Heidegger and Anti-Semitism Yet Again: The Correspondence Between the Philosopher and His Brother Fritz Heidegger Exposed - By Adam Soboczynski & Alexander Cammann
FOR QUITE SOME TIME,
there has been a fair bit of murmuring and speculation surrounding the letters
exchanged between the philosopher Martin Heidegger and his brother Fritz. Those
who had seen the more than 500 pieces of correspondence, which have been stored
at the German Literature Archive in Marbach since 2014, knew how explosive they
would be. But in accordance with the wishes of Heidegger’s family, they were
not allowed to quote from them.
But now - apparently in response to the intense
international debate surrounding Heidegger’s anti-Semitism triggered by the
publication of the Black Notebooks three years ago - the family has
agreed to release an abridged version of the letters, written between 1930 and
1946, in a newly published volume called Heidegger und der
Antisemitismus (Heidegger and Anti-Semitism - Verlag Herder,
Freiburg 2016). Inside these pages one finds an unvarnished picture of the philosopher’s
political disposition. In the Black Notebooks, a kind of diary of
thoughts, Heidegger approached anti-Semitism from a philosophical remove, but
these personal letters published expose him as a bona fide, unrepentant
anti-Semite. They also show that - in contrast to prevailing beliefs - the
Freiburg professor was politically well informed, and was an early and
passionate supporter of National Socialism.
As early as the tail
end of 1931, the 43-year-old Heidegger sent his brother a copy of Adolf Hitler’s Mein
Kampf for Christmas, praising the future dictator’s “extraordinary and
unwavering political instincts.” Heidegger interprets the right-wing
conservative minority cabinet under Reich Chancellor Franz von Papen - which
governed with the help of President Hindenburg between June and December 1932 - as a Jewish conspiracy. And he complains that the Jews are:
gradually extricating
themselves from the mood of panic into which they had fallen. That the Jews
were able to pull off such a maneuver as the Papen episode just shows how
difficult it will be to push back against everything represented by Big Capital
(Großkapital) and the like.
Just how strange
Heidegger’s conspiracy theory was can be gathered from the fact that von
Papen’s allegedly Jewish-controlled cabinet actually received support from
another influential right-wing intellectual in the Weimar Republic, Carl
Schmitt, an anti-democratic constitutional law expert whose intense
anti-Semitism is now well established. Schmitt represented von Papen’s
government in a Leipzig court case against the Prussian government in 1932.
On April 13, 1933,
Heidegger writes enthusiastically:
It can be seen from
one day to the next how great a statesman Hitler is becoming. The world of our
people and the Reich finds itself in a process of transformation, and all those
who have eyes to see, ears to hear, and a heart for action will be swept along
and put in a state of extreme excitement.
Heidegger’s commitment
to Hitler’s state and his membership in the NSDAP turn out to be based, quite
logically, in his long-standing questionable convictions. As the letters now
show beyond doubt, this was in no way the decision of an opportunistic
careerist or the oblivious aberration of a political ignorant — as has been
argued for decades in the philosopher’s defense. The familiar apologetic
assumption that Heidegger adhered to a private, idiosyncratic notion of National
Socialism, allegedly free from any form of racism, should be laid to rest.
The banker Fritz
Heidegger (1894–1980) was always the philosopher’s most important confidant:
“In reality, he has one friend only - his brother,” Hannah Arendt wrote in
1952. Far fewer of Fritz’s letters survive. In these, he also expresses
hostility toward the Weimar Republic, but he seems to be quite persistent in
his skepticism about National Socialism, to which his brother Martin is trying
to win him over. Nevertheless, at least one of Fritz’s associations in the
correspondence, made in April 3, 1933, is quite curious indeed:
I don’t know if it is
pure delusion or not: Some of Hitler’s postures and his gaze in current
pictures often remind me of you. This parallel alone sometimes leads me to the
conclusion that Hitler is an exceptional individual.
The opprobrium Martin
Heidegger directs at Jews in the letters may have been typical of the
widespread anti-Semitic discourse and conspiracy theories of the time. As early
as 1916, he complained to his future wife of the “Jewification of our culture
and universities,” against which the “German race” must “summon inner strength”
to “rise up.”
Still, in the case of Heidegger, such baseness is particularly
abhorrent; not only were his famous academic instructor Edmund Husserl and his
student and lover Hannah Arendt Jewish, but so were many other students that
sat with him in his classes, including Karl Löwith, Herbert Marcuse, Leo
Strauss, Jacob Klein, Elisabeth Blochmann, Hans Jonas, and Werner Brock, his
last assistant prior to 1933. Complaining about his growing workload on April
13, 1933, Heidegger explains coldly: “three Jews are disappearing from my
department.”
Overt arguments for
the Nazi regime disappear from Heidegger’s letters to his brother after 1934;
the philosopher hadn’t managed to persuade Fritz and abandon his attempts. In
the foreword to this correspondence volume, Martin’s grandson Arnulf Heidegger
claims that students perceived his grandfather’s lectures during the war as
critical and courageous. The letters themselves, however, suggest that
Heidegger’s thinking never really shifted. Just like National Socialism itself,
the war was, for Heidegger, a battle in defense of the “Occident” and
“German-ness” against the “great threat” posed by “Bolshevism” and
“Americanism” (Jan. 29, 1943). On June 7, 1942, the philosopher still wonders
why “our propaganda” doesn’t reveal “Americanism in all of its excesses.”
Ultimately, he was left befuddled: “What the Weltgeist (world
spirit) has in store for the Germans is a mystery.
Just as murky is why it is
using the Americans and Bolsheviks as its servants” (Jan. 18, 1945).
After the end of the
war, Heidegger stayed true to this victim mentality, both in regard to his
country and to himself. On July 23, 1945, he writes of “KZ-people” - presumably
referring to concentration camp survivors who were housed in Heidegger’s
apartment - as being “not so nice,” just like the situation at his university,
where “everything is dreadful and worse than during Nazi times.” The postwar
expulsion of Germans (from regions east of present-day Germany) exceeds,
Heidegger argues in April 1946, “all organized criminal atrocities” prior to
1945.
And the Jews? “I find a Heinrich-Heine-Street to be completely unnecessary,
because it makes no sense in Messkirch,” Heidegger writes to his brother Fritz
on July 31, 1945. The newly published letters show clearly that it can no
longer be denied: the case of Martin Heidegger has been both a scholarly and
moral disaster in Germany’s intellectual history.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/heidegger-anti-semitism-yet-correspondence-philosopher-brother-fritz-heidegger-exposed/#!
See also
Hiroshima (is) the only date in
history that he takes as a real turning-point; the earth has been shaking ever
since. His rupture with epistemology... comes from this realization: all these
eminent gentlemen are deaf to the noise made by the atomic bomb; they go on as
if physics was business as usual; as if the emergence of thanatocrat -
his word for the black triad made by scientists politicians and industrialists-
had not reshuffled for ever the relations between society and the
sciences… The mob in a state of crisis cannot agree on anything but on a
victim, a scapegoat, a sacrifice. Beneath any boundary is buried a sacrificial
victim..
(From the Socialist Register, 1974)
IT IS THE RESPONSIBILITY of intellectuals to speak the truth and to expose lies. This, at least, may seem enough of a truism to pass over without comment. Not so, however. For the modern intellectual, it is not at all obvious.
