by Peter Trawny
20. Heidegger, Überlegungen X, 40. In Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95. Cf. also Heidegger, Überlegungen XIII, 28, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96. “And all those who belong know this one decision: which will predominate, beings or beyng.”
21. Heidegger is cognizant of this problem when he writes: “How terrible can this slavery become, arising from the direct dependency into which all antagonism and struggle necessarily fall?” Heidegger, Überlegungen IV, 93, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94. Related to Heidegger’s characteristic alternative between “beyng” and “beings,” it can be said that “beyng” falls all the more into a dependency on “beings” the more strenuously it is separated from these. “Releasement” in this context means that Heidegger appeases the relation between “beyng” and “beings” by relaxing it.
22. Cf. the formulation by which “positionality” would be thought as the “prelude” (Vorspiel) of “the event” (Er-eignisses). Heidegger, Identity and Difference, 36–37; GA 11: 45–46.
23. Heidegger, Leitgedanken zur Entstehung der Metaphysik, der neuzeitlichen Wissenschaft und der modernen Technik (Guiding Thoughts on the Emergence of Metaphysics, Modern Science, and Contemporary Technology), GA 76: 363.
24. Heidegger, Überlegungen XI, 16–17, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95.
25. The second alternative recalls the being-historical figure of the “last man,” as coined by Nietzsche (cf. Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 17). In a certain way, there is no philosopher in the Überlegungen so present as Nietzsche. At times Heidegger seems to want to speak in the voice of Nietzsche, even if he attempts to outdo it.
26. Heidegger, Winke x Überlegungen (II) und Anweisungen, 30, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94.
27. “To be sure, the difficulties of generalizing, as when we say ‘the Germans’ and ‘the Jews,’ intimidate the observer. In times of conflict, however, such all-embracing terms prove easy to manipulate; and the fact that these general categories are vulnerable to questioning has never prevented people from using them vociferously.” Scholem, “Jews and Germans,” 72. In the following I will spare myself the quotation marks. The reason for this is that it is still not decided whether we can entirely renounce these collective concepts. Complete individualization still requires such a general horizon against which to proceed. As long as we are unable to assume a genuine dissolution of collective identity, collective concepts such as these remain of equivocal value. The omission of quotation marks is not to contest this equivocality, but merely to increase the readability of a text that already bristles with quotations.
28. Cohen, “German and Jewish Ethos I,” 180, translation modified: “The idea of humanity in Germanism [Deutschtum] alone rests on the basis of an ethics . . . . At this central point we should all once again feel the inner community between Germanism and Judaism. For the concept of humanity has its origin in the messianism of the Israelite prophets.”
29. Domarus, Hitler, 1: 288. In the famed speech by Otto Wels renouncing the March 1933 empowerment law of National Socialism, he says: “The gentlemen of the National Socialist Party call the Movement they have unleashed a National and not a National Socialist Revolution.” I mention this only because Heidegger, with his narrative of the two beginnings of the Greeks and the Germans, could certainly latch onto a “national” revolution more easily than a “National Socialist” one.
30. Heidegger, Überlegungen und Winke III, 42, 52, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94.
31. Heidegger, Zum Ereignis-Denken, GA 73.1: 848.
32. Heidegger, Überlegungen VII, 24, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95.
33. In my opinion, this is how Heidegger’s infamous remark in the Introduction to Metaphysics concerning “the inner truth and greatness of this movement [National Socialism] (namely the encounter between global technology and modern humanity)” is to be understood. National Socialism was necessary for the transition into the “other beginning.” Cf. Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, 213; GA 40: 208. Nevertheless, such a formulation already appears in the lecture course of winter semester 1934–35, Hölderlin’s Hymns “Germania” and “The Rhine.” That Heidegger at this time already conceived the full being-historical interpretation of National Socialism is improbable. At the beginning of 1935, the “inner truth and greatness of National Socialism” consisted in serving the narrative of the “first” and “other beginning” via the relation of Greeks and Germans.
34. Heidegger, Überlegungen XI, 76, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95. That Heidegger here emphasizes the “intellectual reasons” can only be understood in the sense that in “1930–1934” he pursued seemingly political reasons. This, however, is without doubt already a self-interpretation that must be regarded with reservation.
Types of Being-Historical Anti-Semitism
1. Heidegger, Überlegungen XII, 67, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.
2. Heidegger, Überlegungen XII, 82, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.
3. Heidegger, Überlegungen XIV, 121, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.
4. They do not surface here for the very first time in Heidegger’s work; I refer exclusively to the Black Notebooks. The following statements in a seminar protocol from winter 1933–34 already provided an occasion for discussion: “For a Slavic people, the nature of our German space would definitely be revealed differently from the way it is revealed to us; to Semitic nomads, it will perhaps never be revealed at all.” Heidegger, Nature, History, State, 56; Über Wesen und Begriff von Natur, Geschichte und Staat, 82. The statement touches on the important relation for Heidegger between place and self. The “earth” is not simply the globe, but rather a “rootedness” in the landscape that appears differently to each respective people. In this sense, the German landscape corresponds solely to the Germans. In terms of content, the statement just cited belongs in the realm of being-historical anti-Semitism. The word choice, however, does not entirely sound like Heidegger. The protocol was composed by Helmut Ibach, perhaps the same person as the editor Helmut Ibach, Kleine Feldpostille: Soldatische Richtbilder aus drei Jahrtausenden (Postcards from the Battlefield: Soldierly Paragons from Three Millennia). The historical question as to why being-historical anti-Semitism surfaces in the Black Notebooks around 1937 and then intensifies in 1939–41 is an important one, but can be answered only conjecturally. It is notable that Heidegger identifies the Jews as enemies of war. The more therefore that Germany falls into a political-military crisis—and with it, Heidegger’s conception of a particular Western task for the Germans—the more frequently does Heidegger pursue anti-Semitic ways of thinking. Added to this, Heidegger’s two sons, Hermann and Jörg, were increasingly engaged in military conflicts.
5. Heidegger, Überlegungen VIII, 9, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95.
6. This thought seemingly precludes our connecting what Heidegger ascribes to Judaism with Hegel’s doctrine of a “people’s spirit” or “peoples’ spirits”: “The concrete Ideas, the spirits of various peoples [Völkergeister], have their truth and determinacy in the concrete Idea insofar as this is absolute universality, i.e., in the world spirit, around whose throne they stand as the agents of its actualization and as witnesses and ornaments of its mastery.” Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 376 (§ 352), translation modified. Cf. also Hegel, Philosophy of History, 52–53. Since Heidegger makes “machination” the founding principle of both “calculating Judaism” and imperialistic National Socialism, he appears to escape the Hegelian relation between universal and particular. And nevertheless the structure between the “people’s spirits” and the “world spirit” is retained—only that now the “world spirit” of the twentieth century is machination.
7. In a letter from Martin to Elfride Heidegger, he says in 1920: “Here there’s a lot of talk about how many cattle now get bought up from the villages by the Jews. . . . the farmers are gradually getting insolent up here too & everything’s swamped with Jews & black marketeers.” Heidegger, Letters to His Wife, 77; Mein liebes Seelchen!, 112.
/> 8. Cf. Martin Buber, “Sie und Wir”, 157: “As is well known, the problem of the Jewish relation to the economy of the dominant peoples rests in that for the most part their participation does not begin at the foundation of the house, but rather on the second story. On the contrary, they have no share, or only a miniscule one, in primal production, in the arduous attainment of raw materials, the hard work in the soil, in agriculture as well as in mining. In the manual working over of raw materials they prefer for the most part the easier professions which can be performed while sitting, and in industrial dealings they stand as technicians, engineers, and directors and keep far from hard work on machines. As I have heard with great concern, even in Soviet Russian business not much has changed in this.” Even this is a 1939 example of how general attributions were made. Buber argues not historically but rather in the context of the “life of the people.” The discussion of the relation of the Jews to “primal production” appears to have a tradition. Already Theodor Herzl addressed this when he wrote: “Whoever would attempt to convert the Jew into a husbandman would be making an extraordinary mistake. For a peasant is in a historical category, as proved by his costume which in some countries he has worn for centuries; and by his tools, which are identical with those used by his earliest forefathers. . . . But we know that all this can be done by machinery. The agrarian question is only a question of machinery. America must conquer Europe.” Herzl, Jewish State, 87–88. Herzl combines the question of “primal production” with the meaning of technological modernity.
9. Simmel, “Deutschlands inner Wandlung,” 14–16.
10. Heidegger, “Memorial Address” (“Gelassenheit”), Discourse on Thinking, 46, translation modified; GA 16: 519: “Calculative thinking calculates. It calculates ever new, ever more promising, and, at the same time, ever cheaper possibilities.”
11. It can be no accident that Leo Strauss made particular reference to Heidegger’s employment of the concept of “rootedness.” Cf. Strauss, “Philosophy as Rigorous Science,” 33.
12. Something Heidegger also knows, as when he writes: “The mathematical idea of knowledge that begins with modernity—itself at base Ancient.” Heidegger, Winke x Überlegungen (II) und Anweisungen, 63, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94. All the more can we ask why Heidegger did not hold fast to this insight and develop it further. Translator’s note: the mathesis universalis is a key conception of modern philosophy whereby everything is defined as a possible object for mathematics. See Heidegger, What Is a Thing?, 65–108; GA 41: 65–108.
13. In Contributions to Philosophy, there is a passage that appears to contradict what is presented here: “Sheer idiocy to say that experimental research is Nordic-Germanic and that rational research, on the contrary, is of foreign extraction! We would then have to resolve to number Newton and Leibniz among the ‘Jews.’” Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 127; GA 65: 163. The appearance is nevertheless deceptive. The expression: all “calculative thinking” is “Jewish” is not identical with the expression: all “Jewish thinking” is “calculative.” The first expression Heidegger has to deny, because the great thinkers of modernity were actually not Jews. The second expression he can affirm without falling into contradiction with the first. Cf. also the previous note.
14. Heidegger, Überlegungen XII, 69, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.
15. Heidegger, Überlegungen XII, 82, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.
16. Heidegger, Überlegungen III, 127, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94.
17. Naturally it is possible to ask whether there could be a Jewish “racism.” Christian Geulen, in his clever Geschichte des Rassismus (History of Racism), defines racism as an activity endeavoring “to theoretically ground and practically produce either conventional or new limits of belonging” (11). In this sense the author states that Judaism knows an “asymmetrical self- and foreigner image structure,” though it would “in no way” aspire “automatically” to “the conquest, colonization, or oppression of foreign cultures” (25). Judaism has continually made a “passive claim to exclusivity” in its “competition with the respective hegemonic cultures.” It is a social-psychological question as to whether and how this “passive claim to exclusivity”—that of being the “chosen people”—can be an impetus for racist reactions to the difference that constantly presents itself between belonging and nonbelonging.
18. Cf. Alicke, Lexikon der jüdischen Gemeinden, col. 1306: “In the early morning hours of the 10th of November, 1938, the Freiburg synagogue on Werderring was burned down. The arsonists forced the leading men of the synagogue community to attend the burning. That same night, even the Jewish cemetery was vandalized. Even while the synagogue burned, about 140 Jewish men were arrested and on the evening of November 10 transported away to the Dachau concentration camp.” It is further said that “at the end of October in 1940, a majority of the 350 Jews that remained in the city [‘more than 1,100 Jews’ had emigrated]—together with about 6,500 others—were deported to Gurs; most of them came here in order to stay alive or were murdered in the death camps.” In 1940, Hannah Arendt found herself in the same camp, though she was able to leave in June. Cf. Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 153–56.
19. Cf. Heidegger, Zur Auslegung von Nietzsches II. Unzeitgemäßer Betrachtung (On the Interpretation of Nietzsches 2nd “Unfashionable Observation”), GA 46: 259–62. A note from this session runs: “This ever increasing power, which constitutes the essence of mightiness [Mächtigkeit], rules all claims; that is to say, violence and robbery are not consequences and ways of carrying out otherwise justified claims, but rather the reverse: robbery is the ground of justification. We still know little of the ‘logic’ of power, because we still constantly blend moral considerations into it and because the proclamation of power itself, in the interest of power, employs ‘moral’ reasons and goals (cf. for example, the English ‘cant’)” (GA 46: 215–16). “Cant” is a jargon that can be ascribed to various groups (religious sects, criminals, etc.).
20. Heidegger, Überlegungen XIV, 79–80, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.
21. Heidegger, Überlegungen VII, 88, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95. Translator’s note: these Aryan variants of psychoanalysis would include the work of the Deutsches Institut für psychologische Forschung und Psychotherapie in Berlin under the leadership of Matthias Göring, cousin of Hermann Göring, from 1936 to 1945 (the “Göring Institute”).
22. Heidegger, Überlegungen IX, 123, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95. Freud, for example, also attempted to attract the non-Jew Carl Gustav Jung to his side on “racial” grounds. He says as much in a letter to Karl Abraham: “his adherence is all the more valuable. I almost said that only his appearance has saved psychoanalysis from the danger of becoming a Jewish national concern.” Cf. Gay, Freud, 204.
23. Jaspers, Philosophische Autobiographie, 101.
24. Sammons, Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion: Die Grundlage des modernen Antisemitismus—eine Fälschung (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: The Foundation of Modern Anti-Semitism—A Forgery). Cf. also on the protocols, Poliakov, History of Anti-Semitism, 4: 210–13, as well as Benz, Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion: Die Legende von der jüdischen Weltverschwörung (The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: The Legend of a Jewish World Conspiracy).
25. Translator’s note: A “forgery” is the subtitle of Sammons’s annotated edition of the Protocols.
26. Stein, Adolf Hitler, “Schüler der Weisen von Zion.”
27. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 358.
28. Ibid., 378.
29. Sammons, Die Protokolle der Weisen von Zion, 37.
30. Ibid., 53.
31. Baynes, Speeches of Adolf Hitler, 2: 1140; cf. Domarus, Hitler, 1: 392.
32. Cf. Domarus, Hitler, 3: 1449, translation modified.
33. What or who is “England”? Immediately after the passage cited above as citation 3 (“Even the thought of an agreement with England . . .”), Heidegger adds: “Why do we recognize so late that, in truth, E
ngland is and is able to exist without a Western bearing? Because only in the future will we grasp that England initiated the arrangement of the modern world, and that this modernity, in keeping with its essence, is directed at the unleashing of machination across the entire globe.” Heidegger understands England as the origin of Americanism and Bolshevism, because it pursues the “unleashing of machination.” At another place he writes: “What we did to the Czechs and Poles, England and France want to do to the Germans as well; only that France would like to retain its ahistoricality [Geschichtslosigkeit] through a destroyed Germany and England through a gigantic business; while for the coming Germans there is allotted the endurance of another history—for their thinking stands in the transition to mindfulness.” Heidegger, Überlegungen XIII, 95–96, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96. Without taking this statement about England as providing an exhaustive account of Heidegger’s view, the proclamation that England’s interest in the destruction of Germany would concern a “gigantic business” nevertheless carries with it, in the present context, an anti-Semitic connotation.
34. This attribution was so widespread that it was even affirmed by Jews themselves: “The tragedy of the Jews is the tragedy of the citizenry that lives in the metropolises. The Jew is a person of the big city, more than half the Jews of the world live in big cities. . . . Accustomed to going to the water faucet and drinking from it as a matter of course, raised with the telephone, auto, and electricity, the feeling and sense for primal production is lost on him. They no longer have any inkling of wells that the parents dug out, of the painstaking path of the forefathers and of the light that God at one time produced. This fate is admittedly the fate of the European metropolises in general.” Prinz, “Wir Juden,” 95–96. While most Jews in the German empire around 1900 did indeed live in Berlin, the percentage share of Jews in the total population was, however, lower than in other European big cities. Cf. on these matters Zumbini, Die Wurzeln des Bösen (The Roots of Evil), 42–43.