Tobias Keiling and Ian Alexander Moore, Spoiling the Party? Heidegger’s Lectures on Trakl at Spa Bühlerhöhe – b2o (boundary 2 online)

It all began with plans for a birthday party. Gerhard Stroomann, chief physician and charismatic leader of the posh spa resort and sanitarium Bühlerhöhe (imagine Thomas Mann’s character Hofrat Behrens, transplanted to a postwar “magic mountain” in the Black Forest) would be turning sixty-five in 1952, and he wanted to celebrate it with a weekend of events devoted to his beloved poet Georg Trakl. Even more, he wanted to hear the philosopher Martin Heidegger speak about the poet. Heidegger had already given a few lectures at the spa while he was still prohibited from teaching at the university, including one on language under the guise of a commentary on Trakl’s poem “A Winter Evening.” Although irritated by the overeager, elite milieu of the luxury retreat—“it was,” as one eyewitness reported about the event, “very highbrow, […] teeming with counts and princesses, a bit snobbish”—Heidegger accepted Stroomann’s invitation.