Heidegger dated his POW-camp dialogue to the very day of Germany’s surrender.

Evidence

Heidegger had spent that Danube spring of 1945 writing several new works, including a philosophical dialogue to which he gave the date 8 May 1945 — the day Germany’s surrender became official. It is entitled ‘Evening Conversation: In a Prisoner of War Camp in Russia, between a Younger and an Older Man’. The two characters are German inmates of the POW camp, and when the dialogue opens they have just returned from their day of forced labour in the woods. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 565

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: what did Heidegger want this precise dating to signal? Self-identification with German defeat, or something more self-serving?