Purple Magazine
— F/W 2011 issue 16
Stephan Crasneanscki
This photograph was taken in the southern part of the Black Forest (Schwarzwald) in Germany, on the steep side of a vast mountain valley, 1,150 meters high. The German philosopher Martin Heidegger’s off-the-beaten-track hut sits nearby. From 1933-1935 Heidegger, the dean of the University of Freiburg, was an adherent of National Socialism. At the end of the Second World War he became a recluse in the Black Forest. Here he concentrated on the existential question of the essence of being. The Schwarzwald, according to Heidegger, added a sense of coherence to his philosophical thought.
Heidegger often took long winding walks in the forest. Like those of a trekking woodsman, his paths, or Holzwege, weren’t always well trod and might as easily finished up at an impasse of unpredictability. They did not always take him where he wanted to go. People who don’t have the knowledge and experience of the forest often do not get anywhere, for while the forest is penetrable, it’s as complicated as thought.
