c)
Richard L. Rubenstein
THE PHILOSOPHER AND THE JEWS:
THE CASE OF
MARTIN HEIDEGGER
From, Modern Judaism, Spring 1989, reprinted
in Alan L. Berger, ed., Bearing Witness
to the Holocaust (Lewiston: Edward Mellen Press,
1991)
Martin Heidegger was one of the most
important Western philosophers since Hegel. At least for a time, he was also a
confirmed Nazi and, perhaps, a convinced anti-Semite who, unlike so many of his
fellow Germans, never expressed a word of regret for the horrors perpetrated by
the Third Reich. Moreover, even after ceasing to be visibly active as a Nazi,
he retained his membership in the Nazi party (#312589 Gau
Baden) until the very end of the war, faithfully paying his dues and
assessments.
Debate concerning Heidegger's
alleged anti-Semitism and his commitment to National Socialism has been carried
on since the end of the war. Recently, the debate has been renewed with the
publication of Victor Farias' book, Heidegger et le nazisme.[1] Were Heidegger a lesser figure, his
involvement in National Socialism would be of little concern save to historians
with a special interest in twentieth-century German philosophy. Unfortunately,
such is not the case. If, as some students of Heidegger contend, Heidegger was
an unrepentant follower of a political movement whose most distinctive
institution was the death camp, with its factory-like capacity for the
extermination and incineration of as many as 25,000 human beings a day, one
must either come to understand philosophy in a radically new light or one must
seriously question the value of Heidegger's contribution.
Some of Heidegger's defenders insist
that there is no intrinsic connection between his thought and his politics.
This is a position Heidegger himself rejected. Whatever his political commitments
after resigning as Rector of the
Moreover, as early as 1927 in his
major work, Sein und Zeit,
Heidegger implied that there is an intrinsic connection between authentic
existence, thought and politics. In that
work Heidegger's readers are called to "authenticity," which is
characterized as honest acceptance of man's own being and which Heidegger
further identifies as "resoluteness" (Entschlossenheit), that is, the
authentic response to the call of conscience.[3] In
that call man, who is referred to by Heidegger as Dasein,
is summoned out of his accepted, routine ways toward openness to the
uncertainty and groundlessness of human existence. [4]
As understood by Heidegger, in our
era authentic existence presupposes Nietzsche's "death of God" and
the total absence of any higher authority that could serve as a guide or source
of behavioral norms. Heidegger would regard those who seek such guidance, such
as Heidegger's contemporary, theologian Karl Barth, as leading an essentially
inauthentic existence. Nevertheless, Barth, who was as important to Christian
theology as Heidegger was to philosophy, was never in doubt concerning the evil
of National Socialism. Barth later wrote about his experiences during the
turbulent period of the Nazi seizure of power: "[I] knew where I stood and
what I could not do. In the last resort, this was because I saw my dear German
people beginning to worship a false God."[5] In 1934 Barth refused to take the oath of
allegiance to Hitler that was required of all German professors knowing that
refusal would cost him his job. By contrast, during his tenure as rector of the
I am decidedly not a philosemite, in that in personal encounters with living
Jews [even Jewish Christians] I have always, so long as I can remember, had to
suppress a totally irrational aversion, naturally suppressing it at once on the
basis of all my presuppositions, and concealing it totally in my statements,
yet still having to suppress and conceal it. Pfui! is
all I can say to this in some sense allergic reaction of mine. But this is how
it was and is. A good thing that this reprehensible instinct is totally alien
to my sons and other better people than myself (including you). But it could
have had a retrogressive effective on my doctrine of
The aversion may very well have
influenced his doctrine of
Absent any transcendent authority,
Heidegger's categories of resoluteness and authenticity appear to have an
abstract, formal quality which can easily lead to sheer arbitrariness and
nihilism in which anything, including the most radical National Socialist
programs, is permissible. Nevertheless, Dasein cannot
exist in the world without constantly being confronted with the necessity of
responsible choice and decision. In Sein
und Zeit Heidegger sought to escape from nihilism
by seeking authority in "repeatable possibilities of existence," that
is in the past.[9]
Unfortunately, Heidegger offered no criteria by which those aspects of the past
deemed worthy are to be recognized. Instead, he identified "authentic
repetition" with "the possibility that Dasein
may choose its hero." [10]
Who that hero might be or how he might be identified was not specified.
Nevertheless, Heidegger did suggest
criteria by which heroes are to be recognized. Having rejected all possibility
of transcendence, Heidegger also rejected modern subjective individualism,
characterizing Dasein as being-in-the-world-with-others.[11] Such being-in-the-world has, of necessity, an
historical dimension which Dasein shares with his
fellows of the same Volk:
Our
fates have already been guided in advance, in our Being with one another in the
same world and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities...Dasein's fateful destiny in and with its 'generation' goes
to make up the full authentic historicizing of Dasein.[12]
For Heidegger, authenticity thus
entails the individual's historical involvement in the destiny of his community
and his generation. With the advent of National Socialism, Heidegger's choice
of a hero and his involvement in the destiny of his community were to take on a
sinister dimension. By his own admission, Heidegger found his hero in Hitler at
least or a time. Unfortunately, as Karsten Harries
has pointed out, "Due to its formal character, Being and Time
invites a ...readiness to commit ourselves without prior assurance that there
is a cause worthy of our commitment." [13]
Unlike Heidegger, Karl Barth was capable of discerning which causes are worthy
of our commitment.
The question of the relation between
Heidegger's thought and his politics, including the issue of anti-Semitism, can
thus be seen as consistent with Heidegger's own views. Victor Farias, a researcher who has explored this question, has
concluded that Heidegger's anti-Semitism and his Nazi commitments were neither
a sport nor an aberration. On the contrary, according to Farias,
they were intrinsic to his development as a thinker. Farias
argues that these attitudes were preceded by a long period of gestation going
back to the anti-Semitic Christian Social movement of
Farias
points to the fact that the subject of Heidegger's earliest published writing
was Abraham à
The inauthenticity
and corruption of urban, secular life, a theme effectively used by the Nazis,
was to be an abiding idea in Heidegger’s thought. A persistent theme in
Heidegger's thought from start to finish was the idea of authentic existence as
rooted in one's local Heimat.xxx This theme
was linked to a profound distrust of the world of technology. Like so many
other Germans and Austrians whose roots were outside of burgeoning,
multi-ethnic cities like pre-Hitler
If a
certain type of urban life was repugnant to him, and all that pertained to the
big city appeared strange to him, this was especially true of that mundane
spirit of Jewish circles that dominate the great capitals of the West. But this
attitude must not be understood as anti-Semitism, although it has often been
interpreted that way. <>
In spite of Petzet's
claim that Heidegger's repugnance of urban life and the "mundane spirit of
Jewish circles that dominate" was not the view of an anti-Semite, this
same repugnance was characteristic of virtually every German anti-Semite in the
twenties and thirties. In the
Heidegger's distaste for the
pluralistic, modern world-epitomized by the
It does
not have to do with Jewish hatred-one can reach an agreement directly with
serious Jews on this point-it does not have to do with blood, also not with the
religious beliefs of Judaism. But it does involve the threat of a quite
specific disintegrated and demoralizing urban spirituality, whose
representative is now the Jewish Volk. (Italics added) <>
Heidegger returned to writing about
Abraham a
After the war, Heidegger claimed
that he had ceased to participate in Nazi party activities in 1934. This claim
can no longer be supported by the available evidence. <> Before turning
to that evidence, however, we must take note of Heidegger's most overtly Nazi
period, his term as rector of the University of Freiburg.
Undoubtedly, the best source of information concerning Heidegger's political
activities as rector is to be found in the university's archives.
Unfortunately, the archives have been declared unavailable to the public and
are likely to remain so for a long time. <>. The refusal of the
university to open its archives more than fifty years after Heidegger's tenure
as rector inevitably raises the question of why a research institution sees fit
to hamper rather than foster historical research on this question. Nor is
Because of Heidegger's international
reputation and his widely-known, pro-Nazi views, Heidegger was elected rector
three months after the Nazi seizure of power. The appointment was considered an
event of international importance. The faculty had hoped that Heidegger would
be able to serve as an effective mediator between the university and the new
National Socialist state, preserving as much of the university's autonomy as
was possible under the circumstances. Heidegger disappointed these
expectations.
Heidegger's inauguration on
The much
celebrated "academic freedom" is being banished from the German
university; for this freedom was not genuine, since it was only negative. It
meant primarily freedom from concern, arbitrariness of intentions and
inclinations, lack of restraint in what was done and left undone. The concept
of the freedom of the German is now brought back to its truth. <>
Heidegger
concluded with words of praise for "the splendor and greatness" of
the current "setting out" of the German people to "fulfill its
historic mission," a matter decided by "the young and the youngest
strength of the people." In the context of the upheavals taking place in
Nevertheless, a word of caution is
in order. It is important to note that the body of the lecture is devoted less
to Nazi politics than to the question, "what is science?" and the
role of the German university in fostering it. In attempting to answer that
question Heidegger goes back to the beginnings of science in Greek philosophy
and shows how that beginning is related to the destiny of the university and
the German people. The interpretation of the Rektoratsrede
as an overtly pro-Nazi document cannot be dismissed. Heidegger was a committed
Nazi at the time. However, this interpretation should be read together with
that of scholars such as Karsten Harries and Graeme
Nicholson. <> Harries points out that "Heidegger's concern in the
address is directed not so much towards the individual as towards the
threatened autonomy of the German university." <>. Still, Harries
observes that Heidegger "was willing to fuse his own philosophical
terminology with Nazi jargon." He cites as one example the "three bonds" of the German
student which are to replace the now banished "academic freedom,"
namely, Arbeitdienst, Wehrdienst
and Wissensdienst, Labor Service, Military Service
and Science Service. <> Nicholson sees the Rektoratsrede
as an expression of Heidegger's attempt to put "the mark of his
philosophy" on National Socialism. <> This is keeping with
Heidegger's later explanation in which he acknowledged that in 1933 he saw
"in the movement that had gained power the possibility of an inner
recollection and renewal of the people and a path that would allow it to
discover its historical vocation in the Western world." <> Heidegger thus discerned at least a
partial coincidence of aim and aspiration between his thought and that of the
Nazi movement at the time. Later in the year, Heidegger made matters worse in
an address to the students of
On
Always,
at all times, whether in the first or the twentieth century, the dream of world
Jewry is sole domination of the world, now and in the future. <>
Apparently,
Fischer's career as a leader in the movement to endow biological anti-Semitism
with an aura of "scientific" legitimation constituted no impediment
to Heidegger's continuing friendship. In 1960 Heidegger sent Fischer an
inscribed copy one of his books as a Christmas gift. <>
It should, however, be noted that
Heidegger claimed that he was never whole-heartedly a Nazi. He has written that
his first act as rector was a refusal to permit the posting of the anti-Semitic
Judenplakat,
the "Jew Notice," of the Nazi Deutsche Studentenbund
in any of the university rooms. He incurred further party displeasure by
failing to appoint party members as deans and by seeking the retention of
Jewish professors, Georg von Hevesy
and Siegfried Thannhauser. von Hevesy
emigrated to
In reality, Heidegger was less than
forthcoming in his publicly available explanations of his activities as rector.
A particularly nasty aspect of Heidegger's attempts to reform the university
along National Socialist lines was his secret denunciations of academic
colleagues to Nazi authorities. On
On
As is well known, after the war
Heidegger was denied the right to teach and forbidden to take part in the
public activities of the university. However, by 1951 he was accorded the
status of a Professor Emeritus and once again permitted to teach.
Heidegger's claim to have become
disenchanted with National Socialism did not in any way mitigate his hatred of
both the
Moreover, in 1953 Heidegger made the
claim that
What has
World War II decided? (Let us be silent about its terrible consequences for our
Vaterland, and in particular its split through its
middle.) This world war has decided nothing. If we take the term
"decision" in so high and wide a sense as to concern solely the
essential destiny (Wesengeschick) of man on this
earth. <>
In spite of Heidegger's oracular
pronouncement, there were millions of people for whom World War II settled a
great deal. These included millions of Eastern Europeans who were treated by the
Germans as Untermenschen to be enslaved and/or
annihilated. Above all, the Allied victory
decided a great deal about the Nazi death camps, a matter of more than a
little consequence both to the survivors and to the moral health of the German
nation. Apparently, Heidegger was incapable of understanding that the division
of the Vaterland, which he lamented, was a direct
consequence of the Third Reich having launched and lost a war of aggression,
enslavement and annihilation.
While Heidegger had no difficulty in
expressing pain and sorrow for the sufferings endured by his fellow Germans, he
was incapable of even a remote suggestion of compassion for their victims. In
one of the few instances in which he commented on the Holocaust, he trivialized
it. On
I can
only add that instead of the word "Jews" [in your letter] there
should be the word "East Germans," and then exactly the same [terror]
holds true of one of the Allies, with the difference that everything that has
happened since 1945 is public knowledge world-wide, whereas the bloody terror
of the Nazis was in fact kept a secret from the German people. (italics added)
<>
Heidegger's silence concerning the Shoah, the supreme example of technological and
bureaucratic dehumanization, is especially ironic in view of the philosopher's
preoccupation with the negative aspects of technical civilization and the
dimension of the historical.
Nevertheless, there is another side
to the story. Although Heidegger's attitudes and behavior during the Nazi era
were well known to the philosopher Karl Jaspers, the latter asserted in a
letter to his former student, Hannah Arendt, that
Heidegger "selber nie AntiSemit." <> In the nineteen-twenties and
early thirties, Jaspers and Heidegger had been very close friends. However,
Jaspers' wife Gertrud was Jewish and Jaspers broke with Heidegger over National
Socialism in 1933. Moreover, even in his Rektoratsrede Heidegger took issue with the Nazi assertion
of the supremacy of race and biology by asserting that while the people's
strengths "are tied to earth and blood....Only a spiritual world gives the
people the assurance of greatness." <>
Jaspers and Arendt
had a special reason for a keen and abiding interest in Heidegger. Hannah Arendt first met Heidegger as an eighteen-year-old entering
student at the
In the first years of their
relationship, Heidegger was her most important academic mentor. In some
respects he remained so until the end of her life. However, both recognized
that he could not serve as her Doktorvater because of
their relationship. Heidegger suggested to Arendt
that she complete her work at
Arendt had
no contact with Heidegger from 1930 to 1948 when she visited
Arendt's
renewed relationship with Heidegger was not without its ups and downs. <>
She consented to contribute to the Festschrift published on the occasion of his
eightieth birthday in which she gave a moving appreciation of the thinker and
offered what many have regarded as a questionable defense of Heidegger's
involvement with Nazism. <> Arendt represented
Heidegger as politically naive and characterized his involvement with Nazism as
an episode which lasted "ten short hectic months." <> In the
light of what is now known about Heidegger, it is obvious that Arendt was mistaken
about the duration of Heidegger's Nazi commitment. Nevertheless, Arendt's life-long relationship with Heidegger was not that
of a woman whose judgment had been distorted by a youthful love affair. Arendt was an internationally famous political philosopher
and, as noted, an authority on both Nazism and the Holocaust. Conceivably her
judgment about Heidegger could have been distorted. However, before we conclude
that Heidegger was an unregenerate anti-Semite, we would do well to keep in
mind the Heidegger-Arendt relationship and Arendt's life-long loyalty to the man.
Arendt has
called Heidegger, "the last romantic." He was certainly a provincial.
Because of their lack of rootedness in the
traditional German world, Jews were far more likely to feel at home, insofar as
they could feeling at home anywhere in Germany and Austria, only in the very
cities romantics like Heidegger so deeply distrusted. At the very least, the
circles in which Heidegger was born and educated regarded the Jews as a
politically, religiously, and culturally disruptive alien presence. Preferring
the culture of the peasant to that of the city-dweller, Heidegger made it amply
clear that he had little use for cultural pluralism, which was the only basis
on which a Jewish demographic presence encompassing modern political rights could have been possible in
Even Heidegger's affair with Arendt may not have been inconsistent with strong
anti-Semitic attitudes. He was, after all, not her husband committed to a
shared family life with her but her married lover. The very alien character of
so brilliant and, at eighteen, attractive a Jewish woman could have been an
unsettling attraction. This is, of course, only speculation, but, if this line
of thought has any merit, Heidegger would not be the first anti-Semite to be
drawn to a Jewish woman.
Moreover, while there is little
direct evidence that he approved of or advocated extermination, he actively
supported and lent his prestige to a movement which committed mass
extermination, a deed for which he never publicly expressed regret. We do,
however, have a report that on at least one occasion Heidegger did express
regret that some of the Jewish professors who had escaped the Holocaust were
not exterminated. Maurice Friedman has written that Abraham Joshua Heschel imparted this information to him in 1965. <>
Admittedly, this is not hard documentary evidence. Nevertheless, as Friedman
observes, Heschel was not the sort of person to
indulge in gratuitous defamation, a judgement with
which this writer, a former student of Heschel,
concurs. One could cite yet other witnesses, such as Karl Jaspers, but that is
hardly necessary. <> It is difficult to believe that a man of Heidegger's
epoch-making importance in the history of philosophy was incapable of grasping
the real meaning of National Socialism, the most radically anti-Semitic
movement in human history. Incidentally, Emil Fackenheim
holds that Heidegger became a problematic anti-Nazi at some point after 1935.
That judgment may have been correct given the evidence available to the
theologian when he wrote. It now seems difficult to maintain. In any event,
even today Fackenheim can be judged correct in
asserting that Heidegger's thinking, "while not responsible for his
surrender to Nazism, had been unable to prevent it." <> Still, we are left with the puzzling question
of his relationship with Hannah Arendt.
I came away from my inquiry into
Heidegger's politics with a heightened appreciation for Karl Barth and a
renewed awareness of the difference between philosophy and religion. Barth came
from the same world that saw the Jews as alien and threatening as did
Heidegger. In spite of Heidegger's reflections on authenticity, it was Barth,
not Heidegger, who had no difficulty in identifying National Socialism as
worship of false gods. At the risk of his academic career Barth refused to go
along with National Socialism. When the Nazi nightmare was over, Barth had nothing to regret and nothing to explain
after the fact. Moreover, Barth left no doubt where he stood on the issue of
racism and anti-Semitism. Nor was Barth the only major Christian theologian to
refuse to compromise with Nazism. Although the vast majority of the clergy and
theologians in
Unfortunately, there are no
comparable moral barriers for much of secular philosophy. Every time I read
Hegel's calm reflections on the course of human history, I wonder how that
great philosopher would have regarded the Holocaust. For example:
When we
see the evil, the wickedness, and the downfall of the most flourishing empires
the human spirit has created...we can only end with a feeling of sadness at the
transience of everything...We can only harden ourselves against it or escape by
telling ourselves it was ordained by fate and could not have been
otherwise...But even as we look upon history as an altar on which the happiness
of nations, the wisdom of states and the virtue of individuals are slaughtered,
our thoughts impel us to ask: to whom, or to what end have these monstrous
sacrifices been made? From the beginning we proceeded to define those same
events...as no more than the means whereby...the substantial destiny, the
absolute and final end, or in other words, the true result of world history, is
realized. <>
For Hegel, the Holocaust could easily be seen as one more example of "the happiness of nations" being offered up on the "altar of history." For Heidegger, history is ultimately the story of the self-concealment and the self-unveiling of Being, a self-unveiling which begins to manifest itself in our times in Heidegger's own philosophy. It would thus not be inconsistent with Heidegger's thought to interpret the Holocaust as a necessary stage in the self-unveiling of Being. As late as 1966 Heidegger insisted that because of "the special inner kinship between the German language and the language of the Greeks and their thought," Germans have "a special task" in the overcoming (aufgehoben) of an exhausted metaphysical tradition, which had culminated in nihilism and the modern technical world. <> Implicit in Heidegger's thought is the idea that Being once spoke Greek and now speaks its kindred Aryan language, German. National Socialism was for Heidegger no mere political movement but, at least in its early years in power, a world-historical movement restoring the German Volk to its true vocation. Heidegger's identification with the movement was so complete that a 1934 photograph shows him actually looking like Hitler with his Hitler-type mustache and a swastika lapel pin. <> Under the circumstances, Heidegger may index