Il poeta come amico di casa: Heidegger e Hebel

The poet as friend of the house: Heidegger and Hebel The Swabian poet Hebel is for Heidegger the poet of the Heimat, in a way that is both close to and far apart from the poetic experience of another Swabian poet, Friedrich Hölderlin. At the center of Hebel’s Alemannic lyric poems (Alemannische Gedichte) lies the nostalgia for his homeland. This nostalgia, in Heidegger’s view, lets the presence of the homeland disclose itself in a fuller, and thus more essential, fashion. That’s because the presencing is experienced as one with the absencing. This kind of presence reveals the very heart of what it means to dwell in the homeland. The essential homeland is for Heidegger “nature”, not in the modern sense, but rather in the Greek sense of physis, the arising and emerging that lets things be in their presence. The essential homeland is therefore being itself in its fundamental proximity to the human being. The Heimat appears as such in language, and precisely in poetic language. Hebel writes in Alemannic dialect: in Heidegger’s view his poetry discloses the essence of dialect as the essence of language itself. It’s only moving from this background, that Hebel, according to Heidegger, has been able to write the beautiful prose of the calendar stories for the Rheinländischer Hausfreund.