Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy

by Peter Trawny

  This topography is brought into a specific order, not to say a determinate battle formation (τάξις): on the one side, the agents of “machination”—England, Americanism, Bolshevism, i.e., being-historically understood “Communism,” and “Judaism” (also “Christianity”); on the other, the sites of “beginning”—“Greece,” “Germany,” and “Russia.”

  It is doubly determined. On the one hand, we can recognize in this the lines of the front in the war. In the Überlegungen, written between 1938 and 1941, Heidegger attentively follows the events of the war. He is interested in the “‘historiological’ incidents.”1 On the other hand, the topography proves to be a staging of the drama of the history of being. The lines of the front are written into a narrative in which “beginning” and “end” form the two essential formal elements. The beginning is ascribed to German “thinking and poetizing” (always in reference to the pre-Socratic “Greeks”), the “end” to the forces of machination. The double determination of this topography thus follows Heidegger’s heavily emphasized distinction between historiology (Historie) and the history of being (Seinsgeschichte).

  The double determination of the war constantly oscillates between a historiological and a being-historical significance, and not only in the Überlegungen, but also in the Anmerkungen begun in 1942. On the historiological level, the relation between beginning and end is a matter of “decisions,” of a “destruction,” indeed of a “devastation whose dominance can no longer be touched by the catastrophes of war or catastrophic wars,” though it “can be attested” by such.2 The historiological war is thus “testament” to the history of being. In itself, however, it no longer concerns who is militarily victorious or defeated. The war attests much more to a “decision” in which “everything” becomes “slaves to the history of beyng.”3 A slave, however, is not only someone who is compelled to work, but rather someone who through his work is of service. How then do these “slaves”—for example, the Jews—serve the history of beyng?

  The being-historical significance of the war consists in the “purification of being from its deepest deformation by the precedence of beings.”4 This is for Heidegger the “highest completion of technology.” The completion of this highest stage of technology would be “achieved when technology, as consuming, has nothing more to consume—other than itself.”5 He then asks: “In what form is this self-annihilation implemented?” The purification of being is a “self-annihilation” of technology that takes place in war. Like Heraclitus, Heidegger too thinks of a world conflagration, one that would liberate the world from the “precedence of beings.”6 History empties into an apocalyptic reduction. Is there still a beginning, or is there now only an end?

  The apocalyptic reduction of history is a further narrative that is built into the already prevailing narratival topography of the history of being. Heidegger probably first thought of the self-annihilation of machination at the moment when the war took on a “total” character. And now the topography must be populated with protagonists. The front is inscribed into a self-annihilation. World Judaism assumes its role, as do Americanism and National Socialism.

  This role is ambiguous. To understand the ambiguity we must distinguish among figures of the end within this decision between beginning and end: “destruction,” “devastation,” “annihilation,” “self-annihilation.” The apocalyptic-reductive role of world Judaism is an essential factor in differentiating between “annihilation,” “destruction,” and “self-annihilation.” Indeed, Judaism is perhaps nothing other than the apocalyptic reduction itself.

  Heidegger speaks of “annihilation” in the exoteric text of the lecture course On the Essence of Truth from the winter semester of 1933/34. He interprets the famed fragment 53 of Heraclitus, where πόλεμος is said to be the father and king of all things, making some into gods, others into humans, some into slaves, others into the free. This dictum is frequently interpreted by Heidegger at this time.

  The πόλεμος is understood as a “standing against the enemy.”7 The enemy would be “each and every person who poses an essential threat to the Dasein of the people and its individual members.” The enemy in no way needs to be “external,” i.e., he need not show himself in the form of an enemy nation. Rather it could “seem as if there were no enemy.” Then it would be a “fundamental requirement to find the enemy, to expose the enemy to the light, or even first to make the enemy.” Accordingly, it is irrelevant whether the enemy actually exists or not. Dasein needs an enemy.

  The enemy “can have attached itself to the innermost roots of the Dasein of a people and can set itself against this people’s own essence and act against it.” The enemy is thus an enemy of the “essence.” Thus the “struggle” becomes “all the fiercer and harder and tougher.” For “it is often far more difficult and wearisome to catch sight of the enemy as such, to bring the enemy into the open” and “to prepare the attack looking far ahead with the goal of total annihilation.”8

  The enemy of “essence” is thus met with “total annihilation.” This discourse, which has nothing to do with Heraclitus’s dictum, is obviously brutal. Possibly, Heidegger wants to oppose the new authorities. For the semantics of the formulation are contemporary. Is it not a “parasite” that would have attached itself to the “innermost roots of the Dasein of a people”? Is it necessary to characterize the “enemy” any further?

  Heidegger keeps silent. But in a later passage he says: “Marxism cannot be defeated once and for all unless we first confront the doctrine of ideas and its two-millennia-long history.”9 It is “Marxism” that is considered the enemy of essence. In the consciousness of the 1930s, Marx is the “Jew Marx.”10 Unmistakably, Marxism appears as a figure of metaphysics, that is, of the history of being. Plato’s “doctrine of Ideas” is presented as the presupposition of Marxism.

  Unstated here is that Marxism, i.e., Judaism, becomes subject to “total annihilation.” The enemy of essence, however, must itself be active. It must attack. The πόλεμος, as Heidegger construes it, demands this. At the time of the war, then, Heidegger altered his narrative of the history of being. The historiological events required a constant revision of being-historical thinking. The Jews are now not simply the enemy of the essence of the “Dasein of a people,” but rather take on a “polemical” role in the “Christian West” itself:

  In the period of the Christian West, i.e., of metaphysics, Jewry is the principle of destruction. [It is what is] destructive in the overturning of the completion of metaphysics—i.e., of Hegel’s metaphysics by Marx. Spirit and culture become the superstructure of “life”—i.e., of the economy, i.e., of the organization—i.e., of the biological—i.e., of the “people.”11

  “Jewry” destroys the metaphysical structure of the “Christian West,” insofar as this structure completes itself in Hegel’s philosophy. Marx, who claimed to have stood Hegel upon his head, lays the tracks that lead directly into machination and, now, the Third Reich. The sequence “superstructure of ‘life’—i.e., of the economy, i.e., of the organization—i.e., of the biological—i.e., of the ‘people’” gets to the heart of it: Marx, the destructive Jew, is the precursor to National Socialism.

  (Hitler, whose anti-Semitism is brutally biological, speaks in Mein Kampf of the “destructive principle of the Jew”—to be sure, in relation to Theodor Mommsen’s notorious formulation of the Jew as the “effective ferment of cosmopolitanism and national decomposition.”12 And “the Jew” is for Hitler without further ado always also “the Marxist.”)

  The “principle of destruction” is the same as the “world-historical task” of “uprooting beings from being” that Heidegger ascribed to “world Judaism” around 1940.13 “Jewry” “destroys” the order of difference between beings and being. Marx, who occupied himself in his dissertation with Democritus and Epicurus, is identified as a Jew by the materialist foundation of his thinking.14

  Excursus

  Emmanuel Levinas attempted in his essay “Heidegger
, Gagarin, and Us,” published in 1961, to lay out the most important difference between Judaism, Heidegger, and—they are explicitly named—the Heideggerians. In all essentials, this concerns the topographic order of the world emphasized by Heidegger and the destruction of this order by the technology affirmed by Judaism.

  “One’s implementation in a landscape, one’s attachment to Place,” this would be the “splitting of humanity into natives and strangers.” In this perspective, “technology is less dangerous than any spirit of a place.” It attacks “the privileges of this enrootedness and the related sense of exile.” Technology “wrenches us out of the Heideggerian world and the superstitions surrounding place.”15

  Against this, Gagarin showed us how we could abandon place. Thus Levinas says: “For one hour, man existed beyond any horizon—everything around him was sky, or, more exactly, everything was geometrical space. A man existed in the absolute of homogeneous space.”16 In the year 1961, Yuri Gagarin orbited the earth for 106 minutes in the space capsule Vostok I.

  Decisive, however, is that Levinas relates the idea of replacing “place” with “homogeneous space” to Judaism. Judaism “has not sublimated idols—on the contrary, it has demanded that they be destroyed.” “Like technology,” Judaism “has demystified the universe.” Through its “abstract universalism” it damages “imaginations and passions.” Indeed, it has “discovered man in the nudity of his face.”17

  Even Levinas speaks of a destruction. In Heidegger’s eyes it concerns the “destruction” proceeding from universalism, the destruction of machination, which is still no “annihilation.” It is a little uncanny to see to what extent Levinas affirms the apocalyptic reduction of the history of being. It is he who, coming from the other side, writes the confrontation between “universalist” Judaism and Heidegger into the apocalyptic reduction.

  Heidegger assigns all this to the history of metaphysics. Sometime at the start of the 1940s he noted the following about Platonism:

  The estimation of the ἀγαθόν [the good] as the τελευταία ἰδέα [last Idea] beyond ἀλήθεια [truth] and the ἀληθές [true] as γιγνωσκόμενον [what is known] is the first, i.e., the authentic, step that goes the furthest toward the serial production of long-range bomber planes and the invention of radio-technological news reports, with whose help the former are deployed in service of the unconditioned mechanization of the globe and humanity, equally predetermined by that step.18

  Heidegger turns his interpretation of metaphysics upon contemporary and pressing phenomena. “Long-range bomber planes” destroy and annihilate cities.

  Plato’s doctrine of Ideas, which is bound up with the denigration of ἀλήθεια in Heidegger’s eyes, is the cause of that “serial production.” Everything that is produced requires a model. This model, this paradigm, is delivered by Plato in the Ideas. This is also the argument for why Heidegger conceives of Marxism as a kind of Platonism. For him, Platonism is a philosophy of “production.”

  But what are here serially produced are as much long-range bomber planes as radio-technological news reports. Heidegger rightly conceives that the airplanes presuppose the radio. Also Platonism takes the step that “goes the furthest”—in the sense of technology—insofar as it carries the long-distance bomber planes far off into enemy territory.

  Is it a coincidence that Levinas speaks of Gagarin’s capsule Vostok I and Heidegger of “long-range bomber planes”? According to Heidegger, both serve destruction, both have abandoned the earth and move about in universal space. This portends that for Heidegger the Platonic Idea and Judaism are connected. Augustine, in any event, asks himself in book 8 of The City of God whether Plato could have known the prophets, and first among them Jeremiah.19 He comes to a negative judgment, but nevertheless says that he would almost like to agree with the claim that Plato must have known those books. Judaism, Platonism, Christianity—three figures of the universal that Heidegger attacks in the Black Notebooks.

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  The history of being arrives at the completed apocalyptic reduction there where the “enemy” no longer exists, the enemy who, in whatever way, threatens the “Dasein of the people.” History itself must make the decision. Now annihilation becomes self-annihilation. But self-annihilation can now, according to Heidegger, affect each and every thing. Machination is total, makes no exceptions. At one point Heidegger speaks of the self-annihilation of communism, i.e., of being-historical communism as he construes it, according to which there is no difference between Bolshevism and Americanism in regard to their supposed promise of universal mediocrity. Then he speaks, after the war, of the self-annihilation of the Germans and—still before the end of the war—of the self-annihilation of the “Jewish.” He says:

  Only when what is essentially “Jewish” in the metaphysical sense battles against the Jewish is the pinnacle of self-annihilation in history achieved; assuming that what is “Jewish” has everywhere monopolized dominance entirely for itself, such that even the battle against “the Jewish,” and this first of all, becomes servitude to this.20

  Self-annihilation does not need to be understood everywhere as physical annihilation. Rather, there is according to Heidegger even a “self-annihilation of humanity,” in which the modern subject as “last man” (Nietzsche) transitions into its “ending.”21 On the other hand, however, there is also a self-annihilation of the “opponent.” For this, “‘politics’” in its “modern essence” would have to do nothing more than “trick the opponent into a situation” in which the only option is “self-annihilation.”22 Presumably, in this passage Heidegger thinks of Americanism; indeed, he says in the same place: “One discovers first and late enough and even then only in half-measures, ‘Americanism’ as a political rivalry.”

  But that the oscillation of the concept of self-annihilation would have as a consequence an indifferent significance cannot be justified. Much more must every single nuance of meaning be observed. For this, we must take notice of when Heidegger speaks about, for example, the self-annihilation of the “‘Jewish’” and the self-annihilation of the German. At this point, the testimonial character of the Black Notebooks is relevant. As in the lecture courses, it is important to observe when Heidegger carried out what changes to his narrative of the history of being.

  The apocalyptic reduction proves to be the self-annihilation of technology. The narrative topography of Heidegger’s thinking displays a being-historical unity of “Americanism,” “England,” “Bolshevism,” “Communism,” “National Socialism,” and “Judaism,” more specifically, “world Judaism.” All of these protagonists of the history of being are determined by a “marked gift for calculation,” a gift, admittedly, that Heidegger explicitly ascribes to the Jews. They move about in a worldless space in long-range bomber planes and space capsules. They are perhaps the (in-)authentic agents of machination.

  Before the war’s end, before the “end,” these agents of machination are affected by self-annihilation. What is at stake is the other beginning. The decision requires that this beginning must occur without victors or losers. For the distinction between victors and losers immediately relapses into technology. Technology must annihilate itself, while dragging its agents along with it.

  But the end of the war shows that the agents of machination have persevered. Now they drive the Germans into self-annihilation. Heidegger speaks of a “death machinery” that has transformed “the German people and land into a single Kz [Konzentrationslager, concentration camp].”23 The self-annihilation of machination remains outstanding, which can only have the self-annihilation of the Germans as its consequence.

  The question remains, how are we to understand the self-annihilation of the “‘Jewish’” and of the “Jewish” (do quotation marks in Heidegger always have a darker, more sinister meaning?). The “‘Jewish’” is now apparently machination. In this sense, the National Socialists, and with them the Americans, English, and Bolsheviks, are all representativ
es of what is “‘Jewish.’”24 Whatever opposes this falls into its “servitude,” thinks according to its rules. The “Jewish,” however, is—what else could it be?—the character of factical Jews. The self-annihilation of machination occurs in the form of the annihilation of the “Jewish” by the “‘Jewish’”: Auschwitz—the “self-annihilation” of Judaism? The thought annihilates the annihilated once again.

  After the Shoah

  There is no known public expression of Heidegger’s in which he takes a position in regard to the Shoah. Two allusions in the Bremen Lectures, in which Heidegger speaks of a “production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps” (as Hannah Arendt also does around the same time), do not count as expressions about the Shoah.1 Such an expression would not have to be an “apology,” but perhaps an attempt to let thinking founder against what occurred, or perhaps, in an act of courage, to mourn.

  In the meantime, we know generally how difficult it was to speak in such a way about the Shoah. In Germany, a broad, public discussion of it was basically first initiated by the four-part, thoroughly problematic American television miniseries Holocaust in 1978. To be sure, poets and thinkers had already written about it: Hannah Arendt at any rate, Theodor W. Adorno, and likewise Paul Celan in the “Death Fugue.” Even Ernst Jünger in “The Peace”—this plea from the end of the Second World War—speaks of the “dens of murder” that “will haunt man’s memory to the end of time.” They would be the “true monuments of this war.”2 To be sure, the conversation and the sober recognition of what occurred were without doubt painful—and thus difficult.