Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy

by Peter Trawny

  22. Heidegger, Anmerkungen V, 17, in Anmerkungen I–V, GA 97.

  23. Heidegger, Being and Time, 262; GA 2: 290–91.

  24. In Martin, Martin Heidegger und das “Dritte Reich,” 196.

  25. Walter Eucken was the son of Husserl’s friend Rudolf Eucken and one of the founders of the so-called “Freiburg school of national economy,” an economic direction that has been characterized since 1950 as “ordoliberalism,” that is, a regulated liberalism. The historian Bernd Martin characterizes Eucken as the “authentic opponent and challenger of the rector promoting National Socialist university politics,” Heidegger (Martin, Heidegger und das “Dritte Reich,” 26). So it is no surprise that after the war Eucken did not hold himself back—he even held Heidegger’s university politics themselves to be anti-Semitic. Klinckowstroem, “Walter Eucken,” 73–75. It seems an utter contradiction for Heidegger to have been able to promote “National Socialist university politics” while growing increasingly isolated in his own philosophical plans for the university.

  26. Cited in Martin, Heidegger und das “Dritte Reich,” 149.

  27. Heidegger, Letters to His Wife, 28; “Mein liebes Seelchen!,” 51.

  28. Eucken was obviously not present at the corresponding faculty meeting. The story “was reported” to him, as the report says. Generally, the “Report” is ambiguous concerning Heidegger’s “behavior towards Jews.” It becomes clear that the incriminating statements stem from Walter Eucken, above all, and also from Adolf Lampe. Thus Eucken emphasizes “according to my memory,” that Heidegger “as Rector spoke in a public speech of the ‘Jewish dominance in the age of philosophical systems’ and of the Jews as ‘foreigners.’” Exculpatory remarks stem from Gerhard Ritter, for example. To what extent university politics play a role in the motives here is hard to say. All the same, Heidegger speaks in one place “of the denunciations of Herr Lampe, the mendacity of Herr Sauer, and the deviousness and sham-holiness of Herr von Dietze,” and he asks: “What is to be expected from the remaining operators; what right do these people have to pose as moralists over against the Nazis?” Heidegger, Zum Ereignis-Denken, GA 73.2: 1019. During the NS period, Lampe and von Dietze were active in the Christian-oppositional “Freiburg Circle,” falling into custody in 1944. Eucken was married to a Jew. But even Ritter was arrested in 1944. It is perfectly obvious that Heidegger could not get along with either the spiritual liberalism of Eucken or the basic Protestant comportment of Lampe and von Dietze.

  Work and Life

  1. Biemel, Martin Heidegger, xi.

  2. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 1919/1920, 124; GA 58: 162.

  3. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 1919/1920, 27; GA 58: 33.

  4. Martin Heidegger, Phenomenology of Religious Life, 6–7; GA 60: 8.

  5. Heidegger, Letters to His Wife, 213; Mein liebes Seelchen!, 264.

  6. Zimmermann, Martin und Fritz Heidegger, 82–89.

  7. Heidegger and Bauch, Briefwechsel, 32.

  8. Rosenkranz, Mascha Kaléko, 177.

  9. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 56–70.

  10. Ibid., 56.

  11. Ibid., 69.

  12. Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 133.

  13. Heidegger, Überlegungen X, 107, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95. The question is thus why Heidegger emphasizes that the author of Nathan the Wise was a “German poet.”

  Annihilation and Self-Annihilation

  1. Heidegger, Überlegungen XV, 16, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.

  2. Heidegger, Überlegungen XII, 65, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.

  3. Heidegger, Überlegungen XIII, 89, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96. The idea of “slaves to the history of beyng” is central to Heidegger’s being-historical thinking. Everything that occurs must occur, precisely because it does occur. For this reason, Heidegger even terms his thinking “in-human [un-menschlich]” (GA 69: 24). It does not revolve around “the measures and goals and incentives of the previous humanity.” Thus we see why the expressions about the persecuted and annihilated Jews sound so cold.

  4. Heidegger, Überlegungen XIV, 113, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96. Cf. also p. 12 above.

  5. Heidegger, Anmerkungen I, 26, in Anmerkungen I–V, GA 97.

  6. Cf. Heraclitus, fragment 22 (B 66): πάντα γὰρ τὸ πῦρ ἐπελθὸν κρινεῖ καὶ καταλήψεται. “Fire coming on will discern and catch up with all things.” Art and Thought of Heraclitus, 83. In his wartime lecture course on Heraclitus from the summer of 1943, Heidegger succinctly states: “The planet is in flames. The essence of the human is out of joint.” Heidegger, Heraklit, GA 55: 123.

  7. Heidegger, Being and Truth, 72–73; GA 36/37: 90–91.

  8. Being and Truth, 73; GA 36/37: 91. Faye says of the cited words: “That is one of the most indefensible pages of Heidegger because the struggle he describes against the enemy lying in wait at the very root of the people describes precisely, in his own characteristic language, the reality of the racial fight of Nazism and Hitlerism against the Jews assimilated to the German people, which will lead, in the course of the those years of 1933–1935, from the first anti-Semitic measures I have described as being a part of the Gleichschaltung to the anti-Jewish laws of Nuremberg and the Endlösung, or ‘Final Solution.’” Faye, Heidegger, 168. For Faye it is clear that the “enemy” is Judaism. He interprets its concealment as a consequence of assimilation. Then he interprets the “total annihilation” in the sense of a physical annihilation, which then would be realized in the Shoah. Naturally, none of this is mentioned here. But Heidegger ventures nothing that would preclude such an interpretation of the passage. Zaborowski comments on the passage in the following way: “Precisely in the philosophical context, when the talk is of battle, one must also think of Heraclitus’s word πόλεμος—battle or war—as the ‘father of all things’—a word that became increasingly important for Heidegger and that thereby helped him to justify the sublimation of the real battle into a spiritual one.” Zaborowski, “Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld,” 271. Apart from the fact that Heraclitus’s dictum intends no “spiritual battle”—in this Heidegger’s interpretation is justified—Zaborowski’s reference remains unclear. How could there be a “total annihilation” within a “spiritual battle”? One cannot “totally annihilate” philosophical ideas and arguments. Additionally, the application of a concept like “total annihilation” within a passionate discussion, i.e., in a “spiritual battle,” would be highly unusual. Nevertheless, I do not mean that here Heidegger indubitably thinks of a physical annihilation. But I do see that he apparently concedes the possibility of being able to think this. In contrast to Heidegger’s “total annihilation,” cf. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, 183: “He who lives for the sake of combatting an enemy has an interest in seeing that his enemy stays alive.”

  9. Heidegger, Being and Truth, 118; GA 36/37: 151.

  10. Cf. Rosenberg, Myth of the Twentieth Century, 70, translation modified: “Since Yahweh is conceived as materially effective, in the case of Judaism a strict monotheism is interwoven with practical material adoration (materialism) and the most sterile philosophical superstition, whereby the so called Old Testament, the Talmud, and Karl Marx convey the same insights.” A typical sequence of the time: Judaism = Yahweh—Monotheism—Materialism—Marxism.

  11. Heidegger, Anmerkungen I, 29, in Anmerkungen I–V, GA 97.

  12. Hitler, Mein Kampf, 666, translation modified; Mommsen, History of Rome, 4: 643, translation modified.

  13. Heidegger, Überlegungen XIV, 121, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.

  14. As is well known, Marx’s overlooked dissertation of 1840–41 is entitled The Difference between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophies of Nature. It is accordingly an anti-Semitic strategy to characterize Marx in his materialism (which is anyway a rather limited one) as a “Jew.”

  15. Levinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin, and Us,” 232–33.

  16. Ibid., 233.

&n
bsp; 17. Ibid., 234.

  18. Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, GA 67: 164.

  19. Augustine, City of God, 327–28.

  20. Heidegger, Anmerkungen I, 30, in Anmerkungen I–V, GA 97.

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

  22. Heidegger, Überlegungen XV, 13, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.

  23. Heidegger, Anmerkungen I, 151, in Anmerkungen I–V, GA 97.

  24. This means that Heidegger here anticipates what he says later: “Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs.” Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 27; GA 79: 27. Nevertheless, what is here neutrally-relatively attributed to positionality (Ge-Stell) is approximately eight years earlier attributed to the “Jewish.” It is not easy to pose the question why Heidegger identifies “machination” with the “‘Jewish.’” The quotation marks displace the stereotypical character of the “marked gift for calculation” from the factically existing Jew, in order to assign the whole of technology to him. With this, Judaism is the being-historical “enemy” plain and simple.

  After the Shoah

  1. Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 27, 53; GA 79: 27, 56. Cf. also Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 441.

  2. Jünger, Peace, 29.

  3. Heidegger and Arendt, Letters, 52–53; Briefe, 69.

  4. At this point I cannot deny myself a personal statement. It has become customary for us to adopt an indifferent attitude toward people, independent of their culture or sex or social status. Experiences arise in accordance with “political correctness” that Heidegger did not have at his disposal. As mentioned previously (see p. 27 above), before 1945 it was common to regard a German as German and a (German) Jew as a (German) Jew. Cf. also on this point the discussion about Germanism between Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt in their correspondence around 1933. On this, see my book Denkbarer Holocaust: Die politische Ethik Hannah Arendts (Conceivable Holocaust: The Political Ethics of Hannah Arendt), 165–73.

  5. Heidegger, Letters to His Wife, 28; Mein liebes Seelchen!, 51. The Reich foreign minister Walther Rathenau, murdered in June 1922 for anti-Semitic reasons, writes in an essay “Höre, Israel!” (“Hear, O Israel!”) (1897) that it is a “goal” of the “state, to work against the Jewification of its public essence”—and characterizes this as “justified” (37).

  6. Heidegger and Arendt, Letters, 142; Briefe, 170.

  7. Heidegger and Arendt, Letters, 75; Briefe, 94.

  8. Heidegger and Arendt, Letters, 84; Briefe, 104.

  9. Heidegger and Marcuse, “Exchange of Letters,” 30–31; GA 16: 430–31.

  10. Heidegger, Anmerkungen I, 151, in Anmerkungen I–V, GA 97.

  11. Heidegger and Marcuse, “Exchange of Letters,” 31, translation modified; GA 16: 431.

  12. Heidegger, Anmerkungen II, 60, in Anmerkungen II–V, GA 97.

  13. Heidegger, Anmerkungen V, 21, in Anmerkungen II–V, GA 97.

  14. Cf. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals: “All that has been done on earth against ‘the noble,’ ‘the powerful,’ ‘the masters,’ ‘the rulers,’ fades into nothing compared with what the Jews have done against them; the Jews, that priestly people, who in opposing their enemies and conquerors were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies’ values, that is to say, an act of the most spiritual revenge. For this alone was appropriate to a priestly people, the people embodying the most deeply repressed priestly vengefulness” (33–34). Heidegger, with his idiosyncratic hypostatization of a “spirit of revenge” proceeding against the Germans, can certainly call upon Nietzsche’s moral genealogy. Doing so also casts a light back upon Nietzsche’s anti-Semitism, which does not disappear when the philosopher in other passages adores the “race” of the Jews and gives free rein to his rage against anti-Semites. The thesis is probably not untenable that the (Christian-) conservative strand of German philosophical-history as a whole, from German Idealism, through Nietzsche, and on to Ernst and Friedrich-Georg Jünger, Carl Schmitt, and Martin Heidegger, was more or less latently anti-Semitic. Nevertheless, it is a matter of observing the distinctions between these kinds of anti-Semitisms.

  15. Heidegger and Arendt, Letters, 82; Briefe, 101–2. I cite only a portion of the poem.

  16. “Und vieles/Wie auf den Schultern eine/Last von Scheitern ist/Zu behalten. Aber bös sind/Die Pfade.” Friedrich Hölderlin, “Mnemosyne,” third version, Poems and Fragments, 518–19, translation modified. The “Scheit” is a wooden log. “Log” (Scheit) is related to the verb “to cut” (scheiden). “Scheitern” here in Hölderlin is the plural of “log” (cf. Scheiterhaufen, pyre, bonfire).

  17. Arendt, Denktagebuch, 3.

  18. Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence, 48.

  19. Heidegger and Arendt, Letters, 304–5; Briefe, 382–83.

  20. Heidegger, Anmerkungen II, 77, in Anmerkungen II–V, GA 97. It is conspicuous that Heidegger does not even once regard Judaism as a religion. This holds not only for the Black Notebooks, but rather for his work as a whole. One exception is found in the “Letter to a Young Student,” in which the philosopher speaks of the “default of god and the divinities.” This manner of “absence” would be “not nothing,” but rather “the presence, which must first be appropriated, of the hidden fullness . . . of what has been,” under which he understands “the divine in the world of the Greeks, in prophetic Judaism, in the preaching of Jesus.” Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, 182; GA 7: 185. The expression sounds conciliatory; its center of gravity, however, lies in that it concerns the “fullness of what has been.” When in the Black Notebooks the talk is of an “‘eternal people,’” Heidegger means not the Jews but instead the Germans (in his “Eighth Speech to the German Nation,” Johann Gottlieb Fichte contemplates the relation between a people and eternity). An obstacle to approaching Judaism as a religion for Heidegger was certainly its significance for Christianity.

  21. Another way of approaching Heidegger’s being-historical anti-Semitism is that of an idiosyncratic affinity. Thus he says at one point: “Ethnology [Volkskunde] of whatever kind or extent never finds the ‘eternal people’ if those individuals of essential questioning and speaking are not first assigned to this, the ones who seek the god of the people and who throw the decision for or against this god right into the essential center of this people.” Heidegger, Überlegungen XI, 83, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95. Let us keep the possibility open for a few moments that this “god” who would have to be thrown into the “essential center of this people” would have something to do with the “last god.” This would offer the opportunity, starting from this thought, to cast a glance at Judaism. The thinking of the “last god” as the nonuniversalist god of a people, a thinking that at times is to be characterized as thoroughly messianic, sounds somewhat similar to the way God is conceived in Judaism (this is an entirely preliminary pronouncement). Did Heidegger not see the Germans as a “chosen people”? How does the “last god” stand in relation to this “chosenness”? Is there in Heidegger an unacknowledged proximity to Judaism? And if there were such a proximity, what would it mean for his being-historical anti-Semitism? Cf. on all of this, Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event), 316; GA 65: 399.

  22. Heidegger, Anmerkungen V, 10, in Anmerkungen I–V, GA 97.

  23. At one point in the Anmerkungen, Heidegger says: “But it would be necessary that someday someone consider my anti-Christianity at least once and give it even one thought. This should not happen, so as to tolerate my thinking as still possibly “Christian.” I am not a Christian, and solely because I cannot be one. I cannot be one because I, spoken in a Christian manner, do not have grace. I will never have it so long as thinking expects something of my path.” Heidegger, Anmerkungen II, 138, in Anmerkungen I–V, GA 97. In point of fact, in the
interpretation of Heidegger’s thinking, the position has stubbornly persisted for decades that Heidegger’s deliberations regarding, for example, the “last god” (and the “gods”) can still be understood in a “Christian” manner. It would have been Christian to regard them as targeted blasphemies.

  24. Heidegger, Anmerkungen IV, 62, in Anmerkungen I–V, GA 97.

  25. Heidegger, Anmerkungen I, 30, in Anmerkungen I–V, GA 97.

  26. Cf. Leo Strauss, “Reason and Revelation.”

  27. Cf. Jan Assmann, Herrschaft und Heil.

  Attempts at a Response

  1. Heidegger, Bremen and Freiburg Lectures, 27, 53, emphasis modified; GA 79: 27, 56. Similar sounding would be Heidegger’s remarks in the letter to Marcuse that “the bloody terror of the Nazis in point of fact had been kept a secret from the German people.” Cf. Heidegger and Marcuse, “Exchange of Letters,” 31; GA 16: 431.

  2. Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich, Inability to Mourn.