At the Kornmarkt in Göttingen

As the weather turned out to be moderate this morning we soon decided to take the slow train to Göttingen.The journey takes an hour and drives you through a lesser known landscape of Lower Saksony. Most of the villages have survived there in their mediaeval structure and surroundings. It is a poor but attractive country side. Many people finding their jobs in the busy economic centre in and around Göttingen. At the southwestern side of the Harz, it connects the West-East line between the Ruhr-Area all to Halle and Leipzig. From North to South the line between Hannover to Kassel and Frankfurt.


By sheer coincidence we have landed at the Lower Saksony border, very near to good old Göttingen. It is famous for its Georgia-Augusta University. Many scientists, philosophers, politicians and writers have lived and worked here. Once, as a young (over-)ambitious academic the dream of presenting your doctor-thesis in the philosophy of the social sciences at the Georgia-Augusta seemed equivalent to the personal conquest of the Mont Blanc. An aspiration definitely too high for me.


Today we walked through the city, visited the old Botanic Garden. From there we climbed up all the way to the Hainberg. First visiting the alley where once lived the founding father of phenomenology: Edmund Husserl. And higher up near to the Hainberg Forest the place of “Lou Fried”, the home of the exceptional Lou Andreas-Salome, writer and psycho-analytic.
Then in the corner of the same alley, the bungalow, build by the philosopher-anthropologist Helmuth Plessner. The house was under reconstruction and could not bring us some special experience.


But our long journey was meant as a kind of pilgimage to places linked to personal heros from the past. Their lives and work mostly forgotten or unknown to contemporary students.
Back in town, we visited some bookshops, but could not find the kind of collections or perhaps the quality we were used to value, search and collect. So, after this very remarkable and tiring pilgrimage we were happy to find ourselves back - far from the madding crowd - in the silent  sheltering of our modest Solling-Forest home. On the shelves in our library downstairs an exquisite selection of writers stands waiting for our attentive (re-)reading. Among them of course Edmund, Lou and Helmuth.