enowning
Wednesday, October 26, 2011
 
Sight and Sound has an interview with the recently deceased Friedrich Kittler. The important bits:
Where does your keen interest in the V2, the Nazi "wonder weapon" come from?

As a child I always spent the summer holidays on Usedom. There I used to stumble across traces of bombs from the port of Peenemünde, which no one in the GDR was allowed to discuss. Later, in California, I read Pynchon's "Gravity's Rainbow" and the scales fell from my eyes. On Usedom everything was covered in asphalt after the end of the war, despite all the British bombs. Even the smallest woodland track was fitted out for V2 transport. This screams out at any not completely blind ten-year-old: What's the mystery here?

You have never expressed an opinion on war, never written an anti-war theory.

At my one and only five-minute meeting with Jürgen Habermas, it was in Amsterdam, he took me aside and reproached me, saying my historical analyses were okay, but I had never showed any commitment to a cause.

In 1968 when the students in Freiburg were demonstrating against Vietnam, you brandished a sign with the Heidegger solution: "Being and Time". A conscious distancing?

Yes. As a child you cannot imaging how fascinated I was by Napoleon.
Seen any ontological slogans at #OWS?
 
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