Abstract

These are two of the questions that inform the extraordinary open letter that Martin Heidegger published in 1955 in a Festschrift celebrating Ernst Jünger's sixtieth birthday.2 Heidegger's letter was in response to an essay that Jünger had contributed six years earlier, in 1949, to a Festschrift on Heidegger's own sixtieth birthday. So there was a certain reciprocity in the exchange: a favor returned, a public gesture of respect mirroring an earlier one.