ABSTRACT
The quiet Swabian town of Messkirch is the home of St. Martin's, one of the ornate Catholic churches that grace many southern German villages. In the shadow of the church, a massive statue of a soldier stands atop a column inscribed, “To our dead heroes of the World War 1914–1918”. A less somber monument honors a local celebrity, the composer Conradin Kreutzer. Just a few steps away, a plaque bearing a poor likeness of the other well-known Messkircher, Martin Heidegger, marks the house in which the thinker spent his boyhood. His father, Friedrich Heidegger, was the sexton who looked after St. Martin's Church. A brief climb takes a visitor to the hilltop graveyard that contains the Heidegger family plot. All but one of the tombstones in the plot are marked with crosses. The stone inscribed “Martin Heidegger, 1889–1976” is marked with a star, recalling a line written by the philosopher in 1947: “To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky.” 1
