At the Existentialist Café (20 page)

Not all the book’s experiments work, but Sartre captures the weird quality of a week in which millions of people were trying to get used to a different way of thinking about their lives — their projects or concerns, as Heidegger would have said. The book also reveals the first signs of a shift in Sartre’s thought. In coming years, he would become ever more interested in the way human beings can be swept up by large-scale historical forces, while still each remaining free and individual.

As for Sartre personally, he found the answer for his anxieties of 1938 in, of all things, reading Heidegger. He embarked on the foothills of
Being and Time
, though he did not ascend the steeper slopes until two years later. Looking back from that later point, he recalled this as a year in which he craved ‘
a philosophy that was not just a contemplation but a wisdom, a heroism, a holiness’. He compared it to the period in ancient Greece, after the death of Alexander the Great, when Athenians turned away from the calm reasonings of Aristotelian science towards the more personal and ‘more brutal’ thinking of the Stoics and Epicureans — philosophers ‘who taught them to live’.

In Freiburg, Husserl was no longer around to witness the events of that autumn, but his widow Malvine was still living in their fine suburban house, guarding his library and his huge
Nachlass
of manuscripts, papers and unpublished works. Living alone, seventy-eight years old, officially classed as Jewish despite her Protestant faith, she was
vulnerable, but for the moment she kept danger away mainly by the sheer force of her defiant personality.

Earlier that decade, when her husband was still alive but after the Nazi takeover, they had discussed moving his documents to Prague, where it seemed they might be safer. A former student of Husserl, the Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka, was willing to help arrange this. It did not happen, which was fortunate as the papers would not have been safe at all.

Prague had grown into something of a centre for phenomenology through the early twentieth century, partly because of Tomáš Masaryk — Czechoslovakia’s president, and the friend who had persuaded Husserl to study with Franz Brentano. He died in 1937, and was spared seeing the disaster that befell his country, but in the meantime he had done much to encourage the development of phenomenology and had helped other former Brentano students to collect their teacher’s papers in a Prague-based archive. In 1938, with the threat of a German invasion, Brentano’s archives were in danger. Phenomenologists could only be relieved that the Husserl collection was not there with them.

But Freiburg was not safe either. If war came, the city might be among the first to see conflict, being near the French border. Already,
Malvine Husserl was at the mercy of the Nazis: if they decided to storm the house she could not do much to protect its contents.

The situation of Husserl’s
Nachlass
, and of his widow, attracted the attention of a Belgian philosopher and Franciscan monk named Herman Van Breda. He put together a
proposal urging Louvain University’s Institut Supérieur de Philosophie to support transcription of key Freiburg papers — work that could only be done by former assistants able to read Husserl’s shorthand. With Edith Stein having become a Carmelite nun and Heidegger having gone his own way, this mainly meant two men who had been working with Husserl in recent years: Eugen Fink, originally from nearby Konstanz but now based in Freiburg, and Ludwig Landgrebe, currently in Prague.

Van Breda initially suggested financing the project
in situ
in Freiburg, but with the prospect of war this looked less advisable. He
noted that Malvine Husserl was determined to carry on ‘as if the Nazi regime did not exist and without showing that she was its victim’, which was admirable, but it might not be good for the papers. On 29 August 1938, as the Czech crisis began brewing, Van Breda travelled to Freiburg and met her and Eugen Fink; together they showed him the collection. He marvelled at the sheer visual impact of it: rows of folders containing around 40,000 pages of writings in Husserl’s shorthand, plus another 10,000 typed or handwritten pages transcribed by his assistants, and in the library some 2,700 volumes collected over nearly sixty years and countless article offprints, many covered with Husserl’s pencil notes.

(Illustrations Credit 6.1)

Van Breda persuaded Malvine Husserl that something must be done. Returning to Louvain, he had another persuasion job to do: he talked his colleagues into agreeing to transfer and house the collection there, rather than funding a project remotely. This done, he went back
to Freiburg, where Ludwig Landgrebe had now also arrived, leaving an unnerving situation in Prague. It was mid-September: it seemed that war might start in weeks or even days.

The immediate question was
how
to move the stuff. The manuscripts were more portable than the books, and more of a priority. But it certainly was not safe to drive for the border with thousands of sheets of paper, all written in what looked like an unreadable secret code.

A better idea was to take them to a Belgian embassy office and thence out of the country in a diplomatic pouch, guaranteeing immunity from interference. But the nearest office with an immunity agreement was in Berlin, a long way off in the wrong direction. Van Breda asked monks at a Franciscan monastery near Freiburg if they could hide the manuscripts or help smuggle them out, but they were reluctant. Then a Benedictine nun stepped in: Sister Adelgundis Jägerschmidt, from a nearby Lioba Sisters convent. She was another former student of phenomenology who had visited Husserl regularly in his last illness, in defiance of the rules against associating with Jews. She now volunteered to take the manuscripts herself to a small house owned by her fellow sisters in Konstanz, near the Swiss border. From there, she said, the nuns could carry the manuscripts bit by bit, in small packages, across to Switzerland.

It was a nerve-racking plan. If war broke out during the operation, the manuscripts could end up split between the two locations with the borders closed; some might be lost in the middle. The danger to the nuns was also obvious. It seemed the best option available, however, so on 19 September the heroic Sister Adelgundis loaded three heavy suitcases with 40,000 manuscript pages, and set off by train to Konstanz.

Unfortunately, although the sisters were willing to house the manuscripts temporarily, they considered smuggling them across the border too risky. Adelgundis left the suitcases with them and returned to give Van Breda the bad news.

He reverted to the idea of taking them to the Belgian embassy in Berlin. That now meant detouring via Konstanz to get them, and this time he went himself. So, on 22 September — the day Chamberlain met
Hitler and learned that Hitler had upped his demands on Czech territory — Van Breda travelled to the convent. He collected the suitcases and continued to Berlin on a night train. One can imagine the tension: war looming, three heavy suitcases packed with what looked like coded secrets, a train rattling through a dark night. Arriving in the city on the morning of Friday 23 September, Van Breda entrusted the suitcases to a Franciscan monastery outside the centre, then went to the embassy — to learn that the ambassador was away and no decisions could be taken. The junior officials did agree, however, to look after the cases in the meantime.

So it was back to the Franciscans, and back to the embassy again with the suitcases. At last, on Saturday 24 September, Van Breda saw them locked away in the embassy safe. He travelled back to Freiburg, then out of Germany to Louvain. He kept with him just a handful of texts, so that the transcription project could start. To his relief, the border guards waved him through without looking at the incomprehensible handwriting.

A few days later, the European crisis was resolved — temporarily. Benito Mussolini brokered a meeting in Munich on 29 September, attended by Hitler, Daladier and Chamberlain. No one from Czechoslovakia was in the room when, in the early hours of 30 September, Daladier and Chamberlain caved in to Hitler’s increased demands. The next day, German forces entered the Sudetenland.

Chamberlain flew back to Britain triumphant; Daladier flew back to France ashamed and full of dread. Greeted by a cheering crowd as he got off the plane, he reportedly muttered,
‘
Les cons
!’ — the idiots! — at least that was the story Sartre seems to have heard. Once the initial relief passed, many in both France and Britain doubted that the agreement could last. Sartre and Merleau-Ponty were pessimistic; Beauvoir preferred to hope that
peace might prevail. The three of them debated the matter at length.

As a side effect, the peace deal reduced the urgency about getting Husserl’s papers out of Germany. It was not until November 1938 that the bulk of them were transported from Berlin to Louvain. When they
arrived, they were installed in the university library, which proudly organised a display. No one could know that in two years’ time the German army would invade Belgium and the documents would be in danger again.

That November, Van Breda returned to Freiburg. Malvine
Husserl had now decided to seek a visa so as to join her son and daughter in the US, but this took a long time, so in the meantime Van Breda arranged for her to move to Belgium. She arrived in Louvain in June 1939, joining
Fink and Landgrebe, who had moved there in the spring and were getting to work. With her came a huge cargo: a container of her furniture, the full Husserl library in sixty boxes, her husband’s ashes in an urn, and a portrait of him, which Franz
Brentano and his wife Ida von Lieben had jointly painted as an engagement present before the Husserls’ marriage.

Brentano’s papers — still stored in an archive office in Prague — had meanwhile been through their own adventure. When Hitler moved on from the Sudetenland to occupy the rest of Czechoslovakia in March 1939, a group of archivists and scholars gathered most of them and spirited them out of the country on the very last civilian plane to leave. The papers ended up in the Houghton Library at Harvard University, and are still there today. The few files left behind were defenestrated through the office window by German soldiers, and mostly lost.

The
Husserl archives survived the war and are mostly still in Louvain, with his library. They have kept researchers busy for over seventy-five years, and have generated a collected edition under the title
Husserliana
. So far, this comprises forty-two volumes of collected works, nine volumes of extra ‘materials’, thirty-four volumes of miscellaneous documents and correspondence, and thirteen volumes of official English translations.

One of the first to travel to Louvain to see the archive was Maurice
Merleau-Ponty, who already knew Husserl’s earlier work well, and had read about the unpublished manuscripts in an article in the
Revue internationale de philosophie
. In March 1939, he wrote to
arrange a visit to Father Van Breda so as to pursue his special interest in the phenomenology of perception. Van Breda welcomed him, and Merleau-Ponty spent a blissful first week of April in Louvain, absorbed in the unedited and unpublished sections which Husserl had intended to add to
Ideas
and to
The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology
.

These late works of Husserl’s are different in spirit from the earlier ones. To Merleau-Ponty, they suggested that Husserl had begun moving away from his inward, idealist interpretation of phenomenology in his last years, towards a less isolated picture of how one exists in a
world alongside other people and immersed in sensory experience. Merleau-Ponty even wondered whether Husserl had absorbed some of this from Heidegger — an interpretation with which not everyone agrees. Other influences might be seen too: from sociology, and perhaps from Jakob von Uexküll’s studies of how different species experience their ‘environment’ or
Umwelt
. Whatever the source, Husserl’s new thinking included reflections on what he called the
Lebenswelt
, or ‘life-world’ — that barely noticed social, historical and physical context in which all our activities take place, and which we generally take for granted. Even our bodies rarely require conscious attention, yet a sense of
being embodied
is part of almost every experience we have. As I move around or reach out to grasp something, I sense my own limbs and the arrangement of my physical self in the world. I feel my hands and feet from within; I don’t have to look in a mirror to see how they are positioned. This is known as ‘
proprioception’ — the perception of self — and it is an important aspect of experience which I tend to notice only when something goes wrong with it. When I encounter
others, says Husserl, I also recognise them implicitly as beings who have ‘their personal surrounding world, oriented around their living bodies’. Body, life-world, proprioception and social context are all integrated into the texture of worldly being.

One can see why Merleau-Ponty saw signs of Heidegger’s philosophy of Being-in-the-world in this new interest of Husserl’s. There were other connections too: Husserl’s late works show him considering the long processes of culture and history, just as Heidegger did. But here
there is a great difference between them. Heidegger’s writings on the history of Being are suffused with a longing for some
home
time, a lost age or place to which philosophy should be traced, and from which it should be renewed. Heidegger’s dream-home often calls to mind the forested Germanic world of his childhood, with its craftsmanship and silent wisdom. At other times, it evokes archaic Greek culture, which he considered the last period in which humanity had philosophised properly. Heidegger was not alone in being fascinated by Greece; it was a sort of mania among Germans at the time. But other German thinkers often focused on the flowering of philosophy and scholarship in the fourth century BC, the time of Socrates and Plato, whereas Heidegger saw that as the period in which everything had started going wrong. For him, the philosophers who truly connected with Being were pre-Socratics such as Heraclitus, Parmenides and Anaximander. In any case, what Heidegger’s writings on Germany and Greece share is the mood of someone yearning to go
back
into the deep forest, into childhood innocence and into the dark waters from which the first swirling chords of thought had stirred. Back — back to a time when societies were simple, profound and poetic.