Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy

by Peter Trawny

  Of particular importance for Heidegger was the reunion with Hannah Arendt, his highly gifted former student, his lover. He communicated to her in a letter from the beginning of 1933 that “in university issues,” he was “just as much an anti-Semite” as he was “ten years ago in Marburg, where, because of this anti-Semitism, I even earned Jacobsthal’s and Friedländer’s support,” an ambivalent remark, since he then adds: “And above all it cannot touch my relationship to you.”3 Heidegger formulates the “exception.” Indeed Arendt never even hinted that she might have felt herself to be an “exceptional Jew” in her relations with him. Apart from his academic reservation against Jews, Heidegger had comported himself toward them as toward any others.4

  But the expression shows that Heidegger could voice an anti-Semitism to Arendt of the sort not uncommon in the 1920s and 1930s. His was directed against the Jews in the universities above all. In this regard he speaks in a letter from October 18, 1916, of the “Jewification [Verjudung] of our culture and universities”—a situational assessment that at this time, as I have already mentioned, was so common as to be even shared by Jews.5 Even Arendt herself seems not to have objected completely to Heidegger’s anti-Semitism “in university issues” before 1933, before the introduction of the “Laws of Coordination” (Gleichschaltungsgesetzes). Indeed, she regarded Heidegger as a universal cultural phenomenon. Heidegger had not yet arrived at being-historical anti-Semitism, something with which she most likely never became familiar.

  It was also Arendt who, in a letter from Elfride Heidegger in April 1969, was asked to investigate the sale price for the manuscript of Being and Time. As an explanation for the request, Elfride Heidegger states, “we know nothing of money”—although indeed Fritz Heidegger, her husband’s brother, was active for decades in the Volksbank of Meßkirch.6 Was it an accident that in contemplating the sale of the manuscript, the married couple thought of the Jew Arendt? Did she understand something of money? In the “official” explanations of Heidegger of the past decades, Elfride was held to be the anti-Semite, not her husband. Arendt, in any case, complied with the request without delay.

  What Heidegger and Arendt spoke about after their reunion in 1950 is not known. It is unthinkable that Arendt would broach the Shoah. In a letter from April 1950 Heidegger mentions “that the fate of the Jews and the Germans” would “indeed” have “its own truth,” for which “our historiological calculation is no match”; an ambivalent remark, since it grants much leeway to interpretation (in any event, the ja [indeed] and the je [each] in Heidegger’s handwriting are barely distinguishable).7 Even less univocal is Heidegger’s statement from a letter a month later, in which he proclaims that there was “another shift in 1937/38” in which “Germany’s catastrophe became clear” to him.8 With the highest probability, all the anti-Semitic remarks in the Black Notebooks stem from a later date. It could indeed be the case that Heidegger had reasons for not linking the “catastrophe of Germany” with such remarks. The authentic catastrophe of Germany, being wrecked by “machination,” was something different. But was it really something different?

  With whom could he otherwise have touched upon the topic of the Shoah? All possible witnesses that are known to me either do not remember having spoken with him about it, or are keeping silent. All known correspondences are equally silent. Just one letter, which Herbert Marcuse sent to Heidegger in August 1947, breaks the silence. Heidegger’s evasive answer is well-known.9

  The Black Notebooks break the silence for a moment, the deathly silence (das Totschweigen). Provoked by the placards that were distributed by the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Powers of Europe, Heidegger refers to the Shoah. On the placards with the title “These Disgraceful Deeds: Your Guilt!” there were photographs depicting the liberated concentration camps. Looking back, Heidegger attempts to wrest a meaning here for “destiny.”

  “We” would be, just as before, “in what is inconspicuously precious of a spared treasure.”10 Indeed for the sake of “allowing” ourselves therein, “we would have to first experience what is our own [das Eigene] and be freed to this [zu ihm ge-freyt seyn]; at the same time, however, the foreign would have to allow us, in the sense of an assistance [Hilfe], which would presuppose no less than a free-freeing attitude [freye-freyend–Gesinnung].” One’s “own” must be experienced in order to remain in the “spared treasure.” The reference to a “foreign” that would have to “allow” us something is nearly incomprehensible. How have the “foreigners”—and very often the term “foreigners” characterizes Jews—“assisted” us? Have they allowed (gelassen) us or abandoned (verlassen) us? Or are the “foreigners” here indeed the “Greeks,” who nevertheless could be so characterized only under the being-historical conditions of Heidegger’s Hölderlin interpretations, and to whom certainly no historiological actuality of assistance could be ascribed. The philosopher then also adds: “How dark it is around all of these simple things—and nevertheless—how close is this possibility of a proper destiny—which many are required to carry out.”

  He continues:

  Would, for example, the misjudgment of this destiny—which indeed does not belong to us—would the oppression in the world-will [Weltwollen]—thought in terms of destiny—not be a still more essential “guilt” and a “collective guilt”—the magnitude of which could not at all—in essence not even once—be measured by the atrocities of the “gas chambers”; a guilt—more uncanny than all publicly “decried” “crimes”—one that certainly in the future no one could ever excuse. Does “one” intimate that already now the German people and country is a single Kz [Konzentrationslager, concentration camp]—one that “the world” nevertheless still has not “seen” and that “the world” also does not want to see—this not-wanting is still more willful than our lack of will against a National Socialism running wild.

  The “misjudgment” of this “destiny,” i.e., of being allowed to remain in “what is inconspicuously precious of a spared treasure,” is characterized as the “world-will.” The temporal structure of the context links the past with the present. The “spared treasure” still belongs to us, but “we must” first “experience what is our own.” The “world-will,” however, is apparently something contemporary (aktuelles). It still corresponds to that “destiny” which, precisely because it is “destiny,” we do not have at our disposal. Were “we” to be “oppressed” in this “world-will”—now, after the end of the war—then this “oppression” would be a “guilt,” “the magnitude of which could not at all—in essence not even once—be measured by the atrocities of the ‘gas chambers’.” The “world-will” of the “Germans” is being-historically more important than the “atrocities of the ‘gas chambers.’” And why the quotation marks around “gas chambers”?

  This “not wanting to see” that “already now the German people and country” is “a single Kz” would be “still more willful than our lack of will” against the degeneracy of National Socialism. Both expressions are directed at the victors, the Allies. Their politics, namely, of restricting the German “world-will,” would be more criminal than the mass murder that “certainly in the future no one could ever excuse.”

  The argumentation is muddled. There is a German “destiny” of the “world-will,” an experience of one’s “own” with the “assistance” of the “foreign.” This “destiny” is elevated against a “National Socialism running wild.” Accordingly it in no way leads to the “atrocities of the ‘gas chambers,’” which are attributed to a degenerate National Socialism. But now the crimes of the Allies could even exceed these “‘crimes’” (why the quotation marks?), crimes that Heidegger concedes.

  All this confirms the answer to Marcuse, in which it is bemoaned that the “Allies” were able to murder “‘East Germans’” before “the world public,” “while the bloody terror of the Nazis in point of fact had been kept a secret from the German people.”11 In Anmerkungen II, Heidegger speaks of a “dea
th machinery set into motion,” which should effect the “utter annihilation” of the Germans. And Heidegger adds to this:

  That this machinery would only be the “punishment” for National Socialism, or even only the mere spawn of vengefulness, one may still for some time make a few fools believe. But in truth, one has found the wished-for opportunity—no, over the last 12 years one has co-organized that opportunity and done so consciously, so as to set this devastation in motion. If reservations now enter, then they arise only for a calculation that looks to insure that this machinery not disturb its own business dealings too abruptly.

  This remark, Heidegger emphasizes, would “no longer be said in public for a reader,” but rather would belong “to the destiny of beyng itself and its stillness.”12 How is it said in the Protocols? If a non-Jewish state should hazard to proceed against the Jews (“against us”), “then we would have to unleash world war.” Was it not the Jews who plunged the Germans into their “catastrophe”? And if this was an erroneous insinuation, Heidegger’s view that someone “over the last 12 years” would have “co-organized” an “opportunity” to annihilate the Germans is more erroneous still.

  Approximately two years later, i.e., around the years 1947 and 1948, Heidegger takes up the same thought once again. He critically assesses the habit of historically emphasizing the dates “1933” and “1945.” To do so is “perhaps entirely wrong, to calculate in this way and to take history only historiologically, although the entire modern European world” proceeds “calculatingly in this way with Germany.”13 Indeed, the Germans “still have not yet” noticed “what happens right in front of them and that this calculating has not yet reached the end of calculation.” There “still” remains “the task” “to exterminate the Germans spiritually and historically.” An “old spirit of revenge” makes its way “upon the earth.” The “intellectual history of this revenge” will “never be written,” since that would hinder “the revenge itself.” It never reaches “a public awareness,” for “publicity” itself would already be “this revenge.”

  The “spirit of revenge” is a spirit of calculation, which is not yet at its end.14 The “spiritual and historical” extermination of the Germans is still outstanding. Heidegger no longer speaks of a “death machinery”; the forecast for a physical extinction has not been fulfilled. Nevertheless, what did not escape annihilation was Heidegger’s narrative of the being-historical special role of the Greeks and the Germans. He probably detected that the time for this philosophical story was past. But was it past because a “spirit of revenge” had come over the Germans? Or was the narrative of a special role for the Germans—however this appeared—instead itself annihilated in the annihilation of the Jews?

  Although we find no reference to the Shoah in Heidegger’s statements in the sources mentioned up to now, he did indeed at one point seize upon words to address this. In a poem composed after their reunion, after the first return—and what a return—to Hannah Arendt, Heidegger writes:

  Only to you

  THOUGHT AND TENDER

  “Thought” —

  Oh, help me risk

  saying this.

  Listen! “Thought”

  now means:

  unawakening:

  horrifyingly transposed

  into all the chasms of that wrath,

  then plunging away

  into the lamentations upon lamentations

  of your blood, oh hear it,

  and my [relation] to-you

  henceforth cast into a “woe! ask!”;

  the log of this, you

  pile upon me with every coming, as the burden

  that grips me close, ever closer, ever more deeply,

  pulling on the sway of every emotion,

  draining away the tenderness of the touch!15

  The poem is in keeping with what Arendt found distinctive in Heidegger. The thinking, the event of thinking, “now” becomes an “unawakening,” “transposing.” “Now” the thinker has recognized the “wrath” that sounds in the lamentation of the Jewish “blood.” “Now” would “my to-you” have become a painful question, “the log of this, you/pile upon me with every coming as the burden.” Heidegger here plays upon a verse of Hölderlin’s, in whose “Mnemosyne” it says:

  And much,

  As a load of logs

  upon the shoulders, must be

  Retained. But evil are

  The paths.16

  It is noteworthy that the “log” is piled up from the coming “as the burden.”

  In the intimate dedication (“Only to you”), what Heidegger could not say or indeed even feel in any other form now becomes possible. The “burden” becomes palpable in the encounter with the survivor, with the (former) lover, who escaped the crimes. The thinker appears to bear witness to the far-reaching consequences that lie in the reunion—as though the Shoah first became known to him in his nearness to Arendt. What does this poem risk with its admission of a “burden” in thinking? Perhaps everything, perhaps nothing.

  Hannah Arendt appears to have reflected upon that. The first note from her Thought Journals from June 1950 reads: “The wrong that one has done is the burden on the shoulders, something one carries because one has loaded it upon oneself.”17 It then concerns a “gesture of forgiveness,” one that would destroy the “equality and thereby the foundation of human relations so radically,” that “really, in accordance with such an act, no relation should be possible any longer.” For Arendt the return to Germany was a question of “forgiveness,” not only toward Heidegger.

  Indeed, what did she really think about Heidegger? In a letter to Jaspers from 1946 she characterized him as a “potential murderer,” as a teller of “inane lies” with a “clearly pathological streak.”18 In the reunion, this was irrelevant. Other attempts at a distancing, like the characterization of Heidegger as a “fox,” remain in view of what happened quite harmless.19 What would she have said if she had known of Heidegger’s anti-Semitic notes? What would all those have said who are named in the very first sentence of this book? Would Karl Löwith have resumed contact? Would Celan have visited Heidegger?

  Otherwise asked: how will we deal with Heidegger’s being-historical anti-Semitism in relation to the Shoah? It is no longer up for debate whether one should defend (if one can) Heidegger’s “political error” against a public whose purported “political correctness” already warps the issue, whether voluntarily or not. There is an anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s thinking that—as befits a thinker—undergoes an (impossible) philosophical grounding, but that does not get beyond two or three stereotypes. The being-historical construction makes it all the worse. It is this which could lead to a contamination of this thinking.

  One of the last direct utterances about the Jews in the Black Notebooks reads:

  “Prophecy” is a technique of defense against the destinal of history [Geschicklichen der Geschichte]. It is an instrument of the will to power. That the great prophets are Jews is a fact whose secret has still not been considered. (Note for a jackass: this remark has nothing to do with “anti-Semitism.” This is so foolish and so reprehensible, like the bloody—and, above all, the unbloody—actions of Christianity against “the heathens.” That even Christianity denounces anti-Semitism as “un-Christian” belongs to the highly cultivated refinement of its power technique.)20

  To begin with, in this note the façade just crumbles. That is, if the utterance concerning the “death machinery” at work on the Germans was to be said only “to the destiny of beyng itself and its stillness,” now it is noted “for a jackass” (i.e., for the public?) that what is said here would have “nothing to do with ‘anti-Semitism.’” But what is said? In principle, the following: forecasting and prediction are directed against an understanding of the “destinal of history,” which strongly recalls the Greek μοῖρα, the unknowable spinning of the threads of fate, to which even the Greek gods themselves were exposed.

  With this Heidegger appears to assu
me that the prophet primarily speaks about the future, and not critically against the present. Moreover, he ignores that in the stories of being chosen to be a prophet, being seized by God is described often enough as a bitter fate (cf. Ezekiel). The speech of the prophets is continually contested and set upon, and this by other Jews themselves. Accordingly, the “office” of prophet would be thoroughly comparable to that of the self-sacrificing poet that Heidegger had found in Hölderlin alone.21

  For the thinker, prophetic speech is a “technique,” an “instrument of the will to power.” Moreover, it hides an unthought “secret.” What does he want to signify by this? Through their “‘prophecy,’” have the Jews successfully “co-organized” “in the last 12 years” the downfall of the Germans? Again we brush up against this pronouncement. Can a philosopher insinuate something like this? Does this not give the impression that the thinker has strayed into occultism, one for which all words fail us? Or must we indeed diagnose an anti-Semitic paranoia?

  What Heidegger means in regard to the “secret” of the Jewish prophets he does not take to be anti-Semitism. The rationale for this assuagement is in any case not very convincing. Anti-Semitism is compared to the relationship of Christians to the “‘heathens.’” That Christians took action against non-Christians would be just as stupid as anti-Semitism. To condemn anti-Semitism in this Christian way would belong to the “power technique” of the Christians. What is so foolish and so reprehensible in anti-Semitism itself is not at all expressed—rather, Heidegger uses it only as a foil for the sake of denouncing the foolishness and reprehensibility of Christendom. Additionally, he appears to hold “above all, the unbloody actions” to be especially questionable, i.e.. probably the theological condemnation of non-Christians by Christians. Anti-Semitism for Heidegger is not “so foolish and so reprehensible” because it is located within acts of the “will to power.” Rather he finds it foolish and reprehensible because, unlike philosophy, it is not able to see through these acts.