Heidegger's hut has become a place of pilgrimage 

An innocent just arrived in this small mountain resort would notice the landscape and the modern church and consider a room with en-suite bathroom, satellite TV and parking. These mixed assets would define Todtnauberg, were it not for the name Martin Heidegger, the German who blackened 20th-century philosophy.

For more than 50 years, he worked up here in his hut at a simple desk looking east. He has a street named after him, with urban pavements and lighting, which shows even mountain tops are not safe from town planning. There's also a Martin Heidegger Walking Tour. The village, once isolated, now easily reached by bus or car, curls steeply up the mountain at 1,100 metres. The tour, the Rundweg, starts beside the large brick youth hostel and follows the contour line some 200 metres higher. Designed by the family in 2002, it displays information which represents their considered view.

"Wer groß denkt, muß irren. A great thinker is bound to make mistakes," Board Number One quotes him. Heidegger, the man whose philosophy came very close to the Nazi spirit in the 1930s, is notorious for not apologising for the Holocaust and not removing offensive passages. Accused in his 1929 book on Kant of forcing German philosophy into an alien mould, he insisted postwar on the unaltered text, since "everyone keeps accusing me of force" and "thinking people learn all the better from their mistakes". If this is one of a number of indirect "apologies", it seems grudging. Much of the problem was character. He hated confrontation. As his supercritical student Karl Löwith put it: "The natural expression of his face included a working forehead, veiled face, and lowered eyes, which now and then would take stock of a situation with a short and swift glance. If someone temporarily forced him into a direct look by speaking to him, then this extremely disharmonious face, jagging angularly in all its features, would become somewhat reserved, wily, shifting and downright hypocritical...What was natural for it was the expression of cautious mistrust, at times full of peasant cunning." The emotionally hopeless letters Heidegger wrote to Hannah Arendt, the Jewish political philosopher with whom he fell in love when she was his student, are a key. Evasive in love, he was stubborn in achievement and recalcitrant by nature. Like his semi-literate parents, he was a head-down, uncommunicative type in the old rural mould. The extraordinary thing is that he also gave this stubborn, self-concealing character to truth and philosophised on that basis. 

There's still snow on the northern slope of this glacial valley beneath the 1,493-metre Feldberg peak. Underfoot, patches of compacted, glistening snow scattered with pine needles invisibly feed gullies of slush. There's no one else around to share the assertion on Board Two that Heidegger resigned as the Nazi Rector of Freiburg University over the dismissal of two colleagues. However, Hugo Ott in his Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (Fontana Press, 1988) disagrees. Heidegger fully commended the spirit of 1933. When he resigned a year later, the Nazi Party had rejected him as not malleable enough. Meanwhile, he took on board the required anti-Semitism in academic life. 

Most Heideggerians have to wrestle with themselves here and say, yes, but his lifetime's work is not worthless. Indeed not. As Board Two adds, "Something primeval and an obsession with the origins of being" inspired it. He came to Todtnauberg to think about Being. Cue for this visitor to amble down the steep slope behind the famous work hut and place her hand unthinkingly on its flank, as if it were a sick beast. Some of the silvery wooden shingles have fallen off over winter, leaving a vulnerable patch beneath the green-painted shutters and blue-painted window frames. The family insist on privacy because they still use the hut, but there are no fences and no people.