Geopolitics and prosthetics

Abstract

In 1942 Martin Heidegger held a seminar on Hölderlin’s poem The Ister (the Greek name of the river Danube), which served as inspiration for the homonymous film released in 2004. The present essay assesses the impact of this film, the philosophical effect Heidegger’s seminar exerted on the ontology of Europe and its topography, and takes a critical stance regarding its nationalist implications. In 2001, the author of this essay made his own film, Frozen Time, Liquid Memories, about the racija in Novi Sad in 1942, a pogrom of nearly 1.400 jews and serbs; it includes an interpretation and visual quotations from the film The Ister, while the present essay additionally reflects on the implications of both films for the topography of the Danube, for the ontology of Europe, for ethics and geopolitics. Following the ideas expressed in the work of Samuel Weber, the author takes a stance against the nationalist implications of Heidegger’s seminar (and of his newly published Black Notebooks), as well as against both old and recent nationalist appropriation and use of the Danube as a site of war crime ad genocide. The paper is ultimately concerned with the construction and invention of the national and European topography in the philosophy and literature written “after” the Holocaust.