Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy

by Peter Trawny

  What “machination” secretly pursues with this covert competition is—so Heidegger—a “complete deracination of the peoples.” This goes along with a “self-alienation of the peoples—to the detriment of history, that is, to the detriment of the regions of decision for beyng.” If we emphasized above that Heidegger in no way rejects the thought of race itself, only its absolutization, then this statement is the starkest proof of that. For if race, according to Heidegger, is a moment of “thrownness,” and this, however, as the finitude of Dasein, is something like the condition of historicality, then a “complete deracination of the peoples” is consequently “to the detriment of history.” To be sure, it is still not explained how two enemies who pursue the “principle of race” could nevertheless contribute to a “complete deracination.”

  This second type of anti-Semitism in Heidegger can thus be characterized as “racial” or “racist.” To be sure, Heidegger rejects “race thinking.” Nevertheless he assumes a particular significance of race for “thrownness,” and this means a particular significance of race for historicality. Heidegger is thus by no means of the view that there would be a superiority of the Aryans. Nevertheless—and this is a quite troubling “nevertheless”—he is of the view that the battle between the Jews and the National Socialists is a battle for the sake of history, and one that is conducted from racial motives.

  Citation 3

  In his Philosophical Autobiography, Karl Jaspers writes of Heidegger: “I spoke about the Jewish question, about the evil irrationality of the Elders of Zion, to which he replied: ‘There truly is a dangerous international band of Jews.’”23 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion arose in the horizon of the Dreyfus affair, which played itself out in the Paris of the 1890s; the context of the affair reaches deep into the czarist politics of the time.24 It also includes the spread of anti-Semitic novels as well as a growth in the significance of Zionism, which was especially propelled forward since 1860 by the Alliance Israélite Universelle and since 1897 by the Zionist World Organization. The inaugural meeting of the latter in Basel was the fictional origin of the Protocols. Their striking proliferation began after the First World War. In Germany they appeared for the first time in 1920.

  The effect of the Protocols was astonishing, even from today’s point of view. Technically speaking, the book was not a forgery, but rather a complete fiction since no original exists.25 The Protocols became the first source of modern anti-Semitism. Hitler has been characterized as an early “student of the elders of Zion,” meaning that he found incitements there for working out a totalitarian racial politics.26 Alfred Rosenberg commented on the Protocols. Hannah Arendt noted that “the masses were not so frightened by Jewish world rule as they were interested in how it could be done, that the popularity of the Protocols was based on admiration and eagerness to learn rather than on hatred.”27 Thus for her the methods of the National Socialists were clear: “The Nazis started with the fiction of a conspiracy and modeled themselves, more or less consciously, after the example of the secret society of the Elders of Zion.”28 The Protocols are the proof of the competition between the Jews and the National Socialists, as mentioned above, a competition that Heidegger obviously accepts.

  In the Protocols of the Elders of Zion one finds many types of the anti-Semitic phantasmagoria. The first is that of a secret organization that spins its webs at the level of global decisions. All possible means are deployed on its behalf: politics, finance, culture, communism, the press, everything gets subverted, everywhere unrest is fomented. Even philosophy is deployed. Thus the Protocols say at one point: “Do not believe that our proclamations would be only empty words. Look at the success of the teachings of Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche as disseminated by us. Their destructive effect on non-Jewish heads should at least be clear to us.”29 The philosophers—marionettes of “world Judaism.”

  More than these characteristic remarks, another statement could have had an effect on Heidegger. Under the heading “The Repression of the Resistance of Non-Jews through Wars and a Universal World War,” it says: “As soon as a non-Jewish state hazards to resist us, we must be in the position to occasion its neighbors to go to war against it. But if the neighbors seek to make common cause with it and proceed against us, then we must unleash world war.”30 This gets directly to the point of the competition assumed by Heidegger. Did the National Socialists not hazard to proceed against “world Judaism”? And did the latter not succeed in the perfect counterstrike?

  Various speeches show that Hitler understood how to use the Protocols for propaganda and just how he did so. In a speech that he gave in Berlin-Siemensstadt on November 10, 1933, he spoke of “the struggle between peoples” as “fostered” by “folk with definite interests to promote.” It is “an uprooted international clique” that “incites the peoples one against another.” Here we are dealing with “folk who are at home everywhere and nowhere: they have no soil of their own on which they have grown up: to-day they are living in Berlin, to-morrow they may be in Brussels, the day after in Paris, and then again in Prague or Vienna or London.” They are such that “everywhere they feel themselves at home.” They are “international elements” because “everywhere they can carry on their business.” But “the people,” i.e., the Germans, “cannot follow them,” for “the people is chained to its soil, is tied to its homeland, tied to the possibilities of life of its State, its nation.”31 Or in that speech in the Reichstag on January 30, 1939, in which he “prophesied”: “Once again I will be a prophet: should the international Judaism of finance succeed, both within and beyond Europe, in plunging the peoples into yet another world war, then the result will not be a Bolshevization of the earth and the victory of Judaism, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe.”32 Stereotypes of anti-Semitism from the Protocols.

  Heidegger had an ear for Hitler’s speeches. In any case, he contemplates to what extent the English also take on the role of “world Judaism” in “Americanism and Bolshevism.”33 Heidegger wants to understand this not as a “racial” phenomenon, but rather as a “metaphysical” one. The English would be “the kind of humanity which, utterly unattached, can take over the uprooting of all beings from being as its world-historical ‘task.’” If it is the case that Heidegger accepts a competition between the National Socialists and Jews, one roused and conducted by machination, then it now becomes clearer which role is represented by Judaism in this battle. Machination can pursue the “complete deracination of the peoples” because the Jews “utterly unattached,” strive for “the uprooting of all beings.”

  With this widespread tendency to ascribe to the Jews a homeless, i.e., cosmopolitan, way of life, there arises the notion of an enemy who conducts an inconceivable war on an international level.34 Thus Heidegger says at one time:

  World Judaism, spurred on by the emigrants let out of Germany, is everywhere elusive. In all the unfurling of its power, it need nowhere engage in military actions, whereas it remains for us to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our own people.35

  At first glance, the sentence appears quite simple to interpret. But its context makes an interpretation difficult. Fairness is an indispensable presupposition of interpretation. Thus I must briefly enter into the context.

  The entire Überlegung bears the heading “At the start of the third year of planetary war.” Heidegger assembles ten statements that present the current state of the war. Before this we read: “Insofar as one thinks only historiologically and not historically and still does not include planetarism in the transformation of history, but instead employs this planetarism only geographically at best and as a frame for ‘historiological’ incidents, insofar as one values only ‘facts’ that are always only half-truths and thus erroneous, the following assessments are applicable.” As the ninth point there appears the above-cited statement about “world Judaism.”

  There are two possibilities for interpreting the “insofar” here: (1) as a restriction; (2) as a concession. As a restriction, it
could mean: what follows is not meant seriously, it is solely an overview that I, Heidegger, take to be entirely inapplicable. As a concession it could mean: what follows is written for those who are desperately interested in “‘historiological’” “‘facts.’” Even this point of view should be legitimate here.

  I have decided upon the second possibility. I admit that it contradicts many other comparable passages in the Black Notebooks. Heidegger despises “‘historiological’ incidents” most of all. But here he appears to consider that even these have a specific significance. Beneath the superficies of “obliquely” formulated texts, one recognizes Heidegger’s actual intention, i.e., his worry over the victory of the armed forces.

  The advantage of “world Judaism” in the battle against “us” occasioned by machination consists in the ability to guide the fates from somewhere or other, while remaining “everywhere elusive.” Further, “world Judaism”—as proclaimed in the Protocols—is evidently able to set armies in motion without ever committing itself. The sacrifice lies on “our” side. How the battle will conclude through this “unfurling of power” is clear. Particularly grave is the remark that “world Judaism” would be “spurred on by the emigrants let out of Germany.” Is Heidegger thinking of Thomas Mann, who beginning in October 1941 appealed to the “German listener” in his transmitted addresses from the BBC in London? Or does he think of the refugees more generally and, among them, of the Jews? To be sure, Heidegger in no way makes a case that they should not have been “let out,” but the suggestion is not far.

  The sacrifice of the “best blood of the best of our own people”—without doubt, in these words Heidegger also addresses the fate of his two sons. If in this regard he abandons his otherwise rather consistently maintained neutrality, we can assume an intimate involvement in the matter. Heidegger was strongly partisan on the question of the war and the sacrifice of the German soldiers—and he could not eschew lending his partisanship a being-historical note.36

  “World Judaism” does not master history—which is unconditionally controlled by machination—but among the powers dominated by technology it appears to be the first. Thus the “imperialist-militaristic and the humanist-pacifist ways of thinking”—i.e., the ways of thinking of the totalitarian states (the German Reich, Italy, and the Soviet Union) as well as of the Western democracies—would be “offshoots of ‘metaphysics.’” As such, they appear to be infiltrated by “world Judaism.” For Heidegger continues:

  Thus both [of these ways of thinking] are able to serve “international Judaism,” the one as a means for calling out and bringing about the other—this machinational “history”-making traps all players equally in its nets.37

  “World Judaism” would thus have the power to play the states off against each other—specifically those that find themselves at war—in that it would be “served” by their “ways of thinking.” It is not obvious whether Heidegger subsumes “international Judaism” under the previously named ways of thinking within “this machinational ‘history’-making” or whether he reserves this “history”-making for “international Judaism” alone. In any event, the thought shows how Heidegger wavered in his interpretation of the relation between “world Judaism” and machination. On the one hand he attributed to “world Judaism” a privileged place as the internationally acting representative of technology. On the other hand, this would all belong to the same history. In this “battle,” the success of those who proclaim and achieve “world domination” is “no less irrelevant than the fate of those most ground down.” All would still be “at the level of metaphysics” and would thus remain “excluded from anything different.” The Jews would be just a further configuration of the metaphysical topology.

  With this, it appears that Heidegger was clear about the consequences of the war, particularly for the Jews. In the manuscript on the Geschichte des Seyns (History of Beyng), in those passages singular in content and concerning the being-historical dimension of “power,” Heidegger speaks of the “planetary master criminals of the most modern modernity”—and means without doubt the prime rulers of the totalitarian states.38 “The question remains,” however, “what is the basis for the peculiar predetermination of Jewry [eigentümliche Vorbestimmung der Judenschaft] for planetary criminality.”39 At first, this statement suggests a straightforward understanding: Heidegger asks what could have propelled the Jews into this “peculiar predetermination” of becoming the victims of “planetary master criminals.”

  Admittedly, though, the statement does not preclude Heidegger from seeing the “peculiar predetermination of Jewry” not as becoming the victims of those criminals, but rather as being those criminals themselves.40 This interpretation would also fit with Heidegger’s utterances concerning the power of “world Judaism.” Certainly for Heidegger, the “planetary master criminals” included Stalin and Hitler, but we cannot rule out that along with Hitler and Stalin, this characterization encompassed “Jewry” as well. However we might read the sentence, the formulation “peculiar [eigen-tümliche, as related to Er-eignis] predetermination” (my italics) attests to the being-historical character of this thinking about the Jews.

  Similar to the “skillfulness at calculating” that is attributed to the Jews, this third type of anti-Semitism in Heidegger, oriented around the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, is difficult to delimit. The lecture course from the summer of 1942 on Hölderlin’s “Ister” hymn shows this. Here Heidegger sees the Germans threatened more than ever by “Americanism,” i.e., by the “unhistorical.” This threat, however, comes not from without but from within. The philosopher could not understand why the Germans were not in a position to recognize what is their “own” in the relationship between “poetizing and thinking” as outlined by him. Instead of this, they went along with the global “total mobilization,” indeed, they even became its leading exponents. Hidden behind “Americanism,” was there not the “everywhere elusive” world Judaism?

  In general, the opposite of everything Heidegger sought to save philosophically—“rootedness,” “homeland,” what is “one’s own,” the “earth,” the “gods,” “poetry,” etc.—appears to be transposable onto “world Judaism.” Consequently this receives a kind of paradigmatic status. When Rabbi Joachim Prinz proclaims (cited in note 34) that the “fate of the European metropolises in general” would be embodied in the “fate” of the Jews, then the Jew, who “has the ‘nose’ [Riecher]” for what is modern, would be the antagonist of Heideggerian thinking plain and simple.41

  Note that what is anti-Semitic in this is not the identification of Judaism with an international lifestyle. Even Arendt conceded that the “lies about a Jewish world conspiracy” had “based themselves on the existing international interrelationship and interdependence of a Jewish people dispersed all over the world,” i.e., in the Diaspora.42 It is not anti-Semitic to see in this way of life an “uprooting.” But it is anti-Semitic to assign to this way of life a concrete enmity against the “rootedness” of the Germans. If Heidegger, speaking to Jaspers, mentioned an “international band of Jews” (and there is no cause for believing Jaspers to be deceiving himself or falsely remembering), then he could indeed do so with a view to the Diaspora; but to characterize this band as “dangerous” betrays the anti-Semitic background.

  And yet Heidegger appears to evade such a reproach when he situates the conflict with “world Judaism” within machination. It functions as the being-historical movement in which the battle is carried out. Through this interpretation, Heidegger’s anti-Semitism obtains its distinctive character. For in the battle between world Judaism and the National Socialists, Heidegger in no way would have welcomed a “‘victory’” by the latter. Quite the contrary—since, according to Heidegger, this battle can only concern “sheer aimlessness.”43 The “authentic victory,” by contrast, lies for him “where the rootless [Bodenlose]” excludes “itself,” because it “does not venture beyng, but instead always only” calculates “with beings,” and pos
its “its calculations as the actual.” In this statement it is by no means obvious whether, in addition to Judaism, the “rootless” can also bear the character of “machination.” Philosophically for Heidegger it was important to understand why “the Western” had not experienced itself “as history” and opened itself “for what comes [ein Kommendes],” “instead of—unwittingly throughout it all—imitating and exaggerating Americanism.”44 The West had fallen prey to machination; the task originating with the Greeks of founding a world in “thinking and poetizing” appeared lost. Why?

  At last the difficulty of such a being-historical construction itself comes to light. In the battle of the National Socialists with the Jews as a “consequence of machination,” there reigns an asymmetry worth considering. Heidegger remarks in many places that the National Socialists recklessly promoted the technologization and, in this respect, modernization of the country. Indeed the chief characteristic of the technological, of the “machinational,” was the “rootless” (Bodenlose), the “worldless,” which the philosopher likewise ascribed to Judaism. Were the National Socialists then actually Germans deceived by “machination,” i.e., deceived by the Jews? In the light of this question the National Socialists become marionettes of the “everywhere elusive” power of the Jews. Do the Protocols not suggest the idea that National Socialism itself could have been the most malicious invention of the Jews? In any event, the “self-exclusion” of the “rootless”—which Heidegger characterized as the “authentic victory”—would be the collapse of both “machination” and Judaism.