in the Provinces? (1934) and later The Festival Address (made as part of a celebratory event at Todtnauberg in 1966), Heidegger made a specific claim for the activities of thinking and writing at the hut. He argued that his philosophical work (did) not take place as an aloof, eccentric study but ‘belongs right in the midst of peasants work’ (Mugerauer 2008, 524). In the Festival Address, Heidegger proposed that the thinker’s task/craft does not merely belong together with other skills of members of the community, but all derive their power and continuity specifically from the landscape where they are grounded and sheltered. In this sense, the hut and its locale are steeped in Heidegger’s concerns with authenticity and rootedness and dwelling. Daniel Maier-Katkin argues that ‘in addition to his fantasies about German destiny, Heidegger’s thought also intersected with Nazi propaganda on the authenticity of rural life, especially at his rustic cottage at Todtnauberg in the Black Forest. He believed that the character of the people there had been shaped over centuries by the hard granite and rugged beauty of the natural environment’ (2010, 79). Certainly Heidegger wrote the text Why Do I Stay in the Provinces? at a particular historical moment for Germany and at a particular point in his academic career. In 1934, he had resigned the Rectorate at Freiburg University and was seemingly distancing himself from the political machinations of the National Socialist regime. Ultimately, he sought to immerse himself in a rarefied world that brought into proximity thinking and manual work. Clearly there are points in the text where this relationship reflects a spiritual dimension that suggests the hut at Todtnauberg was almost a monastic retreat for the philosopher. Heidegger’s repeated over-emphatic identification with a familiar, neighbourly and immediate community—its woods, its hearth and its dialect—was a claim to a monopoly of authenticity. Todtnauberg was a locale haunted by uncertainty and open to possibilities; to a sense of becoming—a site of appearances and disappearances; a place to hear the call of Being. However, we can question the nature of this recognition (its ‘visibility’) and reflect on what steadfastly remained contentiously invisible and unspoken at Todtnauberg. The limits of this intimate connection are emphasized by Claude Magris. He proposes that Heidegger had ‘almost an exclusive, patented trademark as if his sincere attachment to his own soil allowed no room for the loyalties of other men towards other soils and other lands—to their log cabins, or their blocked-rent tenements, or their skyscrapers’ (Magris 2008, 45, my emphasis). The refusal at play in this overemphasis on attachment and authenticity suggests that within this familial locale there are already hints at elements of uncertainty and anxiety; a lack of recognition; an ‘otherness’. For Heidegger, without the experience of loss and disorientation and the potential to wander paths that peter out in the woods, there is no call and, most importantly, there is no possibility of hearing the authentic word of Being. Such a landscape haunted by loss and disorientation explains why a Jewish poet such as Celan, lacerated by the Nazis exterminations and its aftermath, was able to set foot on the path to Heidegger’s cabin, to climb to that cabin and to attempt a genuine dialogue with the ex-rector of Freiburg University, who in 1934 had put his philosophical ideas at the service of the newly fledged Reich.

Historian Simon Schama notes: ‘After the war, Heidegger, whose deep engagement in the ambiguities that lie between language and act marked him out as the link between Nietzsche and modern phenomenology, retreated into the depths of the Black Forest. There for some years, he affected a kind of sylvan⁴ hermitage, still implacably alienated from the technological 20th century’ (1996, 129). If there is no landscape that is not inscribed by history, then the essential place of a poet’s poetic saying is a point of convergence. ‘Saying’ ‘gathers’ with the hidden source or origin of that ‘saying’—what remains ‘unsaid’.

Figure 1.2.The spring with the star-die on top, Todtnauberg.

The hut sits on the northern slope of the valley, facing south and overlooking farmland and the hamlet of Rütte. It is one of the several properties situated on this ridge and remains (to this day) in the possession of the Heidegger family and therefore a private residence. From below it is partly obscured by a small stand of trees planted on level ground at its right hand corner and from above by a more substantial copse to the left of the property. The rundweg ⁵ is a concession to the ‘Heidegger pilgrim’ who makes their way on foot or by car or public transport to this locale in order to attempt to engage Heidegger’s ‘work world’. Robert Mugerauer asks: ‘what goes on in Todtnauberg that is so special?’ He answers: ‘Perhaps the chance to retrieve and keep lost idioms and to experience that still robust way of life and speaking? Perhaps an openness to strangers, and a possibility of insiders coming to accept outsiders as belonging? The giving of region, its locality, dialect, intertwined natural and communal rhythms: the giving and receiving of the belonging together—that constitute home and homecoming?’ (Mugerauer 2008, 526)

The rundweg allows the visitor a certain proximity to the hut while attempting to enforce some semblance of privacy (clear signage specifying the family’s desire to keep the uninvited visitor at a distance). Importantly, modern transport links have made the hut and rundweg more accessible than in Heidegger’s lifetime (a regular train from Freiburg takes one to Kirchzarten where a bus heads into the mountains, dropping one at Todtnauberg’s Rathaus—a journey of just over an hour). However, historically it was a difficult place to get to from Heidegger’s permanent home in the Rötebuckweg in the northern suburb of Freiburg-Zähringen. Heidegger’s wife Elfride noted in 1923:

Reaching the cabin at Todtnauberg was an arduous business, particularly in winter. There were various ways of getting to Todtnauberg: by train to Hinterzarten and from there on foot or by ski over Rinken, Feldberg and Stübenwasen; by train via Lörrach up the Wiesen Valley to Todtnau and from there on foot up a steep slope; by train to Kirchzarten and from there by carriage via Oberried and Notschrei … All these routes were arduous, especially in adverse weather conditions. (E. Heidegger in Heidegger 2008, 89)

Elfride Heidegger’s description of the alternative routes to reach the hut from Freiburg places the idea of the path as a means of accessing a location at the forefront of the topography of Todtnauberg. A path is the tracing of a journey into a landscape and marks the trace of passing. The importance of the motif of the ‘path’ throughout Heidegger’s thought remains compelling as it not only acts as a metaphor for the process of thinking but also inscribes itself across the actual topography of Todtnauberg. In addition, Celan’s poem both inscribes and erases through the tracin...