Martin Heidegger Poem by Paul Hartal

Born in Messkirch, in the Black Forest region.
the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1884-1976)
studied philosophy under the phenomenologist
Edmund Husserl, a Jewish scholar at the University
of Freiburg. In 1933 when Heidegger became the rector
of Freiburg University, he delivered an inaugural speech
in which he praised Hitler. Heidegger remained
a committed Nazi to the very end of the Third Reich.
According to record he humiliated his former teacher
Husserl and banned him to use the university library.
As a philosopher, Heidegger identified the central
problem of philosophy in existence, why do things
exist, rather than nothing? His term for human life
was Dasein, being there. He saw human life
as a process leading to death. The basic mode of
being in the world, Heidegger believed, was sorge, concern
with participation and involvement with survival.
He reified nothingness
making it into a concrete thing.
Although he had a wife and was the father of two children,
Heidegge became involved in an extra-marital affair
with a Jewish student who was half of his age. The student,
Hannah Arendt, rose to eminence as a political scientist,
author of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) , The Human
Condition (1958) , as well as of othe volumes.
Arendt traveled to Jerusalem and attended the Eichmann trial.
She found Eichmann, a major perpetrator of the Holocaust,
to be a thoughtless, common man, a rather ordinary
bureaucrat, who represented 'the banality of evil'.