A characteristic of Heidegger was his contempt for German high culture. In particular he shunned eighteenth-century Humanity, Humanität. The idea that the beautiful work of art reconciled the human with the eternal belonged to an outdated metaphysics. Some of this ill-will was political in origin and counter-cultural in intent. The great names of the classical Weimar period—Goethe and Schiller in literature and Kant in philosophy—had become sterile middle-class institutions by the early decades of the nineteenth century. With the unification of Germany in 1871 they became props of an increasingly nationalist and authoritarian, predominantly Protestant state. Heidegger, raised Catholic, resisted the political and cultural dominance of Berlin by declaring himself a localist in his Germanic affiliations, and a philosopher rooted in his home provinces of Baden and Allemania, in the country’s southwest. What this meant in practice was that, from a position of political reaction, he scoffed at the cultivated middle class whose ways were forced upon him by a university career. Disdaining the lofty myth of absolute beauty, goodness and truth, he wanted to remain, also in his practise of philosophy, a village craftsman like his father and grandfather.