In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

BEING-IN-THE-WORLDS OF 1926 439
missible ... to grant him a permanent full professorship of the historical
stature of [the Marburg] chair in philosophy. "9 This unequivocally negative
response must have spurred Heidegger's colleagues to ask him directly
for that book-length manuscript which nobody had yet seen. These
are the words from the minutes of a committee meeting on February 25,
signed by the dean, Max Deutschbein, a professor of English: "The
committee decided unanimously to urge Heidegger to have some copies
of his handwritten text of Sein und Zeit typed and delivered to the dean.
The committee further declared that it would be desirable to have the
text also in galleys. The committee would then send the copies for
evaluation to a number of scholars, still to be named."l0 The undated
remark with which Dean Deutschbein supplemented these minutes
makes it clear beyond any doubt that the manuscript in question was
nonexistent, or at least very far from completion: "Heidegger declares
that he is prepared to get the aforementioned manuscript to the printer
by April 1, and to keep the dean apprised of the progress of the typesetting."ll
In the first weeks of 1926, Heidegger most likely had only two
projects on his desk: the unfinished revision of a seventy-five-page manuscript
on the topic of time which, in 1924, had been rejected by the
Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift fur Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte
(German Quarterly for Literary Studies and Intellectual History,
then the most innovative journal of the humanities in Germany);
and a typescript prepared by his student Simon Moser of a course
entitled "Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs" ("History of the Concept of
Time"), which Heidegger had taught during the summer semester of
1925.12 Virtually the entire first half of the book must therefore have
been written between February 26 (the last day of the winter semester)
and April 1, 1926, when Heidegger mailed the first 175 pages of Sein
und Zeit (up to paragraph 38) to Max Niemeyer Verlag. On April2-in
very general terms, and without mentioning that the manuscript was far
from being complete-Heidegger informed Deutschbein of his progress
with the work. What he offered "as a sheaf of paper decorated with
flowers"13 to Edmund Husserl for his sixty-seventh birthday on April 8
therefore cannot have been the "almost completed text," as Heidegger
would later remember.
Husserl and a number of other, mostly younger philosophers helped
Heidegger correct the galleys, which he began to receive on April 14.14
When Deutschbein mailed the first 175 pages of Sein und Zeit to Berlin