A 1965 note by Heidegger makes an unlikely connection with Henry Miller’s famed account of his travels to Greece at the outbreak of World War Two, The Colossus of Maroussi (1941). Heidegger reads this in light of his own “travelogue” of Greece, Sojourns (1962). Comparing the two through the lens of this note shows how both authors attempt what Heidegger calls a “phenomenology of the inapparent,” an attentiveness to what does not show itself in the phenomena at hand, something quite distinct from objective description. The chapter concludes with reflections on Germany’s relation to Greece at this time.

Drawing on literary works from the Revolutionary Wars (Schiller’s Die Jungfrau von Orleans and Kleist’s Hermannsschlacht), the First World War (Erich Maria Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues and Ernst Jünger’s In Stahlgewittern), the Second World War (Christa Wolf's Kindheitsmuster) and the recent Iraq War (Handke’s Yugoslavia essays and Jelinek’s Bambiland), this chapter argues that the perception of specific historical wars is marked by distinct configurations of time and historicity. Literary representations of the Revolutionary Wars tend to conceive of war within a gradual unfolding of national destiny. Depictions of the First World War chafe against linear concepts of time and against concepts of temporal homogeneity. Representations of the Second World War radically deconstruct concepts of linearity and teleology. Here, time is a web in which the past impinges on the present and the present impacts the future. Both Handke’s and Jelinek’s texts, finally, are characterized by a detachment or even alienation from time and space occasioned by the mediatization of warfare on television and the web.