ABSTRACT
The German press is, of course, crowded with appreciations and re-evaluations of the life and work of Martin Heidegger. In France, the fascinated intellectual preoccupation with Heidegger's philosophy could be found among poets as well as thinkers and it was especially striking on the intellectual Left—where in Germany not a book of Heidegger was ever cracked. To read Heidegger in his original German, with its recondite researches into outlandish etymological roots is to come away with a lesson in tortured semantics which is surely untranslatable. For the German literary critics of today the most decisive commentary on their great poet Holderlin is the work of the French writer Pierre Berteaux. Thus, among the various basic currents of anti-Soviet dissident thought—the religious-traditional; the liberal-libertarian; the back-to-Vladimir Lenin revisionists—it seemed to be that Andrei Amalrik, always formulating carefully and undogmatically, belonged to the spirit of Andrei Sakharov, rather than Alexander Solzhenitsyn or Roy Medvedev.
