(2004; French, German, Croatian, English) If like me you find philosophy fascinating, along with having an interest in history and geography, you may appreciate this long (over three hours) journey up 3,000 km of the Danube River, from the mouth at Sulina, Romania, to the (disputed) source in the Black Forest of Germany. This documentary from directors/writers David Barison and Daniel Ross analyzes Martin Heidegger's 1942 lecture, with its focus on German poet Friedrich Hölderlin's poem "The Ister," the Greek name for the lower portion of the Danube, through the commentaries of three modern philosophers and a filmmaker.

Our first guide, Professor Bernard Steigler (a Frenchman with a German surname who mixes his French with English), begins with the myth of Prometheus (a Greek god of knowledge and memory) and his forgetful brother Epimetheus; the latter, given the task of assigning qualities to all the creatures of creation, after distributing aspects to all the fowls, fishes, and beasts realizes he has nothing left for man. Thus, Prometheus provides mankind with fire, the means for him to manufacture whatever he needs to survive.

Man, while he is a technical creature, cannot maintain a natural balance as do the other animals because "technics develop faster than culture," producing gaps and ruptures with the traditions of the past. Since the 19th century science and technics have merged into "permanent innovation," resulting in global competition to keep up with modernization and an explosion of knowledge systems into an atomization of tiny spheres of expertise.

According to Hegel, says Steigler, by the 19th century man came into possession of historical consciousness, an awareness of a distinction between being and becoming. "Change is normal," announced Marx; Nietzsche declared: "Reality is becoming." In the new theory of technological evolution, the elimination of jobs is necessary for technology to advance; this negentropic (transformative) character of innovation, of course, is unsettling to the masses of workers for whom life is conservative.

From examining the archaeological digs at Histria in Romania (the Danube marks its southern border from Bulgaria's northern), originally a Greek colony of the 7th or 6th century BCE, which was destroyed in the 3rd century CE (earthquake or barbarian invasion), we are told of the Romans arriving somewhere between 100 BCE and 100 CE; they built Trajan's bridge across the Ister, conquered Dacia, and annexed the territory into the empire, thereby introducing Latin to Europe.

A third type of memory arises from technics, Steigler resumes, in addition to genetic (DNA) and individual (human brain) memories, allowing people for the first time to transfer through tools and eventually books their experience on to the next generation. From this memory-support and preservation of knowledge culture blossoms.

However, during the tragic period of Greek religion (no immortal soul, thus no one could imagine escaping death), with the constant need for new artifices for survival, technological men were forced to question themselves: "Who are we?" In their having to continually adopted new technologies to avoid being defeated by their enemies, they fight among themselves because "Adoption is war." Fearful that the race of men will destroy themselves, Zeus sends Hermes to give them justice (see Aeschylus's plays), political knowledge, the means to create laws.

In Vukova, Croatia, we are shown the skulls and skeletons of buildings from the 1991 conflict with Serbia; temporary bridges have been built to restore water traffic. An engineer points out that the more sophisticated a structure is the more sensitive and vulnerable it is to attack.

Through his metaphysics, Plato then supplied Greeks with the concept of an immortal soul. In the 20th century Heidegger (1889-1976) reintroduced anxiety about death with his concept of angst: the necessity of remembering in conflict with the necessity of forgetting.

As we cross into Hungary (the Magyars arrived in 800 CE; the holy crown of Saint Stephen remains the most revered national relic), Jean-Luc Nancy takes up the thread as the river stretches out (I've voyaged from Vienna to Budapest via the Danube), elaborating on Heidegger's "polis" and its foundations. With the advent of the West came the end of empires based on sacred foundations; the mythologies were replaced by self-legitimate institutions, lacking fixity.

When logos (the word) took over from mythos, promoting tekhne (knowledge and know-how), thereby obtaining from nature what it does not freely offer, commerce introduced economics, calculation, writing, and eventually the philosophy of the "good city" and infinite production. More competition produced more conflict.

In Vienna Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe comes aboard our vessel. With killing machines came the need for new rules of war; along with factory mass production came the capability of mass deportation and execution of people. With nothing for most humans to do on the farms after industrialization, controversially Heidegger associated extermination of the Jews with agricultural motorization. The gas chambers forced "the suspension of the breath," or a spiritual and historical caesura; in horror humanity found itself short of breath.

Passing into Germany (humming Johann Strauss II's waltz, but not in the film's soundtrack) we again encounter Steigler on his 48th birthday, who after introducing us to Agnes Bernauer (executed as a witch), Germany's Antigone, expostulates on Heidegger's Da-sein, a temporary being cursed with mortality (nobody can die in my place, which is my time alone), fleeing death and actual time (about which he doesn't want to hear its history) into the "They" of technology (affording him calculation of the indeterminate) and inauthentic time of clocks, calendars, and media.

There's irremediable death, which individualizes the self, and its forgetting, as a means of postponing death, which cannot be lived as experience. In Time and Being (1927), asserts Steigler, Heidegger's argument is with his former teacher, Edmund Husserl, a Jewish phenomenologist (one whose method of inquiry is based on the premise that reality consists of objects and events as they are perceived), an attempt to evince that the Da-sein's past is the factual, historical past, not a personal past; that the Da-sein rather than following, precedes his generation.

Because of the contradictions Heidegger confronted, Steigler says he had to leave the argument incomplete. In closing (blowing out the candles on the cake), the philosopher returns to Epimetheus, who came to wisdom by reflecting upon his mistakes.

Finally the filmmaker of the seven-hour epic, Hitler: A Film from Germany, Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, remarking on an important point about Heidegger that he was not speaking of materialism when he referred to the "spirit of machines," says with a sense of disquiet that there's no poetic power of rivers today. Hölderlin's poem concludes: "Yet what that one does, that river / No one knows."

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Copyright © 2010 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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