Martin Heidegger and Nazism
[5] Heidegger never apologized for anything[6] and is only known to have expressed regret once, privately, when he described his rectorship and the related political engagement as "the greatest stupidity of his life" ("die größte Dummheit seines Lebens").
[5] His supporters, such as Hannah Arendt, Otto Pöggeler, Jan Patočka, Silvio Vietta, Jacques Derrida, Jean Beaufret, Jean-Michel Palmier, Richard Rorty, Marcel Conche, Julian Young, Catherine Malabou, and François Fédier, see his involvement with Nazism as a personal "error" – a word which Arendt placed in quotation marks when referring to Heidegger's Nazi-era politics[11][12] – that is irrelevant to his philosophy.
Something genuinely new seemed to be beginning — a people's rule without political parties, with a leader of whom it was hoped that he would unite Germany once more internally and make her self-assured externally.
Georg Picht recalls that Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, in a lecture in March 1933, declared that the National Socialist revolution was an attempt by the Germans to realize Hölderlin's dream.
He argued after the war that he joined the Party to avoid dismissal, and he forbade the planned book-burning that was scheduled to take place in front of the main University building.
Nevertheless, according to Victor Farias, Hugo Ott, and Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger implemented the Gleichschaltung totalitarian policy, suppressing all opposition to the government.
[5] But according to others such as François Fédier and Julian Young, Heidegger "called for, not the subordination of the university to the state, but precisely the reverse", and "did indeed seek to protect students from indoctrination by the crasser form of Nazi propaganda".
To give the first lecture within the framework of "political education" – a compulsory measure introduced at the universities by the Nazis [...] – Heidegger, rector at that time, invited my mother's brother in law, Viktor von Weizsäcker.
In 1944, he didn't even have the right to teach anymore, was considered a "completely dispensable" teacher, and was ordered up the Rhine to build fortifications, then drafted into the Volkssturm national militia, "the oldest member of the faculty to be called up".
This essential opposition of leading and following must not be blurred let alone eliminated.In this speech, Heidegger declared that "science must become the power that shapes the body of the German university."
[30] The rectorate speech ended with calls for the German people to "will itself" and "fulfill its historical mission":[25] But no one will even ask us whether we do or do not will, when the spiritual strength of the West fails and its joints crack, when this moribund semblance of a culture caves in and drags all forces into confusion and lets them suffocate in madness.
In his advanced contemporary seminars "On the Essence and Concept of Nature, State and History," Heidegger expostulated in essentialising terms concerning "semitic nomads" and their lack of possible relation to the German homeland, "drifting" in the "unessence of history": History teaches us that nomads did not become what they are because of the bleakness of the desert and the steppes, but that they have even left numerous wastelands behind them that had been fertile and cultivated land when they arrived, and that men rooted in the soil have been able to create for themselves a native land, even in the wilderness…the nature of our German space would surely be apparent to a Slavic people in a different manner than to us; to a Semitic nomad, it may never be apparent.Beginning in 1917, the philosopher Edmund Husserl championed Heidegger's work, and helped him secure the retiring Husserl's chair in philosophy at the University of Freiburg.
[38] On April 6, 1933, the Reichskommissar of Baden Province, Robert Wagner, suspended all Jewish government employees, including present and retired faculty at the University of Freiburg.
Then, the week after Heidegger's election, the national Reich law of April 28, 1933 came into effect, overriding Wagner's decree, and requiring that all Jewish professors from German universities, including those who had converted to Christianity, be fired.
Prior to that there was his self-initiated break in relations with me – in fact, soon after his appointment at Freiburg – and, over the last few years, his anti-Semitism, which he came to express with increasing vigor – even against the coterie of his most enthusiastic students, as well as around the department.
In "On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History and State", for instance, Heidegger appears to give a direct ontological sanction to Hitler's absolute rule: ...The origin of all political action is not in knowledge, but in being.
Being the Führer is a destiny …”, In his postwar justification, Heidegger claimed he resigned the rectorship in April 1934 because the ministry in Karlsruhe had demanded the dismissal of the deans Erik Wolf and Wilhelm von Möllendorff on political grounds.
Denied a role at the national level, and increasingly frustrated with the minutiae of academic politics – which seemed to him to betray a sad absence of the new spirit he had hoped would permeate the universities – Heidegger resigned his post in April 1934.
In addition to Heidegger, such Nazi notables as Hans Frank, Julius Streicher, Carl Schmitt and Alfred Rosenberg belonged to the academy and served on this committee.
[citation needed] In his 1938 lecture, The Age of the World Picture, he wrote "...the laborious fabrication of such absurd entities as National Socialist philosophies"[55] – but didn't read it aloud.
"[56][clarification needed] According to personal notes made in 1939 (not published until 2006), Heidegger took strong exception to Hitler's statement, "There is no attitude, which could not be ultimately justified by the ensuing usefulness for the totality."
Löwith recounted their discussion about editorials published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung:[5][63] He left no doubt about his faith in Hitler; only two things that he had underestimated: the vitality of the Christian churches and the obstacles to the Anschluss in Austria.
In response to my remark that I could understand many things about his attitude, with one exception, which was that he would permit himself to be seated at the same table with a figure such as Julius Streicher (at the German Academy of Law), he was silent at first.
)[citation needed] Heidegger's former friend Karl Jaspers spoke against him, suggesting he would have a detrimental influence on German students because of his powerful teaching presence.
[65] At least Heidegger does not say that the mechanization of agriculture and the extermination camps are equivalent, "the same thing" (dasselbe) but "the same" (das Selbe, a very strange turn of phrase in German), so only "in essence", but not in the technical or metaphysical meaning of identity.
Second, he saw in the historic moment the possibility for an "awakening" (Aufbruch) which might help to find a "new national and social approach" to the problem of Germany's future, a kind of middle ground between capitalism and communism.
According to Thomas Sheehan, Naumann had "the vision of a strong nationalism and a militantly anticommunist socialism, combined under a charismatic leader who would fashion a middle-European empire that preserved the spirit and traditions of pre-industrial Germany even as it appropriated, in moderation, the gains of modern technology".
"[5] Heidegger commented on the Nazi identification of Judaism and Communism in 1936, writing that: The final form of Marxism [...] has essentially nothing to do with either Judaism or even with Russia; if somewhere a non-developed spiritualism is still slumbering, it is in the Russian people; Bolshevism is originally Western; it is a European possibility: the emergence of the masses, industry, technology, the extinction of Christianity; but inasmuch as the dominance of reason as an equalizing of everyone is but the consequence of Christianity and as the latter is fundamentally of Jewish origin (cf.
[His book] Sein und Zeit [Being and Time] was dedicated to the Jew Husserl, his Kant-book to the half-Jew Scheler, and in his courses at Freiburg, Bergson and Simmel were taught.
Conversely, Professor H. Naumann did not hesitate to explain German mythology with the help of concepts from Sein und Zeit, discovering "care" in Odin and the "they" in Baldur.
