In the small town of Messkirch in the Black Forest region of Baden-Wurttemberg, southwest Germany, lies St Martin's, a small Catholic church. In its quiet hilltop graveyard there is a tombstone inscribed “Martin Heidegger, 1889–1976”. It is not marked with a cross, but with a star, recalling a line written by the philosopher in 1947: “To think is to confine yourself to a single thought that one day stands still like a star in the world's sky” (PLT: 4). The grave marks the final return of Heidegger, the great philosopher, to his roots.

Heidegger was born in Messkirch, then a pious, very conservative agricultural town, to a poor lower-middle-class, devoutly religious Catholic family. The local church employed his father Friedrich as bellringer, gravedigger and caretaker of the vestments and sacred vessels, so Heidegger's childhood was steeped in Catholicism, a religion that long dominated his life and thinking. The simple, still rustic, world in which Heidegger grew up left him with an enduring sympathy for the life of the traditional German countryside. He came from a social class whose lives for centuries had been filled with the daily round of hard labour and he felt a part of the cultivated farmland. He also loved to hike and ski through the wild mountainous landscape of the Black Forest.

His early experiences of nature and craftsmanship, combined with a typically Catholic sense of guilt – for he also grew up in an atmosphere saturated with Christian doctrines of sin and redemption – became central to his later philosophy.