Martin Heidegger was born in the small town of Messkirch on the edge of the Black Forest in 1889, a few months after Nietzsche rushed across the Piazza Carlo Alberto in Turin, threw his arms around a cab-horse, and never came out of the embrace. This conjuncture was to be an important one for the young Heidegger; he saw a line of continuity in the idea that he came into the world as Nietzsche’s reason left it. Heidegger would go on to compare philosophical communication as speaking from mountain top to mountain top, and Nietzsche, in his Alpine seclusion, was, for him, the nearest peak. As had been the case for Nietzsche growing up in a different corner of provincial Germany, it didn’t take long for Heidegger and those around him to recognize his brilliance. He excelled in all areas, from math to Greek, theology to physics, and the choice was open to him. His staunchly Catholic family favored theology; he chose philosophy. When he completed his studies, he moved to the picturesque university town of Freiburg im Breisgau in a different part of the Black Forest to work with Edmund Husserl, the founder of a new school of philosophy: phenomenology. Husserl felt that it did not suffice to examine the abstractions and to trace the contours of the conceptual systems of such thinkers as Leibniz and Hegel. For him, a philosopher worthy of the name needed to examine more closely how one arrived at such abstractions through how one experienced individual phenomena. And how one arrived at ideas and conceptual systems was through the thousand affects and attitudes that condition them, which meant that the phenomenologist needed to go, in his words, “back to the things themselves.”

As Husserl’s assistant, Heidegger grew famous the old-fashioned way: by talking. His lectures drew ever larger and more passionate crowds, and word of mouth soon carried his fame beyond the confines of the Black Forest. Intellectuals throughout Germany began to speak of “a hidden philosopher-king,” the successor of earlier princes of the mind such as Kant and Nietzsche. Word even reached Kant’s former home in Königsberg on the farthest side of Germany (in the part of East Prussia that is today Russia), where the eighteen-year-old wunderkind Hannah Arendt was finishing high school. A short while later, she traveled to the Black Forest and began to study with him. They fell in love.

Despite a truly remarkable depth and breadth of knowledge, neither then nor later did Heidegger have the speech or the mannerisms of high European cultivation. He walked, talked, and dressed like someone from the Black Forest, Germany’s closest equivalent to the Ozarks. Too intelligent not to make a virtue of necessity, Heidegger cultivated a quaint and bucolic image, wearing to his lectures a traditional outfit that his more metropolitan students dubbed “the ontological suit.” What seemed to them, at first sight, faintly ridiculous grew less so as they listened to the brilliant young professor with the hypnotizing dark eyes speak about philosophy’s furthest origins—and its bright future.

Then as now, publication was required for academic advancement, and so, at the insistence of Husserl and others, Heidegger began to plan a work that would secure his position. In 1922, his wife Elfriede had inherited a modest sum, and to avoid the galloping inflation of the period she invested it in a secluded retreat for her philosopher-husband and their growing family. She found a small plot of hillside land in the higher reaches of the Black Forest rendered inexpensive because a stream cut through it, making it too marshy for farming. She had a small hut, twenty by twenty-three feet, built into a hillside there, commanding a beautiful view of the valley below and the Alps rising in the distance. Soon thereafter, her husband began, at last, to write.

Heidegger knew what he wanted to write about, but he did not yet know how. He felt that he had stumbled upon something monumental, the metaphysical equivalent of a corpse in the cellar. It seemed to him that philosophy had lost something which it desperately needed back. This thing was as simple to sense as it was hard to express: “being.” Inclined towards fundamental questions, he asked himself: What did we mean when we speak of “being”? The answer seemed, at first sight, self-evident. Being was all this—everything around us, everything in which we live and breathe and of which we are a part: being is the being that all beings in one mysterious manner or another share. For most philosophers, this was both true and not a philosophical question—and here was where Heidegger saw his task lying. For him, the largest question that philosophy might ask was this: what do we mean when we speak of a being common to all modes and forms of individual beings? And he saw Western philosophy as having gone astray in that it had ceased to ask this question. Philosophy’s first and most fundamental problem—the true task of metaphysics—had fallen into neglect. He recalled that Aristotle said that philosophy was born of wonder. Heidegger located “the wonder of wonders” in the idea “that being is.” This wonder, and the question that lay at philosophy’s origin and its heart, had, however, been abandoned—or, in his words, it had been “forgotten.” His goal would be to remind his age—but he had not yet figured out how.

For his special task, Heidegger soon realized that he needed special tools. He saw that the terms and concepts employed by traditional metaphysical inquiry were little suited to the task at hand and would break under the strain of what he envisioned. And so he retreated to the Black Forest, and on long walks along its wooded paths, in glades and clearings, skiing down its slopes, and in long hours poring over books in his hut, he patiently crafted a special language for his unusual task. One thing was immediately apparent: it wasn’t pretty. German played a role in this. For him, “the forgetting of being,” as he called it, began early: with the translation of Greek texts into Latin. Things did not get any better with the translations from Latin into the burgeoning Romance languages. But German, in its rugged seclusion, had been spared and, what is more, possessed what he saw as an elective affinity with Western philosophy’s native language, Greek. (When once asked about the status of English as a philosophical language, he curtly responded that it had ceased being one in 1066.) Though German offered special advantages in its similarity to Greek, this was not enough, and Heidegger began employing a German like no other. More classical philosophers such as Ernst Cassirer and the young Walter Benjamin were at a loss as to what he was talking about—but they knew they didn’t like it. Adorno dismissed it as “ontological jargon,” and no less a stylistic master than Adorno’s friend Thomas Mann asked in shocked disbelief upon first reading Heidegger: “Should not such writing be subject to punishment?” A psychologist visiting one of Heidegger’s seminars had a more common reaction: “It was as if a man from Mars had come across a group of earthlings and was trying to communicate with them.”

But while everyone remarked the strangeness of Heidegger’s language, not everyone rejected it, and figures as diverse as Karl Jaspers, Werner Heisenberg, Ernst Jünger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, Pierre Klossowski, and René Char found in it an intensity of expression without compare. For his own part, Heidegger was perfectly aware of the strangeness of what he was saying. In a lecture from 1925, he told his students, “If I am forced to employ here cumbersome and unattractive expressions, this is no mere whim on my part and stems from no special fondness for having my own terminology. Instead, it responds to the constraint placed upon language by the phenomena themselves.” Heidegger saw himself as renewing Husserl’s phenomenology, following the things of the world back to a distant—and thereby strange—origin.

Like his manner and his dress, Heidegger’s new philosophical language bore unabashed signs of its origins. He began Being and Time by apologizing for “the severity and strangeness of my expressions,” and it soon became clear to the book’s readers that these were not the severe or strange expressions of classical metaphysics, not technical-sounding formulations like Kant’s “thing-in-itself” or Hegel’s “sublation” but a new—and strangely sylvan—language. His preferred metaphorical register was that of the area around his hut: of forests and paths, of peaks and valleys, of dwellings and clearings, calls of nature and authentic connectedness with one’s environment. What seemed to most shape his language was the space before which I now, dirty and disoriented, stood.

Several days earlier I had been in Freiburg, clean and well-oriented. Our business in Freiburg done, my wife and I cut across the Black Forest to France (to Strasbourg) and on the way back visited family living in the heart of the Black Forest. Contrary to my expectations, the Black Forest is not black, though it is dark. Eighteenth-century logging removed a great many of the deciduous trees and their lighter greens, leaving the more robust firs and pines to dominate—and darken—the landscape. Also contrary to my expectations, it is hilly, and even, in High Black Forest, mountainous. We visited the ruins of a family of robber barons who controlled from a mighty peak one of the main passageways through the forest; we followed the winding swath of destruction cut by a recent tornado (“Lothar”); we tried to accustom ourselves to the local dialect; and we climbed to mountain peaks from which you can see the Vosges rising on the far side of the valley of the Rhine, as well as the Swiss Alps rising majestically in the hazy distance. After visiting a particularly breathtaking final peak, we began to make our way home, stopping by the side of the road to look at a waterfall. As my wife and her cousin moved towards the waterfall, I stood rooted by a small sign. It pointed towards “Todtnauberg.”

I first heard of the Black Forest in high school, having overheard a friend of my mother’s who taught philosophy say that Being and Time was “the smartest and worst book” he had ever read. Being the adolescent I was, this was appealing, and I soon got my hands on the book. On the first page I read:

Dedicated to Edmund Husserlin friendship and admiration.Todtnauberg in Baden, Black ForestApril 8th 1926.

Given the absurd comprehensiveness of the title, it seemed to me fitting that it had been written in what did not sound like a real place. I knew next to no German, but enough to recognize the word for death, Tod, in the name of the town. Todtnauberg. Death-something-something-mountain, I said to myself. Death Mountain in the Black Forest! I was intrigued, but soon lost my way in the “strange and severe” words of the first chapters and gave up, appropriately enough, in a section entitled “The Task of the Destruction of Ontology.” As I stood with the waterfall sounding in the distance, I recalled the smart, bad book, the strange names, and was as transfixed by the little signpost as if it indicated that nineteen kilometers down the road was an entrance to the underworld.

We were soon on our way. Todtnauberg proved to be tucked away in a lovely and largely untouched valley. Because of the small and steep roads and the almost total absence of signs, it took us far longer than we had expected to reach it—and when we did, there was little to reach. There was no center to speak of, and virtually no stores, and so we drove up and down steep and narrow roads, some paved and some not, asking if people knew where Martin Heidegger’s hut was and reaping a variety of befuddled “No’s.” At last we saw an elderly woman in well-worn hiking boots walking a large dog, and when we asked our question, she responded brightly, “Martin Heidegger Rundweg, of course,” and gestured to the valley’s crest a few kilometers away. After a few wrong turns and a steep final ascent, we at last saw a small wooden arrow with the words Martin Heidegger Rundweg carved into it. A few hundred yards away was a sign with a photo of the aging Heidegger, looking frankly smug, and a short text with the incipit: “Wer gross denkt, muss gross irren”: “He who will think greatly, must err greatly.” I thought this was funny. A few hours later, I found it less so.

Heidegger never finished Being and Time, but this did nothing to limit its success. He published a first installment, and this was enough to secure his growing fame and make his career. He learned many lessons from this first and unfinished treatise, and in the works to follow chose the smaller scales of lectures and essays. The first sign we had seen told us that the Martin Heidegger Rundweg was precisely 6.4 kilometers long and had five informational points like the first one. Rundweg means a circular path, and finding it on the sign seemed perfectly normal, but when we failed to reach the next information point the expected 0.4 kilometers later, the word began to play upon our minds. Heidegger had been fascinated by paths and circles, and often invoked “the hermeneutic circle.” If you wanted to talk about the origin of the work of art, as he did, how would you begin? You began with the artist, for the artist creates the work of art and is thereby its origin. But is an artist who does not create, or no longer creates, works of art still an artist? Is it not, rather, that the work of art is the origin of the artist? The answer to these questions are all, yes and no—or, seen from a different angle, involve “the hermeneutic circle.” Heidegger wrote about situations where “what is at issue is not avoiding the hermeneutic circle, it is in entering it in the right way.” Circular forms of reasoning could not be everywhere and always shunned—and nothing was gained by trying to avoid them. Everything instead depended “on how one entered the circle.” My wife and I had entered the circle of the Martin Heidegger Rundweg at the beginning and were enjoying the tree-lined peaceful walk bathed in afternoon sun, with its intermittent glimpses through the trees of the valley below and the mountain tops in the distance. But the trail markers that had been accompanying us seemed to have disappeared. Our goal—the information point that the first panel told us would be called “Heidegger’s Hut: Why the Hut is Not a Museum”—was nowhere to be found.