When Adolf Hitler assumed power intellectuals and artists fled Germany in large numbers. Most were Jews who saw the writing on the wall in the form of hate speech, violence and decrees that increasingly barred them from public life. Most non-Jewish figures in German culture stayed on, and even those who regained international stature after World War II saw clouds of suspicion follow them into death. What did they do or what did they know? Did they join the Nazi Party to keep their jobs or further their careers (a necessary step in any totalitarian state) or did they actually believe in Nazism? Did their work lend support to the regime or did they retreat into—as Soviet dissidents called it—“inner exile”?
Martin Heidegger was always a hard case. Considered one of Germany’s greatest philosophers, his students included several prominent Jews (Hannah Arendt among them) who flourished in exile and carried on a campaign of apologetics for their old master. His detractors called out his Nazi Party membership but his supporters countered that he joined after Hitler seized power. During the brief period of “de-Nazification” conducted by the victorious Allies, Heidegger could say that while he never resigned his membership, he quickly fell out of favor, lost his university rectorship and spent the remaining years of the Third Reich in a stony silence. He kept quiet through the end of his life.
In Heidegger and the Jews: The Black Notebooks (Polity Press), Donatella Di Cesare rehearses the arguments from all sides before analyzing the contents of the philosopher’s posthumously-published writings. Those “Black Notebooks” that surfaced after his death aren’t metaphorically named but were actually notebooks hardbound in black containing Heidegger’s ruminations from the 1930s through 1970. His words condemn him. After the Nazi defeat, Heidegger wrote that he rued the survival of the Jews as a threat to the German “essence.” In the chain of absurdity he forged, the Jews’ identification as “the chosen people” became the supreme metaphysical construct (Heidegger hated metaphysics), which somehow associated Jews with “the desert void, the nothingness of technical modernism.” Like many anti-Semites before him, Heidegger blamed the Jews for everything he disliked about the modern world. As the one “other” in Western Civilization, the Jews were deemed as the agents of that civilization’s decomposition.
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A professor of theoretical philosophy at Rome’s Sapienza University, Di Cesare writes with unusual clarity on the string of German thinkers she quotes—Luther, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger. All of them found the Jews threatening (she adds that their French philosophical peers fare little better). Di Cesare locates Nazism’s lineage in German philosophy, refuting any notion that Hitler was simply an unlettered emotional manipulator. And by carefully sifting through Heidegger’s writings before, during and after the Third Reich, Di Cesare shows that his train of thought ran on parallel tracks to Nazism.
Reading Heidegger and the Jews, it’s difficult to avoid the thought that philosophy is often nothing more than the history of bad ideas.
