In January 2022, during the Omicron surge of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the world was shut into screens and rooms tense with anxiety, I read Anne Carson’s prose poem ‘Four Talks’. The poem was dense and allusive. I was grateful for the intellectual distraction. The first section is titled ‘Short Talk on Todtnauberg’. This, I discovered, is the German village in the Black Forest where the philosopher Martin Heidegger had a chalet and wrote portions of Being and Time. In 1967, the Romanian poet and Holocaust survivor Paul Celan went there to meet Heidegger, who had been associated with the Nazis....
Monitoring Antisemitism Intel
