Freiburg

A cathedral city at the edge of the Black Forest where Husserl built phenomenology and Heidegger succeeded him, and where Heidegger became rector under the Nazis in 1933.

Freiburg im Breisgau is a small university city at the southwestern edge of Germany, where the Black Forest meets the Rhine plain and France begins just across the river. Husserl came here as a full professor in 1916 and spent twenty years building phenomenology into a movement, directing students from across Europe who came to learn the new method of attending to experience itself. Heidegger was his assistant, then his successor, and it was here that Heidegger became rector of the university in 1933 and joined the Nazi Party, one of the darkest episodes in the history of modern philosophy. After the war, with his teaching rights restored in 1951, Heidegger continued to live in the region until his death in 1976.