Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy

by Peter Trawny

  Once again Heidegger emphasizes that it was a “painful necessity” to “go past” Husserl. Whoever speaks of a “detestable betrayal” knows not that he speaks “only of revenge” and knows “nothing of what happened earlier,” namely, “that my own path of thinking was interpreted as a defection, and that recourse was taken to propaganda, as my path was otherwise not to be stopped.” The first holds true, the second does not.17

  Being and Time remains “the worthiest testament” for “what I owe to Husserl—that I learned from him and vouched for his path by not remaining his follower, or ever becoming one.”18 Precisely this, however, “struck against the house rules, long before the talk was of National Socialism and the persecution of Jews.”19 It is more than significant that, for Heidegger, the decisive break lies in Husserl’s incapacity to grant the student his own philosophical independence. This break took place before “National Socialism and the persecution of the Jews” was spoken of . . .

  With this we abandon the region of difficulties found within a philosophical teacher-student relationship. The potential problems in the relationship between Heidegger and Husserl go beyond the question of teachers and pupils. By the end of the 1920s, the relationship had been destroyed by forces explicable neither by philosophical competition, nor by psychological motivations. Heidegger is said to have increasingly made clear that he was an anti-Semite. Nevertheless, we must not trace his relation to Husserl back to a solely private anti-Semitic ressentiment, leaving the philosophical confrontation out of it.20 Much more is it a matter of asking whether Heidegger’s philosophical rejection of Husserlian phenomenology was contaminated by a being-historical anti-Semitism.

  In the Überlegungen XII from the year 1939 (Husserl died a year before), Heidegger speaks of an “empty rationality and calculative capacity” of “Judaism.”21 It would be in keeping with this intellectual casting of Jews that “the more originary and inceptual the future decisions and questions” become, “the more inaccessible” they remain “for this ‘race.’” “Thus” Husserl’s thinking can never reach “the region of essential decisions.” Heidegger’s “attack,” however, is not directed against Husserl “alone” and is “on the whole inessential”; the attack would go “against the dereliction of the question of being, i.e., against the essence of metaphysics as such.”

  Husserl’s thinking stands outside “essential decisions” because it remains caught in abstractions and calculations of the intellectual kind, as befits “this ‘race’” of Jews. To be sure, this is itself an abstract determination that Heidegger would have to substantiate through a concrete criticism of Husserl’s incapacity for being-historical decisions. So we have to ask, does he elsewhere ever deliver such a critique? Naturally, the presumption of a being-historically cast “calculative capacity” in the way of thinking of the Jewish race would render the critique nonsensical from the outset.

  In the mentioned Bemerkungen V (from the end of the 1940s), Heidegger sketches a philosophical critique of Husserl. Thus he asks whether “the one who in thinking utters the principle ‘to the things [Sachen] themselves’” has “already proven himself the expert [Sachkundige].”22 The question is answered in the negative, since “in the matter of thinking” he could “still slip up terribly and with such oversights act against his own principle,” and be left “incapable of even sacrificing the principle for the sake of the thing [Sache].” “‘That which shows itself (what?) from itself’”—Heidegger’s approach to phenomenology—is “not only a different formulation of the principle of description that befits the matter [sachgemäßen Beschreibung].” Here one “already” sees “the turn of thinking to Ἀλήθεια as an essential trait of being itself.” And Heidegger concludes: “Not only does Husserl know nothing of all this, he barricades himself against it.”

  Certainly, this remark is found in a context where there is no talk of Judaism. It can be understood as a purely philosophical criticism. But while this critique does address Husserl’s inability and unwillingness to think in a being-historical manner, Heidegger’s earlier remark concerning the “empty rationality and calculative capacity” of Judaism cannot be ignored. It imposes itself on the interpretation all the more.

  Moreover, the actual dimension of the criticism is not clear. Already in Being and Time, Heidegger indeed speaks of ἀλήθεια, but in no way of Ἀλήθεια.23 By reading Being and Time was Husserl supposed to have obtained the possibility “of thinking the experience of Ἀλήθεια from the experience of the forgetfulness of being”? Without a doubt, no. But Heidegger’s criticism is also not posed in such a philological manner. Husserl’s thinking as such remains outside the “experience of Ἀλήθεια.” It remains bound to metaphysics, without access to the being-historical “turn of thinking to Ἀλήθεια as essential trait of being itself.” Husserl did not understand the “future decisions” because the history of being escaped him.

  In the “Report on the Results of the Proceedings of the Settlement Committee from December 11 and 13, 1945” of the University of Freiburg [i.e., the University Denazification Committee], where it is a matter, at war’s end, of Heidegger’s forced retirement, we find a section devoted to Heidegger’s “behavior toward Jews.”24 The question as to whether Husserl’s “Jewish descent” had played a role in the “discord between Heidegger and his teacher Husserl” is rebutted by the remarks of Heidegger already mentioned. There had been “many more philosophical differences of opinion” that in “1930 or 1931” were also aired in public by Husserl. The report continues: “According to Herr Eucken’s knowledge, Husserl was of the mind that Heidegger had turned away from him due to his anti-Semitism. Herr Eucken gave no further statement as to the details of this, as that would not be in accord with Husserl’s wishes.”25 Admittedly, Husserl had been dead for seven years. In 1945, remaining “in accord with Husserl’s wishes” was perhaps no longer so important. And one can surely ask whether Husserl had privately characterized Heidegger’s philosophical critique of him as anti-Semitically motivated.

  Husserl did express himself on Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, not to Eucken, but to his old student Dietrich Mahnke in a letter from May 1933. Here Husserl describes his disappointing experiences from 1933 in general and with his former student in particular. He speaks sarcastically of the “most beautiful conclusion to this supposedly philosophical intellectual friendship.” This he discerns as much in Heidegger’s “entirely theatrical” and “publicly performed entrance into the National Socialist party” as also, “in recent years,” in “an anti-Semitism coming ever stronger to expression—against even his group of enthusiastic Jewish students as well as among the faculty.”26 So it is possible, even probable, that Husserl had spoken with Eucken in this manner about Heidegger, too.

  Now it has long been known that already in a letter from 1916, Heidegger spoke of a “Jewification of our culture and universities,” a judgment that many made—even Jews themselves.27 In retrospect, however, we must now ask whether Heidegger’s later being-historical anti-Semitism does not cast new light upon this possibly pure and private ressentiment. Was it not Heidegger himself who later repeatedly emphasized—even if erroneously—the being-historical motivation behind his university politics?

  In this context, an episode in that Freiburg University administrative “Report” takes on a new significance: Heidegger is said to have asserted that “he had come to a Jew-free faculty and had no wish for a Jew to be appointed.”28 It appears that Heidegger already at the time of his rectorate had pursued a being-historical anti-Semitism. And it is not improbable that he even sacrificed his relation to Husserl to it.

  Husserl’s remark that he had been reproached with “‘intellectualism’ and ‘rationalism,’” his sketch of Heidegger’s thinking as the “contemporary ontology of irrationalism,” now appear otherwise when viewed against the background of Heidegger’s being-historical anti-Semitism. Certainly, judging anti-Semitic ideas to be “irrational” requires no prior philoso
phical transformation of these ideas into being-historical relations. But in a consideration of the relation between Heidegger and Husserl it is not unimportant that Heidegger’s philosophical aversion to Husserl’s phenomenology quite possibly contains anti-Semitic moments from the outset.

  The question remains, who spoke of the “persecution of the Jews” and when? Heidegger, in any event, never spoke of this. Now, in recalling his break with Husserl, this word suddenly appears. Why does Heidegger emphasize that the break would have taken place long before the “talk” of “National Socialism and the persecution of the Jews”? Is Heidegger thinking of the time after the war, when one could speak freely about the “persecution of the Jews,” without this freedom ever being used for that? Or is Heidegger thinking of the 1930s, of the anti-Semitic propaganda? Was it in this that there was “talk of the persecution of the Jews”? Or is Heidegger thinking of clandestine conversations, of encounters, in which people expressed their revulsion at the rumors of the camps? Could this all be connected with Husserl? When did Heidegger know of the “persecution of the Jews”?

  Work and Life

  Heidegger scholarship is often ruled by the maxim that the thought and life of a philosopher are to be distinctly separated. Thus as Walter Biemel stated in his influential Heidegger monograph from 1973: “It is not his life from which we can learn something about his work; his work is his life.”1 Gaining access to his life thus means “following his creative activity, trying to grasp the leading idea behind this activity.” Biemel proclaims a unity of work and life in which the work is at the center, around which the life unfolds.

  Attributing such importance to the relationship between life and work is justified. In regard to Heidegger’s work and life, it is also by and large correct: for Heidegger the work, the literary remains (Nachlaß), was ever the radiant center. Indeed, Biemel seems to conclude from this that the life, the telling of this life, the biography, would be meaningless. But this is not in keeping with the thought that the life develops around a center, around a work; for then a trace of the work must be locatable in that life.

  “The starting point of philosophy: factical life as fact,” Heidegger says in an early sketch.2 This sounds like something different. In this regard factical life—which is each time my “self-world,” the “personal rhythm” of my life—appears to be a condition of thinking.3 That would be too rigid. For this reason, Heidegger says at another place that philosophy indeed arises “from factical life experience,” but then it “returns back into factical life experience.”4 Philosophy and life—a rhythmic symbiosis.

  Philosophy is accordingly no science, for the latter is not only distant from factical life but must necessarily distance itself from it. The scientific judgment can appeal solely to what shows itself in the scientific object. The life of the scientist stands in no relation to this object—at least to the extent that the object typically does not prove to be a phenomenon of factical life (like elementary particles, for example). The life of the philosopher, on the contrary, is intertwined with its object or nonobject.

  Thus it is in keeping with Heidegger’s life and thought that we regard life “at the hut” as a philosophical act, that we connect his political engagement with his thinking, and that we likewise understand his need to experience “the beat of that god’s [Eros’s] wings”—something conceded by his wife—all in the context of the work.5 It is he, the thinker, who demanded from life all that life gave him. What does this have to do, then, with the guiding idea of these considerations, “Heidegger’s being-historical anti-Semitism”? Was Heidegger actually an anti-Semite?

  Heidegger maintained friendly and courteous dealings with Jews, indeed, even intimate dealings. How could that have been otherwise? Husserl was his teacher, from whom he increasingly distanced himself for philosophical reasons; as rector, Heidegger first supported Jonas Cohn, a Jewish colleague, but then shifted him into retirement under the auspices of the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Service” in July 1933;6 he had high regard for his assistant Werner Brock, whom he helped secure a stipendium from Cambridge University in 1933, but thought that he could “not work in seminar,” since “the Jews” lack something;7 not to mention Hannah Arendt, but also Elisabeth Blochmann, with whom he remained in contact until his death; Mascha Kaléko he met at the end of the 1950s and appeared immediately to revere her;8 Paul Celan, whose poetry he particularly cherished, etc. All these Jewish men and women obviously encountered Heidegger in various ways, and none of these relationships was broken off for anti-Semitic reasons. On the contrary, many even survived the Shoah or were—painfully, as in the case of Celan—begun after it.

  If the interpretation in the previous pages is correct, from these and other facts it follows only that, on the one hand, Heidegger as a philosopher formulated anti-Semitic thoughts, while, on the other hand, he lived at times in great accord with Jews. This tension corresponds to a well-known observation in anti-Semitic research.

  Hannah Arendt speaks in The Origins of Totalitarianism of the “exception Jews.”9 Western European “society” would never have opened the doors of its salons to Jews “in general,” but only to these exceptions. Thus these “exception Jews” were caught in an “ambiguity.” It was required of them that they be “Jews and yet not like Jews.”10 They should thus in no way be like “‘mere mortals,’” but rather, like Disraeli, display “exoticism, strangeness, mysteriousness.”11

  According to Arendt this remained the case during the time of the National Socialist persecution. Thus at one place in her book on Eichmann, she writes pointedly: “Hitler himself is said to have known three hundred and forty ‘first-rate Jews,’ whom he had either altogether assimilated to the status of Germans or granted the privileges of half-Jews.”12 Here she still believes that Reinhard Heydrich, the organizer of the Shoah, himself would have been a “half-Jew.” That has turned out to be false, though Heydrich had to concern himself with this rumor throughout his life. Other famed examples of “exceptional Jews” could be named, such as the episode from Richard Wagner’s biography in which he insisted that the debut performance in Bayreuth of his “festival play for the consecration of the stage,” Parsifal, be conducted by Hermann Levi.

  However such relations have appeared individually—to have an anti-Semitic attitude and to traffic with Jews amicably and caringly were not and are not mutually exclusive. On the contrary, the exception appears to confirm the rule. Would that also apply to Heidegger? Regardless, with him one also finds two formulations that seem to allow us to conclude that he did make exceptions in regard to Jews. One concerns his relation to Arendt, which I will go into in a subsequent chapter. The other concerns Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, whom he once ostentatiously named a “German thinker”—and precisely in so doing thereby indirectly marked him as not German.13

  Finally, it holds particularly for being-historical anti-Semitism that it represents only with great difficulty that which it is directed against, that which would be embodied in particular persons. For what it represents does not show itself, but hides itself. How could it be seen if it were to appear? Every possible “image” goes right past being-historical anti-Semitism and never corresponds to it. But is there an anti-Semitism without a concrete “image” of the vilified Jew? With Heidegger this appears to be the case.

  It might follow from this that Heidegger never needed to make “exceptions” in his concrete dealings with Jews. It was already clear to him that “world Judaism” had no face. To be sure, there were the “emigrants let out.” But as Heidegger formulated it, their role was merely to incite “world Judaism.” This, however, remained “everywhere elusive,” i.e., invisible. We might also find here a reason why Heidegger reserved these anti-Semitic passages for the Black Notebooks. Ultimately, being-historical anti-Semitism and the prevailing anti-Semitic conceptions grounded in race theory—conceptions Heidegger rejected without repudiating the concept of race—cannot be brought into accord.

  The work i
s the center of the life. All ways of life radiate out from it and lead back to it. This remains the case even in the Black Notebooks. Between the written expressions about the Jews and his life with them Heidegger apparently sensed no grave contradiction. “World Judaism” was precisely “everywhere elusive.” Indeed, as with everything that a philosopher thinks, his work is put into a still more intensive light when that life, determined by the work, is also taken into account. Supporting this is Heidegger’s reunion with Hannah Arendt after the Shoah.

  Annihilation and Self-Annihilation

  In the Black Notebooks, the narrative topography of the history of being is demarcated by terms and concepts that depict the Second World War so as to revise it in a being-historical manner. Alongside the “Germans”—those representatives of the “other beginning”—Heidegger places the “Russians.” As the “Germans” can be being-historically distinguished from “National Socialism,” so too the “Russians” from “Bolshevism.” Then there appears, with growing importance, the being-historical power of “Americanism,” the heir to “England.” “France” also surfaces, the nation of Descartes, the nation of Paris, a nation that began to increasingly interest Heidegger at the end of the 1940s. “Christianity” is marked as an obstacle for the “beginning.” Even the “Asiatic” is named, neutrally alongside the “Chinese” (Chinesentum), a previously employed defamation that sees in China only a land of massive exploitation. And also, to be sure, “Judaism” and “world Judaism,” or even “Jewry” (Judenschaft).