Heidegger and Nazism

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The relations between Martin Heidegger and Nazism are a controversial subject in philosophy, although no one denies his historical engagement for the NSDAP, which he joined on May 1, 1933, nearly three weeks after being appointed Rector of the University of Freiburg. Heidegger resigned the Rectorship about one year later, in April 1934, but remained a member of the NSDAP until the end of World War II. His first act as Rector was to eliminate all democratic structures, including those that had elected him Rector. There were book burnings on his campus (though he successfully stopped some of them), as well as some student violence.

Contents 1 Heidegger's period at the Rectorate 1.1 Inaugural Address 1.2 Discourse of Tübingen 1.3 Emmanuel Faye 1.4 Speech to Student Association 1.5 Karl Löwith 1.6 Führerprinzip 1.7 Denounced Jews, non-Nazis 1.8 Proclamation to Students of University of Freiburg 2 Post-rectorate National Socialist period 3 Heidegger and Husserl 4 Heidegger and Arendt 5 Post-War 5.1 Der Spiegel interview 6 Philosophy and politics 7 See also 8 Footnotes 9 Sources 10 Bibliography 11 External links

[edit] Heidegger's period at the Rectorate

Heidegger implemented at the Rectorate the Gleichschaltung totalitarian policy, suppressing all opposition.^[1] According to Emmanuel Faye, along with Ernst Krieck and Alfred Baeumler, he spearheaded the "conservative revolution" enforced by the Nazis. Heidegger's aim was to "spiritualize" the Nazi movement.^[2] He sent a public telegram to Hitler on May 20, 1933.^[1]

[edit] Inaugural Address

Heidegger's inaugural address, delivered May 27, 1933, the Rektoratsrede, was entitled "The Self-Assertion of the German University," and later became notorious. It culminated in three "Heil Hitlers". In this speech, he declared that "the essence of University was science", as well as the need to "exploit at its best the fundamental possibilities of the originally German stock and to conduct it to domination."^[3] His discourse was a call to his students for a national regeneration, during which he openly positioned himself in favor of Hitler: "Let not theories and 'ideas' be the rule of your being. The Führer himself and he alone is German reality and law, today and for the future."^[1]

Heidegger praised "the historical mission of the German Volk, a Volk that knows itself in its state." He also invoked "the power to preserve, in the deepest way, the strengths [of the Volk] which are rooted in soil and blood."

[edit] Discourse of Tübingen

In his Discourse of Tübingen of 30 November 1933, he spoke about the "National-Socialist Revolution" as the "complete overturning of our German Dasein."

[edit] Emmanuel Faye

According to the philosopher Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger said of Spinoza that he was "ein Fremdkörper in der Philosophie", a "foreign body in philosophy" — Faye notes that Fremdkörper was a term which belonged to Nazi vocabulary, and not to classical German.^[4] Faye also underlines that already by 1916, Heidegger had criticized the "Verjudung" ("Judaization") of German universities, to which he opposed the promotion of the "German race" ("die deutsche Rasse").^[5] Faye mentioned in particular Volumes 36 and 37 of the Gesamtausgabe. As early as 1918, Heidegger mentioned the "necessity of a Führer" for Germany.^[6] The widow of Ernst Cassirer claimed she had heard of Heidegger's "inclination to anti-Semitism" by 1929.^[1]

[edit] Speech to Student Association

Heidegger's June 30, 1933 speech to the Heidelberg Student Association stated:

[The university] must be integrated into the Volksgemeinschaft and be joined together with the state ...

Up to now, research and teaching have been carried on at the universities as they were carried out for decades.... Research got out of hand and concealed its uncertainty behind the idea of international scientific and scholarly progress. Teaching that had become aimless hid behind examination requirements.

A fierce battle must be fought against this situation in the National Socialist spirit, and this spirit cannot be allowed to be suffocated by humanizing, Christian ideas that suppress its unconditionality ...

Danger comes not from work for the State. It comes only from indifference and resistance. For that reason, only true strength should have access to the right path, but not halfheartedness ...

University study must again become a risk, not a refuge for the cowardly. Whoever does not survive the battle, lies where he falls. The new courage must accustom itself to steadfastness, for the battle for the institutions where our leaders are educated will continue for a long time. It will be fought out of the strengths of the new Reich that Chancellor Hitler will bring to reality. A hard race with no thought of self must fight this battle, a race that lives from constant testing and that remains directed toward the goal to which it has committed itself. It is a battle to determine who shall be the teachers and leaders at the university.^[7]

[edit] Karl Löwith

The same month, Karl Löwith criticized The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a forgery supporting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, to which Heidegger responded: "But there is a dangerous international alliance of Jews." ^[1]

[edit] Führerprinzip

On August 21, 1933 Heidegger established the Führerprinzip at Freiburg: thereafter, the rector was to be appointed by the Nazi Minister of Education instead of being elected by the faculty. Heidegger was nominated as Führer of Freiburg University on October 1, 1933. It is in that function that he issued on November 3 a decree applying the Nazi racial policies to the students. The decree awarded economic aid to students belonging to the SS, the SA and other military groups. "Jewish or Marxist students" or anyone considered "non-Aryan" would be denied financial aid.^[1][8]

[edit] Denounced Jews, non-Nazis

Heidegger also leaked information about colleagues to the Nazis. The chemist Hermann Staudinger, for instance, who had been a pacifist during World War I, was fired owing to Heidegger's intervention.

Heidegger also wrote a letter about his student Eduard Baumgarten, calling him "anything but a National-Socialist" and underlining his links to "the Heidelberg circle of liberal-democratic intellectuals around Max Weber." In this letter, he mentioned the "Jew Fränkel."^[1] Heidegger also fired the Catholic anti-Nazi Max Müller, a former student of his from 1928 to 1933.^[1]

In 1915 he had worked with Edith Stein editing the papers of Edmund Husserl for publication, both being appointed as assistants to Husserl the following year. Stein, who like Husserl was a Jewish convert to Christianity, visited both Husserl and Heidegger at Freiburg in April 1929, the month of Husserl's 70th birthday. She and her sister were gassed at Auschwitz in 1942.

[edit] Proclamation to Students of University of Freiburg

In November 1933, he exalted Adolf Hitler as the basis of all right conduct:

Not doctrines and 'ideas' be the rules of your being. The Fuhrer himself and alone is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn ever deeper to know: that from now on each and every thing demands decision, and every action, responsibility. Heil Hitler!^[9]

[edit] Post-rectorate National Socialist period

After the spectacular failure of Heidegger's rectorship, he withdrew from political activity, without canceling his membership in the NSDAP. Nevertheless, references to National Socialism continued to appear in his work, usually in ambiguous ways. Löwith reported a conversation with Heidegger in Rome in April 1936:

He also 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. Now, as before, he was convinced that National Socialism was the prescribed path for Germany.^[1]

In the course of his 1935 lectures, Heidegger referred to the "inner truth and greatness of this movement" ("die innere Wahrheit und Größe dieser Bewegung"), that is, of Nazism. This phrase remained when the lectures were published in 1953 under the title, An Introduction to Metaphysics; however, Heidegger added a parenthetical qualification, without mentioning this change at the time of publication: "(namely, the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity)"; "nämlich die Begegnung der planetarisch bestimmten Technik und des neuzeitlichen Menschen".^[10] This raised concerns in post-Nazi Germany that he was distinguishing a "good Nazism" from a "bad Nazism", a contention supported by his philosophical opponents, including Bauemler. The controversial page of the 1935 manuscript is missing from the Heidegger Archives in Marbach.^[1] In this same course, Heidegger criticized both Russia and the United States for "the same dreary technological frenzy," calling Germany "the most metaphysical of nations."^[1]

Although Heidegger defended himself during the denazification by claiming he had opposed the philosophical bases of Nazism, especially biologism and the Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche's "The Will to Power" — which was not, in Nietzsche's sense, a "will to domination" —, he himself had participated in it:

The two men who, each in his own way, have introduced a counter movement to nihilism — Mussolini and Hitler — have learned from Nietzsche, each in an essentially different way. But even with that, Nietzsche's authentic metaphysical domain has not yet come unto its own.^[1]

Hans Jonas, an influential Jewish philosopher who was a student of Heidegger's, notes the congruence of Heidegger's philosophy with that of Nazi paganism:

But as to Heidegger's being, it is an occurrence of unveiling, a fate-laden happening upon thought: so was the Führer and the call of German destiny under him: an unveiling of something indeed, a call of being all right, fate-laden in every sense: neither then nor now did Heidegger's thought provide a norm by which to decide how to answer such calls—liguistically or otherwise: no norm except depth, resolution, and the sheer force of being that issues the call.^[11]

Karl Löwith met Heidegger in 1936 while the latter was visiting Rome to lecture on Hölderlin. In an account set down in 1940 and not intended for publication, Löwith recounted an exchange with Heidegger over editorials published in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung:

[I] told him that I did not agree either with the way in which Karl Barth was attacking him or in the way [Emil] Staiger was defending him, because my opinion was that his taking the side of National Socialism was in agreement with the essence of his philosophy. Heidegger told me unreservedly that I was right and developed his idea by saying that his idea of historicity [Geschichtlichkeit] was the foundation for his political involvement.^[12]

Löwith went on to say:

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. At last he uttered this well-known rationalisation (which Karl Barth saw so clearly), which amounted to saying that "it all would have been much worse if some men of knowledge had not been involved." And with a bitter resentment towards people of culture, he concluded his statement: "If these gentlemen had not considered themselves too refined to become involved, things would have been different, but I had to stay in there alone." To my reply that one did not have to be very refined to refuse to work with a Streicher, he answered that it was useless to discuss Streicher; the Stürmer was nothing more than "pornography." Why didn't Hitler get rid of this sinister individual? He didn't understand it.^[13]

For commentators such as Habermas who credit Löwith's account, there are a number of generally shared implications: one is that Heidegger did not turn away from National Socialism per se but became deeply disaffected with the official philosophy and ideology of the party, as embodied by Alfred Bäumler or Alfred Rosenberg, whose biologistic racist doctrines he never accepted.

In the lectures of 1942, published posthumously as Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister" Heidegger makes the following remark:

Today — if one still reads such books at all — one can scarcely read a treatise or book on the Greeks without everywhere being assured that here, with the Greeks, "everything" is "politically" determined. In the majority of "research results," the Greeks appear as the pure National Socialists. This overenthusiasm on the part of academics seems not even to notice that with such "results" it does National Socialism and its historical uniqueness no service at all, not that it needs this anyhow.^[14]

After Pearl Harbor, Heidegger declared:

"The entry of America into this planetary war is not an entry into history. No, it is already the last American act of America's history-lessness and self-destruction. This act is the renunciation of the Origin. It is a decision for lack-of-Origin." ^[1]

Modern historians tend, to the contrary, to consider that Nazi Germany's entrance in war was the culmination of Nazism's self-destructive nature.^[15]

[edit] Heidegger and Husserl

Although there is no truth to the oft-repeated story that during his time as Rector, the University denied Heidegger's former teacher Edmund Husserl, born a Jew and an adult Lutheran convert, access to the university library, he did invoke the Nazi "racial cleansing" laws in forcing several Jews, including his own assistant Werner Brock, to sever their connections with the university.^[16] In 1941, under pressure from publisher Max Niemeyer, he agreed to remove the dedication to Husserl from Being and Time (although the dedication was restored in post-war editions).^[17]

Husserl, who had considered himself a friend of Heidegger, wrote on May 4, 1933:

The future alone will judge which was the true Germany in 1933, and who were the true Germans--those who subscribe to the more or less materialistic-mythical racial prejudices of the day, or those Germans pure in heart and mind, heirs to the great Germans of the past whose tradition they revere and perpetuate.

When Husserl died in 1938, Heidegger did not attend his funeral.

[edit] Heidegger and Arendt

Critics further cite Heidegger's affair with Hannah Arendt, who was Jewish, while she was his doctoral student at the University of Marburg. This affair took place in the 1920s, some time before Heidegger's involvement in Nazism, but it did not end when she moved to Heidelberg to continue her studies under Karl Jaspers. She later spoke on his behalf at his denazification hearings. Jaspers spoke against him at these same hearings, suggesting he would have a detrimental influence on German students because of his powerful teaching presence. Arendt very cautiously resumed their friendship after the war, despite or even because of the widespread contempt for Heidegger and his political sympathies, and despite his being forbidden to teach for many years after the war.

[edit] Post-War

In September 1945, the Denazification Committee published its report on Heidegger. He was charged on four counts: his important, official position, in the Nazi regime; his introduction of the Führerprinzip into the University; his engaging in Nazi propaganda and his incitement of students against "reactionary" professors.^[1] He was subsequently dismissed from university the same year. In March 1949, he was declared a "fellow traveller" ("Mitläufer") of Nazism by the State Commission for Political Purification.^[1] But he was reintegrated in 1951, given emeritus status, and continued teaching until 1976. In 1974, he wrote to his friend Heinrich Petzet: "Our Europe is being ruined from below with 'democracy.'".^[1]

Thomas Sheehan has noted in the New York Review of Books "Heidegger's stunning silence concerning the Holocaust," in contrast to his criticism of the alienation wrought by modern technologies: "We have his statements about the six millions unemployed at the beginning of the Nazi regime, but not a word about the six million who were dead at the end of it."^[1] Heidegger did not publish anything concerning the Holocaust or the extermination camps, but did mention them. In a December 1, 1949 lecture entitled "Das Ge-Stell" ("The Con-Figuration"), he stated:

Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry — in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations [the Berlin blockade was then active], the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.^[1]

He answered a question by Herbert Marcuse concerning his silence about the Nazi racial policies in the following way:

I can add only that instead of the word "Jews" [in your letter] there should be the word "East Germans," and then exactly the same [terror] holds true of one of the Allies, with the difference that everything that has happened since 1945 is public knowledge world-wide, whereas the bloody terror of the Nazis was in fact kept a secret from the German people.^[1]

The reference to East Germans concerned the expulsion of Germans after World War II from territories in eastern Europe, gang-rapes throughout East Germany, East Prussia, and Austria, and harshly punitive de-industrialization policies. While the Holocaust was certainly not made public, antisemitic legislation and expulsion of Jews was common knowledge.

[edit] Der Spiegel interview

Some years later, hoping to quiet controversy, Heidegger gave an interview to Der Spiegel magazine, in which he agreed to discuss his political past provided that the interview be published posthumously. It should be noted that Heidegger extensively edited, at his insistence, the published version of the interview. In that interview, Heidegger's defense of his Nazi involvement runs in two tracks: first, he argued that there was no alternative, saying that he was trying to save the university (and science in general) from being politicized and thus had to compromise with the Nazi administration. Second, he saw an "awakening" ("Aufbruch") which might help to find a "new national and social approach". After 1934, he said, he would (should?) have been more critical of the Nazi government.

Heidegger's answers to some questions are evasive. For example, when he talks about a "national and social approach" of national socialism, he links this to Friedrich Naumann. 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 tradition of pre-industrial Germany even as it appropriated, in moderation, the gains of modern technology."^[18]

Also, he alternates quickly between his two lines of arguments, overlooking any contradictions. His defense often tends to take the form of pointing to the greater extremism of other educators and thinkers, as to minimize his own Nazi sympathies by comparison.

The Der Spiegel interviewers did not bring up Heidegger's 1949 statement in which he calls engineered food production and the Holocaust "essentially the same." While Heidegger's defenders have attempted to account for this "similarity of essence" by reference to his essay "On the Essence of Truth," this account of the technological 'frame' that now infects human nourishment and human mortality is not a conventional reaction to genocide. Moreover, many of those who align themselves with Heidegger philosophically have pointed out that in his own work on being-towards-death, we can recognize a much more salient criticism of what was wrong with the mass-produced murder of a people. Thinkers as diverse as Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler have made this point sympathetically. Commentators differ on whether this philosophical shorthand is evidence of a profound disregard for the Jews or simply the astigmatism of an old man concerned more with his own legacy than with that of the Holocaust.

In fact, the Der Spiegel interviewers were not in possession of most of the evidence for Heidegger's Nazi sympathies now known. For more on this interview and its aftermath, see "Only a God Can Save Us," Der Spiegel interview with Heidegger (1966) and Jürgen Habermas, "Work and Weltanschauung: The Heidegger Controversy from a German Perspective."^[19]

[edit] Philosophy and politics

Since the book Heidegger et le nazisme (1987) by Victor Farias, who had access to many documents, in particular some preserved in the STASI archives, no one denies Heidegger's historical involvement with Nazism and support of Hitler's policies and person. However, philosophers disagree on the consequences of this historical responsibility on his philosophy. Some claim that his philosophy is pure from historical and political contingencies. Others, such as Jürgen Habermas or Theodor Adorno, strongly disagree, claiming that his historical engagement for the Nazi party derived from his philosophical conceptions.^[1]

When Karl Löwith suggested to Heidegger in 1936 this thesis, the latter responded by the affirmative: "Heidegger agreed with me without reservations and spelled out for me that his concept of 'historicity' was the basis for his political 'engagement'."^[1]

[edit] See also

• Nazi propaganda
• Nazism and race
• Alfred Baeumler
• The Will to Power
• Edith Stein

[edit] Footnotes

[edit] Sources

• Heidegger and the Nazis, review of Victor Farias' Heidegger et le nazisme by Thomas Sheehan, in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXV, n°10, June 16, 1988, pp.38-47

[edit] Bibliography

• Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, Temple University Press (1989) ISBN 0-87722-640-7
• Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger, l'introduction du nazisme dans la philosophie, Albin Michel, 2005
• Luc Ferry & Alain Renaut (1988). Heidegger et les Modernes, Gallimard, 1988
• Luc Ferry & Alain Renaut, Système et critique, édition révisée, Ousia, 1992
• François Fédier, Martin Heidegger Écrits politiques 1933-1966, Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 1995. ISBN 2-07-073277-0
• François Fédier, Heidegger. Anatomie d'un scandale, Robert Laffont, Paris, 1988. ISBN 2-221-05658-2
• Hugo Ott. Martin Heidegger. Éléments pour une biographie, Payot
• Dominique Janicaud, L'ombre de cette pensée, Jerôme Millon, 1990
• Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La fiction du politique, Bourgois, 1987 (translated as Heidegger, Art and Politics)
• Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe discusses Heidegger's Nazism at length in the film, |The Ister, 2004
• Jean-François Lyotard, Heidegger and the Jews, 1990
• Günther Neske & Emil Kettering (eds.), Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers, 1990.
• Ernst Nolte Martin Heidegger: Politik und Geschichte im Leben und Denken, Propyläen, 1992
• Jean-Michel Palmier, Les Écrits politiques de Heidegger, Éditions de l'Herne, Paris, 1968
• Rüdiger Safranski, Heidegger et son temps, Livre de poche, 2000
• Hans Sluga, Heidegger's Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany
• Richard Wolin, The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, 1990 ISBN 0-262-73101-0.
• Guido Schneeberger: Nachlese zu Heidegger: Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Denken (Bern, 1962) OCLC 2086368
• Hans Jonas: "Heidegger and Theology," The Phenomenon of Life: Toward a Philosophical Biology (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2001) ISBN 0810117495247

[edit] External links

• Press articles on Victor Farias' 1987 book (French)
• Pierre Joris defends Heidegger
• "Serious response to Emmanuel Faye on Heidegger and nazism" (French)
• Réponses de Gérard Guest (1) (au dossier publié dans "Magazine Littéraire") (French)
• Réponses de Gérard Guest (2) ( au dossier publié dans "Le Point") (French)
• François Fédier, Pascal David et Faye.Multimedia (French)
• Heidegger contre le nazisme (paris4philo-sorbonne)
• Heidegger and Nazism: An Exchange
• A Normal Nazi Thomas Sheehan On Heidegger