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11 Heidegger in Benjamin’s City On the steep slope of a mountain valley a little chalet eighteen feet by twenty all around meadow and pinewood . . . —Kenneth White, “Black Forest—Heidegger at Home” The work of Walter Benjamin is inextricably bound with the images and ideas associated with the metropolitan spaces and places that figure so prominently in his writing, and in close proximity to which his own life, from his childhood in Berlin to the last years in Paris, was lived. The work of Martin Heidegger, on the other hand, is usually taken to bring with it an almost entirely contrary set of associations—those of the rural and the provincial, of the peasant and the countryside—that can be seen as themselves deriving from Heidegger’s own rootedness in the Alemannic -Swabian countryside, and in particular, his connection to the village of Messkirch in which he was born, in which he spent his childhood , and in whose graveyard he lies buried. It would seem that the distance between Benjamin and Heidegger—between Paris and Messkirch—could not be greater. But to what extent is Heidegger’s apparent attachment to the provincial and the rural actually tied to the philosophical positions that he developed? Might it be the case that such details of personal attitude and preference are actually secondary to a more basic and philosophically salient set of considerations in which the difference between the metropolitan and the provincial, at least as ordinarily understood, is of much less significance than it might otherwise appear? How might Heidegger find himself in Benjamin’s city, and what 226 Chapter 11 might be the place of the city in Heidegger’s own thought? Moreover, what light might such considerations shed, in turn, on the work of Benjamin , and how might Benjamin be placed in relation to the landscape in which Heidegger locates himself? Let us start, however, by leaving Benjamin, and the city, to one side for the moment, and looking instead to the provincialism that seems so apparent in Heidegger—a provincialism that is often taken to be most clearly expressed not only in his attachment to his home village of Messkirch, but also by the role played by another place, and a particular building in that place, namely, Todtnauberg, in the Black Forest, and the small three-room hut Heidegger built there.1 It was to this hut that Heidegger retreated in times of personal crisis, as well as in times of intense philosophical productivity—it was there that the final draft of Being and Time was completed—and it was also to the hut that Heidegger invited his most important guests. The significance of the hut, and its rural location, in Heidegger’s life, and so also, one might assume, in his thought, is indicated by the short essay, published in 1934 (and first given as a radio talk the same year), “Why Do I Stay in the Provinces?” There he describes the world of Todtnauberg: 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 the farm houses with their large overhanging roofs. Higher up the slope the meadows and pasture lands lead to the woods with its dark fir-trees, old and towering. Over everything there stands a clear summer sky, and in its radiant expanse two hawks glide around in wide circles.2 The reality of this world, Heidegger tells us, has a space opened for it by the work undertaken within it, a work that “remains embedded in what happens in the region.” He goes on: This philosophical work does not take its course like the aloof studies of some eccentric. It belongs right in the midst of the peasants’ work. When the young farmboy drags his heavy sled up the slope and guides it, piled high with beech logs, down the dangerous slope to his house, when the herdsman, lost in thought and slow of step, drives his cattle up the slope, when the farmer in his shed gets the countless shingles ready for his roof, my work is of the same sort. It is intimately rooted in...

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