Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy
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35. Heidegger, Überlegungen XV, 17, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.
36. Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” Pathmarks, 258; GA 9: 339: “When confronted with death, therefore, those young Germans who knew about Hölderlin lived and thought something other than what the public held to be the typical German attitude.” Although this certainly holds, it must nevertheless be asked just what they could have “lived and thought.”
37. Heidegger, Überlegungen XIII, 77, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.
38. Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns, GA 69: 78.
39. This sentence is lacking in the book. It stands in the manuscript, but is not included in the transcript of Fritz Heidegger, who indeed had thus “struck it out.” In keeping with the plan for an edition of the “last hand” [letzter Hand; the editorial policy of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe], the editor and the estate executor decided at that time not to publish the sentence. In light of the Black Notebooks, the statement appears differently. Chronologically, anyway, it belongs entirely in the context of the other anti-Semitic passages discussed here.
40. Cf. Heidegger, Überlegungen XV, 119, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96. There it says at one point: “The reports just published about the Bolshevik murder cellars are supposed to be horrible.” Heidegger eschews saying something similar about the Germans. Moreover, he thinks that “world Judaism” occupies the key positions among the Bolsheviks.
41. Prinz, “Wir Juden,” 95. Even Prinz’s idea is ultimately one specific interpretation according to which in modern times, the diaspora would be the “fate” of humans in general. I would then plead that the world-changing forms of technology have nothing to do with the diaspora, and that the cosmopolitanism accompanying globalization is without precedent. Götz Aly in his study Why the Germans? Why the Jews?: Envy, Race Hatred, and the Prehistory of the Holocaust finds the distinction between the fundamental conservatives (among them the placid, the backward, and the homey) and the progressives (those eager to learn and the modern) to be a very important one for German anti-Semitism.
42. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 354.
43. Heidegger, Überlegungen VIII, 9, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95.
44. Heidegger, Überlegungen XV, 10, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.
45. Heidegger, Die Geschichte des Seyns, GA 69: 47.
46. To proclaim an identity of “machination” and “world Judaism” would ignore, for example, the entire discussion with Ernst Jünger’s understanding of “total mobilization” or the “figure of the worker.” Nevertheless, in the genesis of Heidegger’s thinking of technology, an anti-Semitic ressentiment must be considered along with this.
47. Cf. Diner, Feindbild Amerika, 33: “In many respects anti-Americanism can be understood as a further stage beyond that of anti-Semitism in the global hatred of Jews.” At one point in Überlegungen XIII, Heidegger speaks of the “commercial rational calculation [Rechenhaftigkeit], painted over with morals, of the English-American world.” Heidegger, Überlegungen XIII, 50, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96. This would probably have to be understood in the current context as an expression of being-historical anti-Semitism.
48. Martin Heidegger, Metaphysik und Nihilismus, GA 67: 150.
The Being-Historical Concept of “Race”
1. Geulen, Geschichte des Rassismus, 13.
2. Nietzsche, Daybreak, 149.
3. Ibid., emphasis modified. Cf. Schank, “Rasse” und “Züchtung” bei Nietzsche. While Nietzsche does not doubt the presence of “race,” he does waver in regard to the question of their “mixing.” On the one hand, he appears to emphasize the “purity” of the “race”; on the other hand, he is of the opinion that “mixed races” would be “the source of great culture” (Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente, 45). It may be that the concept of race does not stem from the central discussions of biology. It is nonetheless worth noting that Charles Darwin employed the concept of “race” as something obvious. The title of his 1859 work reads: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle of Life. Gobineau’s Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines, which influenced Wagner, appeared in two volumes between 1853 and 1855. As an indication of the difficulty that the concept of “race” still implies even today, one should recall the importance of “race” in the United States Census. The social structure of the United States appears to make a renunciation of the concept of race impossible, precisely because there is, so to speak, such an “official” racism. In a situation in which the predominance of certain social groups is racially grounded, the proclamation that there will be no races is problematic.
4. Jünger, Der Arbeiter, 288, 309.
5. Ibid., 156.
6. Heidegger, Logic as the Question concerning the Essence of Language, 57, translation modified; GA 38: 65.
7. Heidegger, Logic as the Question concerning the Essence of Language, 57; GA 38: 65 (underlined in the transcript of the lecture).
8. Heidegger, Logic as the Question concerning the Essence of Language, 131, translation modified; GA 38: 153.
9. Heidegger, Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” Winter Semester, 1934–35, 175; GA 86: 162.
10. Today in Germany, the concept of the “racy” is applied exclusively to women and sports cars.
11. Zaborowski emphasizes that Heidegger, in his understanding of “state and people,” “opportunely, even if not so often, adopted a position that, to all external appearances, is to be characterized univocally as racist” (“Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld?,” 420). If “racist” means that Heidegger would have derived a superiority over other peoples from the “racial” founding of the “body of the people” of the Germans, then in my view the philosopher must be acquitted of such charges of racism. A “being-historical racism,” on the contrary, consists in the fact that Heidegger did not wish to renounce the concept of race in his topology of being-historical protagonists, because he believed the authentic importance of race in general would come to the fore only in a definite epoch of the history of being. More on this later.
12. Heidegger, Being and Truth, 201; GA 36/37: 263.
13. Heidegger, Überlegungen und Winke III, 96, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94.
14. Heidegger, Überlegungen und Winke III, 26–27, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94. Somewhat later: “The attuning and formative force of the project [is] the deciding” (41). Incidentally, it can be shown how Heidegger attempted to politicize the fundamental ontology of Being and Time around 1933 (with the concept of “care,” for example), i.e., to ontologize the political, and thus to practice “metapolitics.”
15. Heidegger, Logic as the Question Concerning the Essence of Language, 57, translation modified; GA 38: 65.
16. Heidegger, Winke x Überlegungen (II) und Anweisungen, 45, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94.
17. Heidegger, Überlegungen und Winke III, 102, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94.
18. Heidegger, “The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts” (1945), in Neske and Kettering, Martin Heidegger, 20, translation modified; GA 16: 378. With the conception of the notion of “Western responsibility” it is nevertheless to be observed that Heidegger first applied this only after the war. In the Black Notebooks it surfaces just after 1945 in Anmerkungen II. The decision to speak of the “West” (Abend-Land) and the “Western” (Abendländischen) arises from a setting aside of the narrative of the “first” and “other beginning” in regard to the Greeks and the Germans. By “Western responsibility” did Heidegger understanding anything other than the inscribing of European history into the transition from the “first” to the “other beginning”? To be sure, for Heidegger, “Europe” is not the “West.” But this cannot be gone into further here. On “people of the earth,” see Heidegger, Seminare Kant—Leibniz—Schiller, GA 84.1: 338. “Earth,” here, in this ambivalent usage, certainly refers not to the planet, but to the “earth” of the “conflict of world and earth.”
19. Heidegger, Überlegungen X, 103, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95.
20. Heidegger, Überlegungen XII, 69–70, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.
21. Heidegger, Überlegungen XI, 57–58, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95.
22. Heidegger, Überlegungen V, 36–37, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94.
23. Cf. Trawny, Adyton, 78–85.
24. Heidegger, Überlegungen XI, 67, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95.
The Foreign and the Foreign
1. Heidegger, Winke x Überlegungen (II) und Anweisungen, 55, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94.
2. Heidegger, Überlegungen IV, 38, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94.
3. Heidegger, Überlegungen IV, 52, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94.
4. Heidegger, Überlegungen und Winke III, 96, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94.
5. Heidegger, Überlegungen IV, 102, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94.
6. Heidegger, Überlegungen IV, 46, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94.
7. Cf. Waldenfels, Topographie des Fremden, 184–207.
8. Heidegger, Überlegungen IV, 24, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94: “The effective enactment of keeping silent [Verschweigung] and fading away as the opening and transformation of beings with essencing beyng./This requires, however, an essential renunciation of speaking about keeping silent and of saying something about the essence of language as silence [Schweigen]—then it may be kept silent.”
9. Heidegger, Überlegungen V, 79, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94.
10. The treatment of the city-country relationship in Heidegger has been continually criticized, recently by Zimmermann, Martin und Fritz Heidegger, 60–65. Nevertheless, I myself am not entirely sure whether Heidegger’s preference for the “Black Forest hut” can be taken for a mere “stylization.” It is not in keeping with the matter to deny any significance to the facticity of dwelling in different landscapes.
11. Heidegger, Überlegungen VII, 12, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95. The thought that the Germans would imitate something “foreign” is not original. It is found, for example, in the early Nietzsche. Thus at the outset of David Strauss the Confessor and the Writer, Nietzsche writes: “Even if we had actually ceased to imitate the French, that would still not imply that we had triumphed over them, but only that we had liberated ourselves from our subordination to them: only if we had imposed upon the French an original German culture would we legitimately be able to speak of a triumph of German Culture. Meanwhile, we can scarcely help but note that we—necessarily—remain dependent upon Paris in all matters of form, for up to the present day there has never been an original German culture.” Nietzsche, David Strauss, 9–10. Naturally, Heidegger bitterly rejected the concept of “culture.”
12. Heidegger, Überlegungen VII, 14, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95.
13. Heidegger, Überlegungen IX, 1, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95.
14. Heidegger, Überlegungen X, 101–2, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95.
15. Heidegger, Überlegungen XIII, 64, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.
16. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” 54; GA 53: 67: “That foreign, of course, through which the return home journeys, is not some arbitrary ‘foreign’ in the sense of whatever is merely and indeterminately not one’s own. The foreign that relates to the return home, that is, is one with it, is the provenance of such return and is that which has been at the commencement with regard to what is one’s own and the homely. For Hölderlin, the Greek world is what is foreign with respect to the historical humankind of the Germans.” Superfluous to say that what holds “for Hölderlin,” according to Heidegger, holds “for the Germans.”
17. Thus from the outset the discussion of a linguistic chauvinism in Heidegger is nonsensical. Cf. Farías, Heidegger and Nazism, 298–99. The thinking of being is not bound to a particular language. What the sentence “this is a table” can mean in regard to the “is” can be said in all languages (being as existence, as essence, as truth, etc.), even when these have no word for the verbal substantive “being.” Another question concerns the translatability of languages. That Heidegger had a particular interest and a peculiar conception in regard to this is well known. Whatever the case, the proclamation that languages are not translatable on a “one to one” basis is no chauvinism.
18. Heidegger, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” Pathmarks, 258; GA 9: 339.
19. Heidegger, Anmerkungen I, 70, in Anmerkungen I–V, GA 97.
Heidegger and Husserl
1. Cf. more recently, Heidegger und Husserl: Neue Perspektiven, ed. Günter Figal and Hans-Helmuth Gander. Despite all their differences, they are still regarded as belonging together.
2. Heidegger, “My Way to Phenomenology,” On Time and Being, 78; GA 14: 98.
3. Habermas, “Work and Weltanschauung,” 142–43.
4. Cf. Husserl’s marginal notes to Heidegger’s Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (in Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology, 258–472). Nevertheless, there is no way that it could not have been known to him to what extent Heidegger was proceeding along his own path. Their joint work on the Encyclopedia Britannica article speaks against his not knowing. Heidegger himself refers in a note to their “conversation in Todtnauberg” around the time of the composition of Being and Time, in which the differences between the two must have intensified. Cf. Husserl, Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology, 129.
5. Husserl, Briefwechsel, vol. 3: Die Göttinger Schule, 265.
6. Husserl, Briefwechsel, vol. 7: 15, emphasis modified. Letter to Émile Baudin.
7. Heidegger, “The Spiegel Interview,” in Neske and Kettering, Martin Heidegger and National Socialism, 48; GA 16: 660.
8. Cf. Karl Schuhmann, “Zu Heideggers Spiegel-Gespräch über Husserl.”
9. Husserl, “Phenomenology and Anthropology,” in Psychological and Transcendental Phenomenology, 485–500.
10. Translator’s note: Husserl’s “Nachwort zu den Ideen I” has been translated into English as “Author’s Preface to the English Edition” of Ideas (Boyce Gibson edition). That translation, however, omits the opening “Preliminary Remark” of the text, from which the following citations are drawn.
11. Husserl, “Nachwort,” 139.
12. Ibid., 139.
13. Ibid., 140.
14. Heidegger in a letter to Husserl from October 1927: “Dear fatherly friend! I cordially thank you and your estimable wife for the days flown by in Freiburg. I really had the feeling of being an adopted son.” GA 14: 130.
15. Heidegger, Anmerkungen V, 52, in Anmerkungen I–V, GA 97.
16. Heidegger, Anmerkungen V, 53, in Anmerkungen I–V, GA 97.
17. Is it only a rhetorical flourish that whenever Heidegger gets wind of an anti-Semitic reproach, he meets his opponent with such a politically loaded vocabulary? “Sports-palace atmosphere,” “rally,” “propaganda”—all this would be directed at Husserl. Is there perhaps a strategy behind this of blaming the Jews for the sordid past? I am reminded that Paul Celan, after a reading in the “Gruppe 47” at the beginning of the 1950s, was unspeakably offended when someone, perhaps Hans Werner Richter, opined that Celan read “in the cadence of Goebbels.” Cited in Milo Dor, Auf dem falschen Dampfer, 214.
18. Heidegger, Anmerkungen V, 54, in Anmerkungen I–V, GA 97.
19. Heidegger, Anmerkungen V, 54, in Anmerkungen I–V, GA 97.
20. Cf. the discussion around Elfride Heidegger’s letter to Malvine Husserl from April 29, 1933, in which Elfride—put mildly—speaks very insensitively about the consequences of the Forced Coordination laws of March and April 1933, in Zaborowski, “Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld,” 390–91. However, the announcement in the Festschrift zum 550. Jubiläum der Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg that Malvine Husserl (1860–1950), Husserl’s wife, “on the day before the deportation of all Baden Jews in 1940” chose to commit “suicide” is simply absurd. Additionally, a false birth year was invented for Heidegger, “1891.
” Cf. Speck, 550 Jahre, 171.
21. Heidegger, Überlegungen XII, 67, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.