Book Review: JENNIFER SCHUESSLER - Heidegger’s Notebooks Renew Focus on Anti-Semitism
It has long been one of the most contentious questions in
20th-century intellectual history: Just how much, and what kind, of a Nazi was
the German philosopher Martin Heidegger?
To his strongest detractors, Heidegger was a committed National
Socialist whose hugely influential ideas about the nature of being and the
dehumanizing effects of modern technology and much of the modern philosophical
tradition itself were fatally compromised by his membership in Hitler’s party
from 1933 to 1945. To his staunchest defenders, however, he was a Nazi of
convenience — a sometime personal anti-Semite, perhaps, but a philosopher whose towering
intellectual achievements are undiminished by temporary political
dalliances or everyday bias.
Now, the recent publication in Germany of the first
three volumes of Heidegger’s private philosophical notebooks has brought the
controversy roaring back, revealing what some say is an unmistakable smoking
gun: overtly anti-Semitic statements, written in Heidegger’s own hand, in the
context of his philosophical thinking. The so-called black notebooks, written between 1931 and 1941
and named for the color of their oilcloth covers, show Heidegger denouncing the
rootlessness and spirit of “empty rationality and calculability” of the Jews,
as he works out revisions to his deepest metaphysical ideas in relation to
political events of the day.
“World Jewry,” he wrote in 1941, “is ungraspable everywhere
and doesn’t need to get involved in military action while continuing to unfurl
its influence, whereas we are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of
our people.” The anti-Semitic passages total only about two and a half of
the notebooks’ roughly 1,200 pages. Still, some scholars say, they put the lie
to any claim that Heidegger’s Nazism can be kept separate from his philosophy,
or confined only to the brief period in the early 1930s when he was the rector
of the newly Nazified University of Freiburg.
“The evidence now isn’t just undeniable, it’s over the top,”
Richard Wolin, an intellectual historian at the Graduate Center of the City
University of New York and the author of several books on Heidegger, said in an
interview. “Heidegger was engaged with these issues philosophically and
intellectually through the course of the whole regime.”
The black notebooks, released by the Frankfurt-based
publishing house Vittorio Klostermann, are appearing as Volumes 94 through 96
of Heidegger’s complete works, according to a schedule laid out by the
philosopher himself before his death in 1976. Though long whispered about
among some Heideggerians, virtually no one outside the family had seen the
notebooks, which are kept in the tightly restricted Heidegger archive in Marbach ,
Germany
Even before the release of the first volume in late
February, however, word of the anti-Semitic passages leaked into the press in France ,
where Heidegger’s philosophy has exerted its strongest influence,through
thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Jacques Derrida.
One Heidegger translator, during an hourlong radio program
dedicated to the controversy in December, called the anti-Semitic statements
shocking evidence of “intellectual bankruptcy.” But some orthodox Heideggerians
went on the attack, charging the editor of the notebooks, Peter Trawny, whose
monograph on Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, then unpublished, was also circulating,
with self-serving careerism and reckless misinterpretations.
Mr. Trawny, the director of the Martin Heidegger Institute
at the University of Wuppertal in Germany, said in a recent interview that
there had been pressure from some in France to stop the release of his
monograph, “Heidegger and the Myth of Jewish World Conspiracy,” and remove him
as editor of future volumes of the notebooks, but that the Heidegger family had
been supportive of full publication. “When I read them, I was quite astonished,” Mr. Trawny said
of the notebooks. “But there was never any question of modifying the
manuscripts.” To some people, such astonishment has a whiff of Claude
Rains’s shockin “Casablanca,”
given what books like Victor Farias’s “Heidegger and Nazism” (1987)
and the French scholar Emmanuel Faye’s “Heidegger:
The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy” (2005) have established
about both Heidegger’s activities in the 1930s and his postwar efforts to
minimize his belief in the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism,
as he put it in 1935.
Both those books caused intellectual convulsions and even
suggestions that Heidegger’s work, including his 1927 masterpiece “Being and
Time,” should be banished from philosophy to
the realm of Nazi ideology. But even those who defend Heidegger’s philosophy
more broadly say the black notebooks are hardly the first sign of a
specifically anti-Semitic cast to his thought.
Richard Polt, a professor of philosophy at Xavier University
in Cincinnati, pointed to the student notes from a seminar that ran from 1933
to 1934 (published in Germany in 2009 and released in English in December),
which showed Heidegger speaking of “Semitic nomads” who will never understand
the nature of “our German space.” “Although the presence of anti-Semitic comments in the
so-called black notebooks is newsworthy,” Mr. Polt said in an email, “it should
not come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying attention to the
evidence.”
Thomas Sheehan, a Heidegger scholar at Stanford, put it even
more strongly, saying in an email that too many Heideggerians “have swallowed
the Kool-Aid and bought in wholeheartedly to his story about modernity” as
decline, which Heidegger used to “launder” his anti-Semitism. The scandal over the notebooks, Mr. Sheehan added, should be
a chance to “rethink, from scratch, what his work was about.” That process will take years, given the volume and notorious
difficulty of Heidegger’s writing, so chock-full of neologisms, the old joke
goes, that it is impossible to translate even into German. (An English edition
of the notebooks is under negotiation; six more volumes remain to be published
in German.) A conference on the notebooks is planned at Emory
University Atlanta
next fall. Mr. Trawny will also discuss them at the Goethe Institute in New
York on April 8.
In a newspaper article derived from his monograph, Mr. Trawny
argues that Heidegger rejected the “biologism” of Nazi race theory in favor of
a “historial” anti-Semitism (to use a Heideggerian coinage) that emanated “from
the history of Being itself.” For Heidegger, in Mr. Trawny’s interpretation,
the Jews are not the inventors of modern technology, but “along with the Nazis”
— whom he had come to see not as a rebirth of authentic Being, but as another
degrading force of modernity — “the most powerful embodiment of it.”
Heidegger, Mr. Trawny said in the interview, is not known to
have kept a notebook from 1941 to 1945. And a long-missing notebook from 1945
to 1946 that surfaced in January does not contain anti-Semitic statements,
according to an interview in Die Zeit with the notebook’s longtime owner, a son
of one of Heidegger’s mistresses, who sold it to the archive at Marbach in March. Mr. Trawny speculates that Heidegger’s reunion in 1950 with
the German-Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, his former lover and student, helped
modify his views of Jews and of the Holocaust, a subject on which he made only
minimal (and, many say, minimizing) public comment. “After 1950, we don’t have
anti-Semitic passages in the black notebooks anymore,” Mr. Trawny said... read more:
