A real Nazi, really

In the world of philosophy, the Nazi beliefs of Martin Heidegger have become a scandal that won’t go away. Heidegger was a great philosopher and a Nazi, two identities that seldom get attached to the same individual. That’s why he’s endlessly fascinating. Four decades after he died, in 1976, fresh facts about him keep appearing and new judgments of his life continue to develop.

The title “Heidegger Was Really a Real Nazi” showed up on my computer this week, over an essay by a wellregarded critic, Adam Kirsch. For many years, biographers and critics played down Heidegger’s Nazi sympathies and his anti-Semitism. Admirers of his philosophy would like to see his Nazi ideas as a temporary stage, perhaps not terribly serious, in an otherwise noble life. The most prominent Jew who knew him, Hannah Arendt, his student and lover during her youth, went out of her way to minimize his devotion to the Nazis.

But in book after book, the case against him has grown more serious. Today, with the appearance of his private notebooks and the recent translation of them into English, his reputation has fallen to a new low.

He first revealed his views in 1933, soon after Hitler became German chancellor. Heidegger, already a respected philosopher, was elected rector of the University of Freiburg. He signed the Loyalty Oath of German Professors to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State. His inaugural address proved that he stood behind the new regime: “The Fuehrer alone is the present and future German reality and its law,” he said. Universities should align their principles with the government, meaning they should do as the Nazis directed. The duties of students would include labour and military service. He mentioned the “inner truth and greatness” of the new age. He wore a swastika on the collar of his uniform.

Heidegger hoped to be the chosen philosopher of the Nazi movement, making this a great period in his own life as well as Germany’s. He was disappointed when enemies in the party proved more adroit as politicians and forced him to resign from his university position. He disappeared from public life and settled down to read and write. By 1936 Heidegger was under Gestapo surveillance. He had apparently said the wrong thing, or to the wrong bureaucrat.

The most direct revelations of his attitudes have emerged from the Black Notebooks. The name suggests a moral darkness, but it refers to the colour of his workbooks. He filled 34 of them from 1931 to the 1970s (more than 1,200 pages) and authorized their publication only after the appearance of all his other books, numbering about 100.

The Black Notebooks tell us that even when he was alone with his conscience, in the Second World War, he felt free to blame the Jews for the disaster that was overtaking Germany. “World Judaism,” he wrote, “is everywhere elusive and in the unfolding of its power it does not need to get involved in military action, whereas we are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people.”

That, of course, turned reality upside down: even as Hitler murdered millions of Jews, Heidegger chose to mourn the Germans who died while Judaism unfolded its alleged power. Michael Inwood, an Oxford University professor of philosophy and the author of a book on Heidegger, quoted that passage in an article and then asked: “How could such a clever man believe such absurdities?” Inwood could not answer. No one can.

Perhaps jealousy had something to do with it. Heidegger was a full-time blamer who imagined secret plots when he failed to get what he wanted. He could explain any success of the Jews with his view of their “tenacious aptitude for calculating and profiteering and intermingling.”