ABSTRACT
Heidegger was born in Messkirch, then a pious, very conservative agricultural town, to a poor lower-middle-class, devoutly religious Catholic family. His early experiences of nature and craftsmanship, combined with a typically Catholic sense of guilt for he also grew up in an atmosphere saturated with Christian doctrines of sin and redemption became central to his later philosophy. From an early age Heidegger displayed a keen interest in religion and seemed destined for the priesthood. In 1903 he gained a scholarship to the Gymnasium in Konstanz, where he lived in a Catholic boarding house. In 1919 Heidegger began lecturing in philosophy at Freiburg as a privatdozent under the guidance of Husserl. Husserl held the chair of philosophy at the university, where Heidegger soon became his most trusted assistant, helping develop phenomenology, the movement pioneered by Husserl. Heidegger had shown little interest in politics, normally voting for small regional parties, but in the early 1930s he began to be drawn towards Nazism.
