Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy

Peter Trawny, Andrew J. Mitchell

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780226303734
• eBook ISBN:
  9780226303871
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: German History

In 2014, the first three volumes of Heidegger's Black Notebooks—the personal and philosophical notebooks that he kept during the war years—were published in Germany. These notebooks provide the first textual evidence of anti-Semitism in Heidegger's philosophy, not simply in passing remarks, but as incorporated into his philosophical and political thinking itself. In Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, Peter Trawny, the editor of those notebooks, offers the first evaluation of Heidegger's philosophical project in light of the Black Notebooks.
           
While Heidegger's affiliation with National Socialism is well known, the anti-Semitic dimension of that engagement could not be fully told until now. Trawny traces Heidegger's development of a grand "narrative" of the history of being, the "being-historical thinking" at the center of Heidegger's work after Being and Time. Two of the protagonists of this narrative are well known to Heidegger's readers: the Greeks and the Germans. The world-historical antagonist of this narrative, however, has remained hitherto undisclosed: the Jews, or, more specifically, "world Judaism." As Trawny shows, world Judaism emerges as a racialized, destructive, and technological threat to the German homeland, indeed, to any homeland whatsoever. Trawny pinpoints recurrent, anti-Semitic themes in the Notebooks, including Heidegger's adoption of crude cultural stereotypes, his assigning of racial reasons to philosophical decisions (even undermining his Jewish teacher, Edmund Husserl), his endorsement of a Jewish "world conspiracy," and his first published remarks on the extermination camps and gas chambers (under the troubling aegis of a Jewish "self-annihilation"). Trawny concludes with a thoughtful meditation on how Heidegger's achievements might still be valued despite these horrifying facets. Unflinching and systematic, this is one of the most important assessments of one of the most important philosophers in our history.

Notes

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Preface to the English Translation

1. Richard Wolin, “National Socialism, World Jewry, and the History of Being: Heidegger’s Black Notebooks,” and Donatella Di Cesare, “Heidegger, das Sein und die Juden.”

2. Cf. Joachim Prinz, “Wir Juden”: “The Jew, startled out of the narrow ghetto (although indeed in many regards a place more free and clear) with the swing of a great and epochal turn in the ‘great age,’ suffers the fate of the parvenu. His table of values breaks apart. His equilibrium is disturbed. And so he supports himself each time on what the epoch harbors of new ‘values.’ In place of his former instinctual certainty, he now has a ‘nose’ for the modern. ‘Modern as a minute from now’—because he does not understand the day or the hour” (28). This book by Rabbi Prinz assembles the motives for a renunciation of the modern, a meditation upon the origin, and the grounding of a new society. Similar motives are found in Herzl and Buber. Heidegger probably would have understood them as indications of the correctness of his proclamations.

3. Friedrich Hölderlin, “Conciliator, You That No Longer Believed In . . . : Preliminary Drafts for ‘Celebration of Peace,’” Poems and Fragments, 453.

4. Cf. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen VII, 49–50, in Überlegungen VII–XI, GA 95.

5. Emmanuel Levinas, “Heidegger, Gagarin and Us.”

6. Martin Heidegger, Überlegungen XIV, 91, in Überlegungen XII–XV, GA 96.

Introduction: A Thesis in Need of Revision

1. Jonas, Memoirs, 59: “Many of these young Heidegger worshippers, who’d come great distances, even from as far away as Königsberg, were Jews. That can’t have been a coincidence, though I have no explanation for it. But I assume the attraction wasn’t mutual. I don’t know whether Heidegger felt entirely comfortable with all these Jews swarming around him, but actually he was completely apolitical.” The concluding judgment concerning Heidegger as “apolitical” is simply false. In the Third Reich, Heidegger thought “more politically” than most professors. On the proximity of Heideggerian thinking and Judaism, see Zarader, Unthought Debt.

2. Baumann, Erinnerungen an Paul Celan.

3. Derrida, “Heidegger’s Silence,” 147. What does “wounding of thinking” (blessure pour la pensée) mean? (Calle-Gruber, Conférence, 81). What or who has struck a wound in whom? Did the “wounding” take place in Heidegger’s thinking? What did it teach him? Or is Heidegger’s thinking a damaging of thinking more generally? Is our thinking wounded? Indeed, is anti-Semitism on the whole a wounding of thinking? Translator’s note: Derrida’s text, first published in a German translation, is excerpted from his remarks at a conference in Heidelberg in 1988. The French transcript of this conference is found in Calle-Gruber, ed., La Conférence de Heidelberg.

4. For example, “Letter on ‘Humanism,’” Pathmarks, 242; GA 9: 317.

5. Safranski, Martin Heidegger, 254: “Was Heidegger anti-Semitic? Certainly not in the sense of the ideological lunacy of Nazism. It is significant that neither in his lectures and philosophical writings, nor in his political speeches and pamphlets are there any anti-Semitic or racist remarks.” Beyond this, see Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art and Politics: “Heidegger overestimated Nazism and probably wrote off as merely incidental certain things which were already in evidence before 1933 to which he was, in fact, staunchly opposed: anti-semitism, ideology (‘politicized science’) and peremptory brutality” (21). Heidegger’s thinking is no “ideology” (he scorns this), although at times it does become ideological.

6. On this problem see Benz, Was ist Antisemitismus?, 9–28.

7. Translator’s note: the term “being-historical,” seinsgeschichtlich, refers to Heidegger’s conception of a “history of being,” Geschichte des Seins, first pursued in the 1930s and elaborated in the “being-historical treatises,” beginning with Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) of 1936–38. The term will be developed further in the following chapter.

8. The number is as follows: fourteen notebooks with the title Überlegungen (Considerations), nine Anmerkungen (Remarks), two Vier Hefte (Four Notebooks), two Vigiliae, one Notturno, two Winke (Hints), four Vorläufiges (Preliminaries).

9. Heidegger, Anmerkungen II, 77, in Anmerkungen II–V, GA 97. All citations from the Black Notebooks are by individual notebook name followed by page number therein. Notebook pagination is supplied in the margins of the corresponding Gesamtausgabe volume. Translator’s note: the German Seyn, “beyng,” is, an older spelling of Sein (“being”)—one still found in Schelling, Hölderlin, and Hegel—and is used by Heidegger in the mid 1930s to emphasize the historical, destinal, and nonobjective character of being.

10. Cf. Zaborowski, “Eine Frage von Irre und Schuld,” 637: “If Heidegger actually had been an anti-Semite inwardly and of deep conviction, in the sense of the racial anti-Semitism represented by the National Socialists, then in the time from 1933 to 1945, and above all during the rectorate, he would have had ample opportunity to show this publicly and thereby to work with the new authorities.” This is an argument against an “inward anti-Semitism of deep conviction.” Nevertheless, we know the extent to which Heidegger tended to keep his thinking far from every form of publicity. Philosophy and publicity are mutually exclusive for him. That he secreted away his anti-Semitic ideas can also be understood from this perspective.

11. Heidegger, Überlegungen VI, 14. In Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94.

The Being-Historical Landscape

1. Heidegger, Basic Problems of Phenomenology, 11; GA 24: 15.

2. Heidegger, Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, 157; GA 26: 199.

3. I prefer the concept of “narrative” and consider that of a “remythologizing” to be unfitting. Heidegger was not interested in founding a “new mythology,” even if in later manuscripts the concept of a “mytho-logy of the event” appears to rehabilitate such a notion (Heidegger, Zum Ereignis-Denken [Toward Event-Thinking], GA 73.2: 1277). In Winke x Überlegungen (II) und Anweisungen, however, it says: “The reference to some higher or highest reality—Christianity—[or even] an invented myth of any such sort—no longer helps at all, though it did for a long time.” Heidegger, Winke x Überlegungen (II) und Anweisungen, 84, in Überlegungen II–VI, GA 94. The mentioned “mytho-logy of the event” must stand at the beginning of any thematic tracing of the narratival character of the history of being.

4. Heidegger, Being and Time, 436; GA 2: 508.

5. Heidegger, Being and Time, 443; GA 2: 516.

6. Heidegger, Hölderlin’s Hymn “The Ister,” 143; GA 53: 179.

7. Heidegger, Essence of Truth, 7; GA 34: 10.

8. Heidegger, Essence of Truth, 62, translation modified; GA 34: 85.

9....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the English Translation
• Introduction: A Thesis in Need of Revision
• The Being-Historical Landscape
• Types of Being-Historical Anti-Semitism
• The Being-Historical Concept of “Race”
• The Foreign and the Foreign
• Heidegger and Husserl
• Work and Life
• Annihilation and Self-Annihilation
• After the Shoah
• Attempts at a Response
• Afterword to the German Second Edition
• Afterword to the German Third Edition
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Name Index