Contemporary observers read Heidegger’s persona as rural and unpolished

Evidence

Toni Cassirer, Ernst’s wife, found Heidegger vulgar. She remembered his arrival on the first evening: he literally turned heads, coming in after the other delegates had assembled to listen to an after-dinner speech. The door opened — rather as happens in The Magic Mountain, where the slinky love interest Clavdia Chauchat habitually enters the dining room late and with a careless bang of the door. Toni Cassirer looked round, and saw a beady-eyed little man. He looked to her like one of the Italian workmen who were numerous in German lands in those years, except that he was wearing his Black Forest garb. He seemed ‘as awkward as a peasant who had stumbled into a royal court’. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 244

Categorization

• XREF: The Magic Mountain comparison connects to the reader’s literary background and captures the social dynamics feel. — connects to: Heidegger’s peasant self-image masked an unusually dominant personality — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 180; Heidegger equated philosophical thinking with the physical labours of farmers and herdsmen. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 313; Heidegger was recognized by contemporary Parisian playwrights as an aloof hut-dwelling philosopher. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 657
• CANDY: The image of Heidegger as a peasant stumbling into a royal court is a memorable, telling anecdote about the philosopher’s outsider persona.