The cyclical attempts to rehabilitate Martin Heidegger’s reputation tell us far more about the political context in which these attempts arise than about Heidegger’s dedication to Nazi ideology. This goes for Ramin Jahanbegloo’s 130th birthday paean to Heidegger published last week in the Indian Express.
The evidence attesting to Heidegger’s fidelity to Nazism and his deep-seated anti-Semitism has been available since 1933. That year, Heidegger took on the rectorate – the highest administrative position at a German university – at Freiburg University and proceeded to enact the policies of so-called Aryanisation with swiftness and violence. According to the Freiburg economics professor Adolf Lampe, Heidegger “defended his positions with fanatical and terroristic intolerance and summoned the political force of the party to his defence.”
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Many Jewish academics driven out of Germany after the Nazi seizure of power in the 1930s witnessed firsthand the early stages of Heidegger’s ambitious attempts to become the intellectual leader of the Nazi revolution. In his diaries and speeches from the time, Heidegger spoke of his political ambitions as a university administrator and educational reformer as the philosophical enactment of his thinking. This included the notion of a “historical people” gathered together in “struggle and communication” which he developed in his 1927 magnum opus Being and Time.
Yet despite the clear contemporary evidence documenting Heidegger’s philosophical commitments to Nazism’s racist policies, he was the beneficiary of an intense rehabilitation in the era of denazification.
The University of Freiburg, where Heidegger was the rector. Photo: Public Domain
Denazification and confronting the past
Denazification can be understood in two broad senses. First, it refers to the administrative process of examination and inquiry carried out by the post-war occupation governments to determine culpability among Nazis. Second, it refers to a large-scale societal process of what is often called “coming to terms with the past” in Germany.
The climate of denazification after 1945 in Germany was complex and at times at odds with its own stated aims. Given the large-scale complicity of the professoriate, civil service, medical profession and legal system (among others) in the mass murder of Jews, German society was not prepared for any genuine form of denazification. Amidst an amnesty passed in West Germany in 1949, the German mood turned to one of silence, amnesia and a booming consumer economy fostered by American interests.
As a world-famous philosopher, Heidegger became the symbolic case of the failures of denazification. For many influential German post-war philosophers such as Hans-Georg Gadamer, looking too closely into the Heidegger case would have meant also looking more closely into their own political commitments in the Nazi era. Meanwhile, while academic disciplines such as history were forced to go through a painful process of public denazification in the 1970s and 80s, the discipline of philosophy in Germany managed to avoid the same sort of painful public confrontation with the past.
This historical context of insufficient denazification of the discipline of philosophy enables Jahanbegloo to declare Heidegger the “philosopher of the future” and a thinker of great “spiritual power.” Working in line with these efforts at rehabilitation and diminishment – a process which has long been driven by the political and academic peculiarities of Germany and North America – Jahanbegloo can overlook the immense evidence attesting to Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and to his commitment to the most destructive aspects of Nazi policy.
While Victor Farias’ (1987) book Heidegger and National Socialism did – as Jahanbegloo acknowledges – a great deal to piece together the archival puzzle of Heidegger’s precise negotiations with the Nazi regime, this work was followed in the subsequent decades by further publications from Hugo Ott, Bernd Martin, Emmanuel Faye, and many others. That is not to mention the immense outpouring of literature following the 2013 publication of Heidegger’s infamous Black Notebooks – private diaries composed during the Nazi years which contain vociferous anti-Semitism.
Not a strategic political move
The publication of the Black Notebooks along with the publication of the German edition of Peter Trawny’s 2013 book Heidegger and the Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy rendered it impossible to deny the depth of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism. Moreover, it became clear that his anti-Semitism was a lifelong commitment and not simply a strategic political move adopted in the Nazi era.
In the wake of the Black Notebooks, a veritable cottage industry of publications has emerged in multiple European languages, rekindling the “Heidegger Affair.” In late 2013, one could hardly open the cultural section of a French or German newspaper without being confronted with Heidegger’s anti-Semitic remarks. In English, the Guardian, New York Times, New York Review of Books, L.A. Review of Books, and Jewish Review of Books also ran multiple pieces. The publication of the English translation of the first three volumes of the Black Notebooks was completed by 2017. Dozens of scholarly publications in various European languages have capably dealt with the Black Notebooks, including my own book with Stanford University Press, Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence.
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In the midst of this work, only a handful of diehard deniers have continued to defend Heidegger as not being anti-Semitic, among them Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann from Freiburg University. Yet overtly defending Heidegger against the well-documented charges of anti-Semitism is something entirely different from acting as if none of these publications exist – as if the debate begins and ends with Farias’ 1987 book.
Given this immense body of scholarly literature, it is irresponsible for Jahanbegloo to assert that “[a]ll this criticism came down to one notorious phrase by Heidegger.” Jahanbegloo’s statement was not tenable before the publication of the Black Notebooks and was not tenable even before the 1987 publication of Farias’ work. Moreover, Jahanbegloo’s rehashing of the old trope about Heidegger’s purported “silence on Auschwitz” is both outdated and politically irresponsible. Martin Heidegger was not silent about Auschwitz.
The Black Notebooks covering the years from 1942-48 are replete with mentions of the death camps, mass murder, and what Heidegger considers the dubious notion of collective guilt.
Heidegger’s stance towards the mass murder of Jews is both complex and devastatingly simple. The Holocaust, according to Heidegger, was an act of Jewish “self-destruction.” In his typical style of philosophical ambivalence, he treats the Holocaust as nothing more than a matter of ethical indifference.
Auschwitz concentration camp. Photo: Wikimedia Commons/ xiquinhosilva CC BY 2.0
As the entries in the Black Notebooks written in the wake of Germany’s defeat make clear, Heidegger declares the Germans the true victims of WWII and even goes on to describe occupied post-war Germany as “one single concentration camp.” These revelations are not new. They were published in German in 2015 and have been dealt with in book-length studies by Donatelli di Cesare, Peter Trawny and Jean-Luc Nancy. Moreover, these were fairly standard opinions within the post-war German conservative movement.
The polite face of intellectual fascism
Perhaps not coincidentally, this is the very movement which laid the intellectual groundwork for Germany’s currently insurgent anti-immigrant party, the Alternative for Germany. In the euphoria of anointing Heidegger a “groundbreaking thinker” and the author of the “most important philosophical work of the 20th century,” we all too often forget the tawdry context of Heidegger’s conservative and ethno-nationalist thinking. Globally, Heidegger is being rebranded as the polite face of a form of intellectual fascism which diverges in the particular conception of the enemy, but draws on a common intellectual heritage.
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Of course, ever since the time of denazification, Heidegger’s rehabilitation has had very little to do with the empirical evidence documenting Heidegger’s complicity in the crimes of National Socialism. Heidegger’s rehabilitation has always been far more revealing of the political goals of those seeking to rehabilitate him. In the context of Cold War America, Heidegger found a home in a university system seeking to purge itself of Marxist influence while fostering thinkers who would offer a façade of critique, while ultimately not impeding the march of neoliberal policies.
In Germany, where Heidegger so often served as a placeholder for the complicity of the professoriate in general, he received a partial rehabilitation – aided by a desire to cease uncomfortable discussions about collective and individual guilt. In the wake of the Black Notebooks, the only professorial chair dedicated to Heidegger’s work was dismantled – and we should cast a wary eye if any intellectual forces in Germany begin to push for Heidegger’s rehabilitation. What political goals could lie behind Jahanbegloo’s attempt to deny Heidegger’s anti-Semitism? Is it at all a scholarly conclusion to note that “[m]any of us might not consider Heidegger as an ethical person”?
Confronting the “Heidegger Affair” in a complex and responsible political manner has little to do with our individual moral judgments about Heidegger’s personality. Instead, we could learn much more about our current political challenges by attending to the structural forces which have allowed Heidegger’s thinking to serve as a foundation of the philosophical canon.
This means recognising that Heidegger was a philosopher who flourished under Fascism, while also acknowledging that many of the texts written during the Nazi years form the basis for the immense interdisciplinary impact of Heidegger’s work mentioned by Jahanbegloo. While it would be simplistic to say that working with Heidegger is perpetuating Nazism by other means (à la Emmanuel Faye), it would be equable irresponsible to say that Heidegger’s interdisciplinary impact is not of political importance in the current context of what Yale philosophy professor Jason Stanley calls the “work” of Fascism. Jahanebegloo’s attempt to rehabilitate Heidegger is performing this work.
Martin Heidegger promoted an environment of terrorism at German universities, worked to “Aryanise” the university curriculum, dismantle structures of democratic governance and contributed to the removal of a racial minority from German civil society. What does it mean to cleanse Heidegger’s history of these facts and to cavalierly wave the Heidegger flag as if he were an apolitical prophet of the future? What does it mean to do it in today’s India – as publicly-funded universities that have fostered critical thinking are being dismantled? What does it mean to proffer a form of scholarship that is either deeply invested in some version of the very political commitments Heidegger supported, or so thoroughly dismissive of the relevant literature that it does not deserve to be called scholarship? And what would it mean to do both at the same time?
Adam Knowles teaches philosophy at Drexel University, Philadelphia and is the author of Heidegger’s Fascist Affinities: A Politics of Silence (Stanford University Press, 2019).