Research Projects

Heidegger's Hut

Adam Sharr

Adam Sharr's book Heidegger's Hut will be published by The MIT Press in 2006.

Beginning in the summer of 1922, philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) occupied a small, three-room cabin in the Black Forest Mountains of southern Germany. He called it "die Hütte" ("the hut"). Over the years, Heidegger worked on many of his most famous writings in this cabin, from his early lectures to his last enigmatic texts. He claimed an intellectual and emotional intimacy with the building and its surroundings, and even suggested that the landscape expressed itself through him, almost without agency. In Heidegger's Hut, Adam Sharr explores this intense relationship of thought, place, and person.

Heidegger's mountain hut has been an object of fascination for many, including architects interested in his writings about "dwelling" and "place." Sharr's account--the first substantive investigation of the building and Heidegger's life there--reminds us that, in approaching Heidegger's writings, it is important to consider the circumstances in which the philosopher, as he himself said, felt "transported" into the work's "own rhythm." Indeed, Heidegger's apparent abdication of agency and tendency toward romanticism seem especially significant in light of his troubling involvement with the Nazi regime in the early 1930s.

Sharr draws on original research, including interviews with Heidegger's relatives, as well as on written accounts of the hut by Heidegger and his visitors. The book's evocative photographs include scenic and architectural views taken by the author and many remarkable images of a septuagenarian Heidegger in the hut taken by the photojournalist Digne Meller-Markovicz.

There are many ways to interpret Heidegger's hut--as the site of heroic confrontation between philosopher and existence; as the petit bourgeois escape of a misguided romantic; as a place overshadowed by fascism; or as an entirely unremarkable little building. Heidegger's Hut does not argue for any one reading, but guides readers toward their own possible interpretations of the importance of "die Hütte."

Extracts from selected reviews:

"Heidegger's Hut is and is not a book about a hut. It's about how a place inspired a life's work, and how that work inspired modern architectural theory and, to a lesser degree, the sustainability movement.... Many of the book's photos are posed, though the light is beautiful. The hut has a confidence, a rightness that is oddly indisputable, making in the end, even the philosopher's work seem transient and insubstantial."
The Los Angeles Times

"Offering clear and precise structural and phenomenological descriptions of the hut, Sharr gives us access to the habitus that conditioned not only the essential concepts but equally the inimitable style - as richly suggestive for some as it is emptily obscurantist for others - of Heidegger's thinking. It is a beautifully produced book, its verbal account of the hut fleshing out a compelling visual record of its interior and exterior, as well as its surrounding landscape. Reproductions of the Spiegel photojournaltst Digne Meller-Marcovicz's 1968 document of daily life in the hut casts fascinating light on the relationship between thinking and dwelling in Heidegger's thought. Heidegger's detractors will likely find confirmation in the portentousness of his studied poses; moreover, Sharr's discussion of Heidegger's decision to electrify and install a telephone in the hut provokes the question of whether his talk of "authentic" poetic dwelling was, as Adomo's withering phrase would have it, so much "jargon".
Josh Cohen,
TLS

"As Adam Sharr reveals in his remarkable study Heidegger's Hut, the philosopher's timber-shingled cabin (which had no running water and, at least for the first decade, no electricity) can be interpreted as a locus of contemplation, a romantic escape, and a place where, given the politically problematic nature of Heidegger's writings, fascist over-tones cannot but linger"
Andrea Walker, Bookforum