He tells the anecdote about how to tell a joke: “A small man comes into the cabin, six feet tall, with a rucksack.

He wants to go up to the Schauinsland.

A second little man joins them, six feet tall, with a rucksack.

They go up and go the same way.

Of course, they have to talk to each other.

One turns to Wieden, the other to Todtnauberg.

That was Professor Heidegger and Dr.

Goldschmidt ”- the philosopher and a respected judge from Hamburg, who a few years later had to give up his profession and was deported to Theresienstadt.

The episode is a bad joke in the life of the as yet unborn narrator: “Just imagine: my father talked to Heidegger for hours.

They got on very well.

The one as reactionary as the other. "

Juerg Altwegg

Freelance author in the features section.

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We are sitting in Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt's apartment on Rue de Belleville in the twentieth arrondissement of Paris.

It is the year before the pandemic.

It was in this house that we had met for the first time four decades earlier.

Valery Giscard d'Estaing was then President and Goldschmidt a German teacher in the banlieue.

He had translated Nietzsche's "Zarathustra".

In the Quinzaine littéraire he wrote about German-speaking writers - many of them owe their breakthrough in France to him.

The reason for this first visit (FAZ of September 5, 1979) was a “German wave” in Paris, triggered by the first election to the European Parliament.

The magazines brought out special issues, Hachette launched a “Bibliothèque allemande”.

Günter Grass was a guest on the legendary literary television program "Apostrophes".

Private reasons

Sartre was blind and Marxism had gambled away its cultural hegemony.

Grass had to uphold the model of the committed writer.

At the same time, the French rise of the "apolitical poet" Peter Handke began.

Goldschmidt's finding: Handke offers an alternative to "écrivain français" and Grass as its German incarnation.

The year before, the epoch-making exhibition “Paris - Berlin” had taken place. The "Nouvelle Droite", which appeared out of nowhere in the post-war period, rehabilitated fascist thinking - in both countries - and prophesied reunification. At the time, Goldschmidt did not really believe in a permanent improvement in Franco-German relations. He was born in Hamburg in 1928 as Jürgen-Arthur Goldschmidt into a Jewish family that had converted to Protestantism. His father was 58 years old when he was born, his mother 46. Ten years later, his parents sent him into exile with his four years older brother Erich. They survived the war in a French boarding school, the younger one stayed in the country. Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt later became eerie about the German turmoil there,The cult around Heidegger was particularly unbearable. He first scourged him in 1974 in the daily Le Monde.

Heidegger, who was revered by the French philosophers as a German master thinker, met his father for private reasons: Maria, the Goldschmidt's eldest child, born in 1906, studied in Freiburg and fell in love with Ludwig Landgrebe. In 1933 they got married. Landgrebe and Heidegger were Edmund Husserl's assistants. “My brother-in-law behaved very nobly and did not get a divorce,” says Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt. Because of his Jewish wife, Landgrebe had not been able to become a professor.