Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy

by Peter Trawny

  As little as Heidegger can disperse the suspicion of anti-Semitism, so much do we have cause to say that he directly founded a further type of it. For him, Judaism and Christianity converge in the technological actuality of the “will to power.” For this reason, the truly severe attacks on Christians and Jesuits in the Black Notebooks bear a peculiar tone. That there was a Christian anti-Semitism does not contradict this view.

  Heidegger’s anti-Semitic statements have a direction. The more the “planetary war” approaches its end, the more the formulations shift their emphasis from a characterization of the Jews as agents of machination to Judaism as a religion that, in its connection with Christianity, plays a disastrous role in the history of being. “Jewish-Christian monotheism” is represented as the origin of the “modern system of total dictatorship,” a well-known strategy of Heidegger’s, according to which National Socialism is an epiphenomenon of Judaism.22

  Now Heidegger’s openness to the “gods,” to polytheism, becomes manifest.23 “Jehovah” would be “that one of the gods who presumes to make himself the chosen God and no longer suffers any other God beside him.”24 The play on “chosen people” is significant. The philosopher asks and answers the following: “What is a god who, against all others, arrogates to himself the status of being chosen? In any event, he is never ‘the’ god unqualifiedly, assuming that what is meant by this could ever be divine. How could it, when the divinity of god resides in the great calm out of which he recognizes the other gods.” Again, Heidegger writes himself into the German Sonderweg (special path), which runs from Winckelmann and on past Hölderlin, Schelling, and Nietzsche, leading up to Heidegger himself, upon which it would be possible to long for other gods back before Christianity or out beyond it. The topology of “first” and “other beginning” surfaces:

  From here one can assess what the remembrance of the first beginning in Greece—a beginning that remains outside of Judaism, and that means outside of Christianity—signifies for thinking into the concealed inceptual essence of the history of the West.25

  The decision is significant: the “Greece” of philosophy is played out against the “Judaism” and “Christianity” of religion. To be sure, the differences between thinking and believing are conspicuous. Even Leo Strauss, a student of Heidegger’s, emphasized them—without, however, emphasizing the supposed consequences of those differences that obviously interested Heidegger.26 The decision for a Greek beginning of Europe need not have any anti-Semitic consequences.

  Whether Heidegger’s references to “monotheism” make claims that can be transferred into an extant critical-religious discourse is questionable.27 Certainly one could conceive that “polytheism” would influence political philosophy in specific ways. But this can not be shown in Plato, for example, nor had Heidegger himself thought about this. On the contrary, Heidegger’s reservation regarding democracy and his aversion to it are maintained across the entirety of his thinking. Accordingly, we must proceed from the fact that Heidegger’s remarks on the religion of Judaism do not overcome his being-historical anti-Semitism.

  Attempts at a Response

  The considerations up to this point give rise to a justifiable assumption: Heidegger’s being-historical Manichaeism, which increases at the end of the 1930s, his narrative of a history of the world and the homeland threatened by the un-history of worldlessness and homelessness (Heimatlosigkeit), formed a milieu in which his anti-Semitism, long latent to be sure, could now take on its own being-historical significance. In this context, deceptive stories (the Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and simpleminded legends (of a Jewish “gift for calculation,” for example) enter Heidegger’s thinking forcibly and start to proliferate there.

  One must not be deceived: Although we do not know what Heidegger intimated by the “production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps” or still less what he knew, and even if we believe him that “hundreds of thousands” were “unobtrusively liquidated in annihilation camps,” all of this still implies a central thought of his being-historical anti-Semitism: that the Jews were a military enemy of the National Socialists or, worse yet, of the Germans.1 In the war between such enemies, at what point would Heidegger have limited the violence against the Jews? In his eyes, what was the scope of the above-mentioned “predetermination” for “planetary master criminals”? Was the “fabrication of corpses” really unthinkable when it came to an enemy, perhaps even the enemy? Not that Heidegger had wanted the war. Indeed while it lasted, he held it for an unavoidable step in the “overcoming of metaphysics.”

  Heidegger did not judge the public capable of thinking through philosophical problems of significance. This reservation may be understandable, but only under the assumption that the public is never primarily concerned with the truth. Even the Black Notebooks, these apparently most intimate texts of Heidegger’s, keep silent about the human suffering of the Shoah. The “inability to mourn” was widespread, certainly not in conservative circles alone.2 Thus Heidegger could speak with great feeling about mourning and pain, and nevertheless write in the Bremen Lectures: “Everywhere we are assailed by innumerable and measureless suffering. We, however, are unpained, not brought into the ownership of the essence of pain.”3 Did he possibly mean himself, or at least others including himself? In such an admission, can we not hear at least an echo of his having been affected? But the inability to experience “the essence of pain,” according to his view, lies in the presumptions of modern technology, not in the indifference of one’s own emotionality.

  The lack of testimony for any mourning over the “innumerable and measureless suffering” is conspicuous in such an inflationary testament of mourning over being-historical “homelessness.”4 Indeed let us assume for a moment that the philosopher actually would have been completely immune to the pain that ensues in regard to the Shoah; would the reunion with Hannah Arendt then not be completely incomprehensible, indeed, even unbelievable? Must not Arendt herself have been certain that this dear man had experienced the pain? Not that she had directly burdened him with the “log” of it, but it is unthinkable that Arendt would accept her beloved’s remaining cold before the crimes of the Germans. Admittedly, we are here left only with conjecture.5

  There is a being-historical anti-Semitism in Heidegger that appears to contaminate not just a few dimensions of his thinking. This fact throws a new light on Heidegger’s philosophy as well as its reception. If previously Heidegger’s involvement with National Socialism was a problem that led in part to exaggerated condemnations and in part to justified reservations, then with the publication of the Black Notebooks, the presence of a specific anti-Semitism—which arises at a time when the thinker very critically confronted real, existing National Socialism—cannot be overlooked.

  The philosophical and academic engagement with Heidegger in years ahead will work at drawing the consequences of this now philologically indubitable state of affairs. One need not be a prophet to foresee an institutional crisis in the reception of Heidegger’s thinking. The question whether the anti-Semitic passages of the Black Notebooks prompt a necessary leave-taking from Heidegger’s thinking as a whole is not at all irrelevant. Whoever will philosophize with Heidegger must be clear about the anti-Semitic implications of certain specific traits of his thought.

  From now on, any attempt to isolate the being-historical anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s texts so as to distinguish “anti-Semitism-free” zones in his thinking will be regarded as scandalous. The contamination does not begin only in the thinking of the 1930s, nor is it subsequently restricted to that. Are there fundamental decisions in Heidegger’s philosophy that provide an opening from the outset for the adoption of a being-historical enemy? Does the characteristic and often fascinating radicality of this thinking overshoot the aim of philosophizing when it desires a “purification of being”? Is this radicality the origin of being-historical anti-Semitism?

  The anti-Semitic contamination of Heidegger’s thinking—how far does it re
ach? Does it affect the corpus of this thinking as a whole? Does it seize the history of being and being-historical thinking alone? Can it even be delimited? I have already indicated that I hold Heidegger’s being-historical anti-Semitism to be the consequence of a being-historical Manichaeism, which at the end of the 1930s came to a full outburst and drove his thinking into an either/or from which the Jews and their destiny were not spared. As Heidegger’s narrative of the German salvation of the West—the yearning for a “purification of being”—fell into a crisis, the Jews emerged on the side of the enemy. The limits of the contamination of Heidegger’s text coincide with the limits of this being-historical Manichaeism. To the degree that “beyng” and “beings” were no longer alternatives, as reflected in the alternatives of “other beginning” and “machination,” the possibility vanished for the hypostatization of a hostile “world Judaism.” To speak of a being-historical anti-Semitism therefore does not imply that being-historical thinking as such is anti-Semitic.

  Finally, we cannot avoid connecting the desire for a “purity of being” with the purity phantasmagoria that, at the very least, helped to organize one of the greatest crimes against humanity. The Nuremberg laws state that “purity of blood” is “the presupposition for the continued existence of the German people.” At the end of the 1930s, Heidegger placed this purification on the side of the “deepest deformation of being by the precedence of beings” (for this reason he emphasizes “purity of being”). And, indeed, in his radicalizing of the difference between being and beings, he falls victim in his own thinking to a basic trait of the “brutalitas of being,” i.e., the violence of “machination.” The extreme of a pure being when it is thought as history, as location of “Da-sein,” which is how Heidegger indeed thinks it, cannot escape the violence from which it attempts with all its power to remove itself. It necessarily falls prey to a counterviolence that increases all the more, the more violently it experiences the first violence.

  Heidegger liberated himself from the narrative that stood at the beginning of his radicalization of the difference between “beyng” and “beings”—slowly, to be sure, and painfully, but at last, pointedly. His thinking in his final three decades achieved a measure that he lacked in the measureless time between 1933 and 1947. The Black Notebooks attest to how deeply Heidegger was involved with the convulsions of the times, how much his thinking had suffered in these convulsions—not only in terms of the injury that being-historical anti-Semitism proved to be. After 1945 Heidegger interpreted many things in the way he wanted to see them—scarcely a text shows that so overtly as the Black Notebooks. At the same time, however, they unsparingly present an exposure of thought that Heidegger did not wish to renounce at the end of his life. Did he forget what the notebooks contained? Or did he want to let us take part in a philosophical drama unique in the German intellectual history of the twentieth century? Was not Heidegger’s keeping the Black Notebooks secret, along with the instruction to publish them last of all, perhaps bound up with the intention of showing us just how far his—any—thinking can proceed along false paths?6 Did not everyone close to him, i.e., relatives and friends and co-workers, advise him against their publication?

  In the end, it can be said that henceforth Heidegger’s thinking will present itself as a unique philosophical challenge. To arrive at this view, I do not need to refer first to the work of Heidegger, which in its ever new and surprising force of thinking belongs to that inexhaustible philosophical source where all the great texts of philosophers from Plato to Wittgenstein are gathered. For in the past century, it is not only the history of philosophy that is incomprehensible without him. Heidegger’s historical effect oversteps the limits of philosophy. He will remain the philosopher who lets us remember like no other the “dark times” of the twentieth century. Admittedly he does this in an entirely different way than those “men in dark times” whom Hannah Arendt presents in her essays—while she never refused him a place among them.7 His involvement even in the darkest traits of that time colors the memory we receive from him. That memory is painful not only for what is remembered, but also for the sometimes horrifying way and manner of the memoir itself. And can we not feel gratitude for the fact that Heidegger’s thinking never and nowhere spares us this pain, indeed this terror?

  Nevertheless, the Black Notebooks from the 1930s and 1940s will make a revision of our confrontation with Heidegger’s thinking necessary. Nothing of what has been mentioned in the back-and-forth discussions of the role of National Socialism in his thinking can compare with what the narrative of a German salvation of the West finally wrought upon this philosophy. Even if Heidegger’s thinking survives that revision, the statements treated in the foregoing considerations will disfigure it like broke-open scars. A “wounding of thinking” has occurred.

  Afterword to the German Second Edition

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  Heidegger’s Überlegungen, the first series of Black Notebooks, have been published and have provoked an extraordinary media response. The reactions were overwhelmingly negative. But the philosophical and academic confrontation is still to be had. What is already certain is that with this publication, Heidegger’s writings enter into a new dimension, one that will entail changes in the context of his writings as a whole. Above all, the being-historical treatises—Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), Mindfulness, etc.—will have to be read in parallel with the Überlegungen, especially since those treatises constantly refer to the Überlegungen.

  The reaction of the international media—and is there not a strange cleft between the public and academic importance of Heidegger here?—is likewise tied to discussion of Heidegger’s statements directed against the Jews, i.e., his anti-Semitic statements. Here we discern differing interpretations. I would like to point out two of these and assess their coherence.

  The historical view of Heidegger’s statements contextualizes them and establishes that they remain far behind the most prominent forms of anti-Semitism of the Third Reich. In fact, the anti-Semitism that I characterize as being-historical simply cannot be compared with anti-Semitism à la Julius Streicher.1 Moreover, Heidegger kept his statements secret. He played no role in the anti-Semitic milieu of the Third Reich. These historical reminders are not unimportant, but must be distinguished from a philosophical interpretation. This is already the case, because Heidegger lets his statements on “world Judaism” surface in a philosophical context. Finally, what is problematic in this position cannot be resolved by referring to something still more problematic.

  The second view proclaims that the passages in question belong to a grandly envisioned “culture critique.” So it would be more or less natural that in a critique of “Americanism” and of “Bolshevism,” of “nationalism” and of “imperialism,” etc., “world Judaism” would also be named. Insofar as history vanishes into an end situation of total “machination,” everything falls under its (machination’s) dominance. Since “world Judaism” would have a special relation to technology and its economy (owing to its “marked gift for calculation”), it would prove to be as much the master of this dominance as its slave. I skeptically oppose this interpretation. If someone were to proclaim today that the Chinese are particularly suited for global capitalism because they are capable of an entirely non-European personal self-renunciation, indeed of self-enslavement, we would most likely not hold that for a sensible critique of capitalism. The characterization would lead to outrage and rightly so.

  Additionally, I have been criticized for the thesis that Heidegger’s anti-Semitism was influenced by, if not stamped by, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was and is objected that Heidegger had not read the Protocols, did not know of them. This pseudo-philological objection assumes that only a person who had read Hitler’s Mein Kampf was a National Socialist. With this, one would quickly reduce the number of National Socialists in the Third Reich to a handful. I do not claim that Heidegger had read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But anyone
who had heard (of) Hitler’s speeches, for example, stood under their influence.

  Thus I think that the concept of being-historical anti-Semitism still performs a heuristic duty.2 It is to be set aside and shelved (ad acta) only when another, better interpretation of a passage arises. What I mean is that the term “green bird” lets us conclude only that we see a bird with green feathers, not that everything green we see must be a bird. Similarly, the reference to a being-historical anti-Semitism in Heidegger does not mean that the history of being as such is anti-Semitic.

  In a certain regard, I would like to criticize myself. The concept of “contamination” conforms to a logic of purification, one that perhaps has entered my text through Heidegger’s idea of a “purification of being.” Here and there I have even allowed my own thoughts to be “contaminated.” A poisoned thinking becomes weak, goes blind. Have I consequently overinterpreted Heidegger’s statements on world Judaism? I have understood the concept of “contamination” literally, in the sense of a reciprocal touching, reciprocal grasping. When Heidegger, for whatever reason, allowed his thinking to get caught in the clutches of an imaginary threat of “world Judaism,” what was touched by this presumed threat? It is this logic of purification, of cleansing, from which all thinking must be unconditionally protected—without this protection itself being understood in terms of purity.

  It would certainly be desirable if, in the future, the focus fell upon the philosophical problems that we encounter in the Black Notebooks from the end of the 1930s. It seems to me that we are poised for a discussion of Heidegger’s radical anti-universalism. The universalistic—the planetary—appears for Heidegger to be grounded solely and entirely in the technological-mathematical-scientific character of modernity. Its effect is destructive for all particulars or singularities. The possibility of a being-historical “homeland” (cf. GA 73.1: 753–65) is annihilated by such a universalism. Obviously, Heidegger would have to refine this relation to technology, to the universalistic as such. The thinking of “positionality” (Ge-Stells) provides a more sensible relation to it.