Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy

by Peter Trawny

  It is the Shoah that marks every confrontation with anti-Semitic ideas before 1945 with an asymmetry. Between the years 1938 and 1941, what we know, Heidegger did not know. He kept his Überlegungen secret at a time when everyone could sling anti-Semitic discourse. Anti-Semitism was a career. Thus a hermeneutic sense of justice should reign here. Indeed precisely this would have to aver that Heidegger noted down his statements on “world Judaism” while the synagogues in Germany burned. And it would have to be conceded that even in the Black Notebooks, those esoteric manuscripts, while many words of mourning over the suffering of the Germans are to be found, there are none concerning that of the Jews. There reigns here a silence that will long resound in our ears.

  Nevertheless, this silence cannot be the last word. Philosophy is, when it happens, free. To freedom there belongs the danger of failure: “for all essential thinking needs the freedom to err, a long useless errancy” (GA 95: 227). Despite everything problematic entered in the Überlegungen, this unreasonable demand still stands. Does the drama of philosophy not consist in the possibility of error? There is perhaps no philosophy without a pain all its own.

  April 20, 2014, P.T.

  Afterword to the German Third Edition

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  When Contributions to Philosophy was published in 1989, our understanding of Heidegger’s thinking began to change. The thought of the “event” (Ereignis) started a trend among philosophers. Even academic research pursued this development, if somewhat reluctantly.

  In 2014 a similar transformation took place. The publication of the Black Notebooks have initiated a discussion about Heidegger that, to be sure, will influence our dealings with his thinking even more strongly than the publication of Contributions to Philosophy.

  The upheaval brings more good with it than bad. We are confronted with a problem that no one can ignore. The recognition of this problem—paradoxically, in a certain respect—will lead to a new freedom in Heidegger interpretation. The time when a Heidegger reading could pursue a mere reconstruction of his path of thought has faded. For reconstruction is simply immune to such a problem.

  But can I proclaim that the discussions of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism have brought new life to this thinking? Certainly no one can underestimate the consequences of these statements. There are enemies of philosophy who would dearly like to hinder the effect of Heidegger’s thinking—already a futile attempt since it falls into a performative contradiction with itself, constantly having to remember to forget Heidegger. But even neutral readers will remain cautious.

  Nevertheless, something has happened. With the publication of the Black Notebooks Heidegger has once again—or perhaps really for the first time—written himself into the painful history of the Shoah. Even he could not escape from this. The sorrow over the loss meets up with the terror of a thinking that does not know this sorrow. So long as there are humans, there are these “trails of tears.”1

  January 20, 2015, P.T.

  Abbreviations

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  All citations to GA refer to Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976–).

  GA 2

  Sein und Zeit. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. 1977.

  GA 7

  Vorträge und Aufsätze. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. 2000.

  GA 9

  Wegmarken. 2nd ed. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. 1996.

  GA 11

  Identität und Differenz. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. 2006.

  GA 14

  Zur Sache des Denkens. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. 2007.

  GA 16

  Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges. Ed. Hermann Heidegger. 2000.

  GA 24

  Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie. 3rd ed. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. 1997.

  GA 26

  Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz. 2nd ed. Ed. Klaus Held. 1990.

  GA 34

  Vom Wesen der Wahrheit: Zu Platons Höhlengleichnis und “Theätet.” 2nd ed. Ed. Hermann Mörchen. 1997.

  GA 35

  Der Anfang der abendländischen Philosophie: Auslegung des Anaximander und Parmenides. Ed. Peter Trawny. 2012.

  GA 36/37

  Sein und Wahrheit: 1. Die Grundfrage der Philosophie; 2. Vom Wesen der Wahrheit. Ed. Hartmut Tietjen. 2001.

  GA 38

  Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache. Ed. Günter Seubold. 1998.

  GA 40

  Einführung in die Metaphysik. Ed. Petra Jaeger. 1983.

  GA 41

  Die Frage nach dem Ding. Zu Kants Lehre von den transzendentalen Grundsätzen. Ed. Petra Jaeger. 1984.

  GA 46

  Zur Auslegung von Nietzsches II. Unzeitgemäßer Betrachtung. Ed. Hans-Joachim Friedrich. 2003.

  GA 53

  Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister.” 2nd ed. Ed. Walter Biemel. 1993.

  GA 55

  Heraklit: 1. Der Anfang des abendländischen Denkens. 2. Logik: Heraklits Lehre vom Logos. 3rd ed. Ed. Manfred S. Frings. 1994.

  GA 58

  Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919/20). Ed. Hans-Helmuth Gander. 1993.

  GA 60

  Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens: 1. Einleitung in die Phänomenologie der Religion; 2. Augustinus und der Neuplatonismus; 3. Die philosophischen Grundlagen der mittelalterlichen Mystik. Ed. Matthias Jung and Thomas Regehly, and Claudius Strube. 1995.

  GA 65

  Beiträge zur Philosophie (vom Ereignis). 2nd ed. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. 1994.

  GA 66

  Besinnung. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. 1997.

  GA 67

  Metaphysik und Nihilismus: 1. Die Überwindung der Metaphysik; 2. Das Wesen des Nihilismus. Ed. Hans-Joachim Friedrich. 1999.

  GA 69

  Die Geschichte des Seyns: 1. Die Geschichte des Seyns; 2. Κοινόν: Aus der Geschichte des Seyns. Ed. Peter Trawny. 1998.

  GA 71

  Das Ereignis. Ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann. 2009.

  GA 73.1

  Zum Ereignis-Denken. Ed. Peter Trawny. 2013.

  GA 73.2

  Zum Ereignis-Denken. Ed. Peter Trawny. 2013.

  GA 76

  Leitgedanken zur Entstehung der Metaphysik, der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft und der modernen Technik. Ed. Claudius Strube. 2009.

  GA 79

  Bremen und Freiburger Vorträge: 1. Einblick in das was ist; 2. Grundsätze des Denkens. 2nd ed. Ed. Petra Jaeger. 2005.

  GA 84.1

  Seminare Kant—Leibniz—Schiller. Teil 1: Sommersemester 1931 bis Wintersemester 1935/36. Ed. Günther Neumann. 2013.

  GA 86

  Seminare Hegel—Schelling. Ed. Peter Trawny. 2011.

  GA 94

  Überlegungen II–VI. Ed. Peter Trawny. 2014.

  GA 95

  Überlegungen VII–XI. Ed. Peter Trawny. 2014.

  GA 96

  Überlegungen XII–XV. Ed. Peter Trawny. 2014.

  GA 97

  Anmerkungen I–V. Ed. Peter Trawny. 2015.

  Notes

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  Preface to the English Translation

  1. Richard Wolin, “National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks,” and Donatella Di Cesare, “Heidegger, das Sein und die Juden.”

  2. Cf. Joachim Prinz, “Wir Juden”: “The Jew, startled out of the narrow ghetto (although indeed in many regards a place more free and clear) with the swing of a great and epochal turn in the ‘great age,’ suffers the fate of the parvenu. His table of values breaks apart. His equilibrium is disturbed. And so he supports himself each time on what the epoch harbors of new ‘values.’ In place of his former instinctual certainty, he now has a ‘nose’ for the modern. ‘Modern as a minute from now’—because he does not understand the day or the hour” (28). This book by Rabbi Prinz assembles the motives for a renunciation of the modern, a medit
ation upon the origin, and the grounding of a new society. Similar motives are found in Herzl and Buber. Heidegger probably would have understood them as indications of the correctness of his proclamations.

  3. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Conciliator, You That No Longer Believed In . . . : Preliminary Drafts for ‘Celebration of Peace,’” Poems and Fragments, 453.

  4. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen VII, 49–50, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95.

  5. Emmanuel Levinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us.”

  6. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen XIV, 91, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.

  Introduction: A Thesis in Need of Revision

  1. Jonas, Memoirs, 59: “Many of these young Heidegger worshippers, who’d come great distances, even from as far away as Königsberg, were Jews. That can’t have been a coincidence, though I have no explanation for it. But I assume the attraction wasn’t mutual. I don’t know whether Heidegger felt entirely comfortable with all these Jews swarming around him, but actually he was completely apolitical.” The concluding judgment concerning Heidegger as “apolitical” is simply false. In the Third Reich, Heidegger thought “more politically” than most professors. On the proximity of Heideggerian thinking and Judaism, see Zarader, Unthought Debt.

  2. Baumann, Erinnerungen an Paul Celan.

  3. Derrida, “Heidegger’s Silence,” 147. What does “wounding of thinking” (blessure pour la pensée) mean? (Calle-Gruber, Conférence, 81). What or who has struck a wound in whom? Did the “wounding” take place in Heidegger’s thinking? What did it teach him? Or is Heidegger’s thinking a damaging of thinking more generally? Is our thinking wounded? Indeed, is anti-Semitism on the whole a wounding of thinking? Translator’s note: Derrida’s text, first published in a German translation, is excerpted from his remarks at a conference in Heidelberg in 1988. The French transcript of this conference is found in Calle-Gruber, ed., La Conférence de Heidelberg.

  4. For example, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” Pathmarks, 242; GA 9: 317.

  5. Safranski, Martin Heidegger, 254: “Was Heidegger anti-Semitic? Certainly not in the sense of the ideological lunacy of Nazism. It is significant that neither in his lectures and philosophical writings, nor in his political speeches and pamphlets are there any anti-Semitic or racist remarks.” Beyond this, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: “Heidegger overestimated Nazism and probably wrote off as merely incidental certain things which were already in evidence before 1933 to which he was, in fact, staunchly opposed: anti-semitism, ideology (‘politicized science’) and peremptory brutality” (21). Heidegger’s thinking is no “ideology” (he scorns this), although at times it does become ideological.

  6. On this problem see Benz, Was ist Antisemitismus?, 9–28.

  7. Translator’s note: the term “being-historical,” seinsgeschichtlich, refers to Heidegger’s conception of a “history of being,” Geschichte des Seins, first pursued in the 1930s and elaborated in the “being-historical treatises,” beginning with Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) of 1936–38. The term will be developed further in the following chapter.

  8. The number is as follows: fourteen notebooks with the title Überlegungen (Considerations), nine Anmerkungen (Remarks), two Vier Hefte (Four Notebooks), two Vigiliae, one Notturno, two Winke (Hints), four Vorläufiges (Preliminaries).

  9. Heidegger, Anmerkungen II, 77, in Anmerkungen II–V, GA 97. All citations from the Black Notebooks are by individual notebook name followed by page number therein. Notebook pagination is supplied in the margins of the corresponding Gesamtausgabe volume. Translator’s note: the German Seyn, “beyng,” is, an older spelling of Sein (“being”)—one still found in Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel—and is used by Heidegger in the mid 1930s to emphasize the historical, destinal, and nonobjective character of being.

  10. Cf. Zaborowski, “Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld,” 637: “If Heidegger actually had been an anti-Semite inwardly and of deep conviction, in the sense of the racial anti-Semitism represented by the National Socialists, then in the time from 1933 to 1945, and above all during the rectorate, he would have had ample opportunity to show this publicly and thereby to work with the new authorities.” This is an argument against an “inward anti-Semitism of deep conviction.” Nevertheless, we know the extent to which Heidegger tended to keep his thinking far from every form of publicity. Philosophy and publicity are mutually exclusive for him. That he secreted away his anti-Semitic ideas can also be understood from this perspective.

  11. Heidegger, Überlegungen VI, 14. In Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94.

  The Being-Historical Landscape

  1. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 11; GA 24: 15.

  2. Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 157; GA 26: 199.

  3. I prefer the concept of “narrative” and consider that of a “remythologizing” to be unfitting. Heidegger was not interested in founding a “new mythology,” even if in later manuscripts the concept of a “mytho-logy of the event” appears to rehabilitate such a notion (Heidegger, Zum Ereignis-Denken [Toward Event-Thinking], GA 73.2: 1277). In Winke x Überlegungen (II) und Anweisungen, however, it says: “The reference to some higher or highest reality—Christianity—[or even] an invented myth of any such sort—no longer helps at all, though it did for a long time.” Heidegger, Winke x Überlegungen (II) und Anweisungen, 84, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94. The mentioned “mytho-logy of the event” must stand at the beginning of any thematic tracing of the narratival character of the history of being.

  4. Heidegger, Being and Time, 436; GA 2: 508.

  5. Heidegger, Being and Time, 443; GA 2: 516.

  6. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” 143; GA 53: 179.

  7. Heidegger, Essence of Truth, 7; GA 34: 10.

  8. Heidegger, Essence of Truth, 62, translation modified; GA 34: 85.

  9. Heidegger, Mindfulness, 374, translation modified; GA 66: 424. Translator’s note: Of the Event is Heidegger’s private name for Contributions to Philosophy.

  10. Heidegger, Der Anfang der abendländischen Philosophie. Auslegung des Anaximander und Parmenides (The Beginning of Western Philosophy: An Interpretation of Anaximander and Parmenides), GA 35: 1.

  11. Heidegger, Winke x Überlegungen (II) und Anweisungen, 89, in GA 94.

  12. What is instated here is a metapolitics. This concept must be newly assessed in its particular significance for Heidegger. On “politics” in the NS-period for Heidegger, see Sommer, Heidegger 1933; Zaborowski, “Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld?”; Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy; Amato et al., Heidegger à plus forte raison; Rockmore, On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy, as well as the important essay by Donatella di Cesare, “Heidegger, das Sein und die Juden.” My essay is not conceived as a general confrontation with Heidegger’s adoption of and separation from National Socialism. For me, as for di Cesare, it is an issue of anti-Semitism, certainly an important dimension of this entire context.

  13. The thesis that the relation of the “first” to the “other beginning” would motivate Heidegger’s thinking through to 1945 needs refining. That a manuscript such as Contributions to Philosophy (1936–38) is determined by this relation is significant. But in the writings after 1940, the talk of an “other beginning” disappears—if not abruptly, then increasingly. Already in the 1941–42 manuscript The Event, the idea is stressed differently. Indeed, at one point we read: “The experience of the beginning as downfall.” Heidegger, The Event, 243, translation modified; GA 71: 280. Here the concrete experience of history asserts itself. The course of the war is threatened. The “downfall” as onto-tragic movement now becomes increasingly important.

  14. Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns (The History of Beyng), GA 69: 27.

  15. Translator’s note: Heidegger’s term Machenschaft, “machination,” names the processes that objectify the world of Dasein and that render this a matter of lived experience (Erlebnis). Foremost among such processes is that of
modern technology. Machenschaft thus produces beings understood in terms of what can be “made” (macht) by the power (Macht) of the will. The term plays a central role in Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event).

  16. Cf. Trawny, Adyton, 94–100.

  17. I am aware of the problems with this concept. Manichaeism proclaims the combative separation of two irreconcilable “principles” of darkness and light. At times, Heidegger analogously separates “beyng” from “beings” (in “beyng” there are then “beyngs” [Seyendes]).

  18. Heidegger, Überlegungen XIV, 113, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.

  19. Cf. Burkert, Greek Religion, 75–83.