Chapter 5

National Socialism:

1933-1934

In 1933, Heidegger found history. On 19 January, he wrote to Elisabeth Blochmann, apologising for his late response to her earlier letter: “that I am only writing now is due to one thing only: the fact that in recent weeks a great storm has come over me, which I dared to greet with ‘full sails open’. In this storm, the old guard is now in tatters. There can be no mere patching up of things anymore”. The storm that had overcome Heidegger, and to which he had fully opened himself (with ‘vollen Segel’), was the “storm” of Hitler’s rapid rise to power in the final days of the Weimar Republic. Here, between 1932 and 1933, chancellors from the conservative ruling elite, Franz von Papen and Kurt von Schleicher, were removed by President Paul von Hindenburg after a short term in office. The old ruling system was falling apart and could not, according to Heidegger, be mended or “patched up”. It was obvious to all who the next chancellor would be.

            For those who could read between the lines of Heidegger’s pronouncement, the signs had been there since at least 1928: the disgruntlement with the Weimar “system, dismay at the vapid intellectual life of the universities (and the “open sails” suggests the liberation of a boat that has been becalmed) and ”, frustration with conventional modes of philosophy. These were all possibly apolitical dispositions but mental sets nonetheless clearly susceptible to political articulation should the opportunity arise. That opportunity had now arisen.

The Nazi Party had reached power following its stage management of the Reichstag fire of 27 February (which had conjured up a Communist threat to the nation) and the election results of 5 March. Hitler had already been nominated as Chancellor on 31 January, and his ascension to the Chancellery ushered in a new and volatile period in German politics, the so-called “German revolution”, a period of organised turmoil that would end only with the law promulgating the new formation of parties on 14 July. Between these dates, the Nazis succeeded in temporarily and then permanently suspending those clauses of the Constitution safeguarding civil liberties: on 28 February and through the Enabling Act of 23 March, banning and forcing into voluntary liquidation the Communist, Social Democratic, Centre and Nationalist parties and placing many of their members in custody in newly constructed concentration camps; implementing on 1 April the boycott of Jewish businesses, and the removal of members of the Jewish faith from positions within the judicial, educational, medical and even sporting institutions; and abolishing the political self-determination of the individual German Länder substituting the federal system of government with a single structure of command based in Berlin. A secret police office (SD) under Heinrich Himmler was created (26 April), and Trade Union organisations were abolished and replaced with a new Nazified Labour Front (2 May), in a month that saw the ritualistic book-burning ceremony (10 May). By 1 July 1933, the National Socialists had not only successfully occupied almost all of the key positions within the political and parliamentary institutions of the newly constituted German State, they had also successfully removed any likely source of future opposition to their policies by Nazifying the judiciary, the Protestant Church and the universities. The promulgation of the “Gesetz gegen die Neubildung von Parteien” on 14 July was a law which effectively turned the Third Reich into a one-party state. See Mary Fullbrook, A History of Germany: 1918–1990 (Oxford: OUP, 1992), 66–73.

We should not assume, however, that Heidegger was fully aware of what was taking place. When in his letters he discussed the radical turn of events in German politics, he rarely cited matters in detail or mentioned specific political actions or personages. Heidegger’s appropriation of the Nazi “revolution” seemed largely to stem from wish fulfilment (a “Wunschtraum”, Denker 115), where he imposed ideals of national renewal on a reality that he did not look closely at. Heidegger was in history, but curiously distanced from it. Rüdiger Safranski puts this paradox succinctly, “the events to which Heidegger reacted were political events, and his actions took place on the political stage – but it was the power of philosophical imagination that governed his reactions and actions. And this philosophical imagination transformed the political scene into an historical-philosophical stage on which a play from the repertoire of the history of Being was being enacted. Real history was scarcely recognisable in it”.[1] As even Hugo Ott (one of the philosopher’s harshest critics) admits: Heidegger’s “programme was built on high hopes and expectations”, which were soon to be overtaken by the reality.[2] Indeed, for all of the later talk about the need to put in place a practical realisation of National Socialist ideology, his own discourse, as in his later Rector’s speech, was largely constituted from generalisations and abstractions and constituted perhaps (as Karl Löwith, who was amongst the audience, noted) “an attempt to import the conceptual terrain of his previous philosophy into the pragmatics of the new state”.[3]

But that Heidegger was by the end of March 1933 fully committed to the politics of Nazi Germany there is no doubt. In a letter to Kurt Bauch, Professor of Art History at the University of Freiburg, written on 14 March, just one week after the election success of the Nazi Party, Heidegger wrote, “in my opinion, we can only avoid misjudgements when we awaken within ourselves an awareness of the necessity for an entire [political] transformation, and one that will not to be achieved through mere ‘measures’, but one that calls for determined actions and the resolution of the will power of the mission of today’s youth” And again, in a letter to Elisabeth Blochmann written on 22 March, the same sentiments were expressed, but now an inspirational note was being sounded, as he prepared himself for the challenges that the new Germany would bring. Here he would need complete determination and the total acceptance of what was taking place, for “all that will come will bring with it onerous tasks, and we should take care that we do not take them lightly”.

 Eight days later, Heidegger wrote once more to Blochmann. “The present turn of events – just because much remains in the dark and is unpredictable – has for us an enormously concentrated power. It empowers our sense of purpose and gives us the self-confidence to be able to act in the service of a great cause and to participate in the formation of a national [‘volklich’] world. For a long time, the meagre nature and lack of substance of mere ‘culture’ and the unreality of so-called ‘values’ has degenerated for me into a nothingness, compelling me to seek Dasein in a quite different area.”

In March or April, Heidegger joined the “Cultural-Political Work Community of German University Teachers” (“Kulturpolitische Arbeitsgemeinschaft Deutscher Hochschullehrer”, the KADH), a group that had been newly formed in Frankfurt by the rector of that university, Ernst Krieck, “a kind of National Socialist group within the German Academics’ Association, the official organization of university staff. The members of this ‘community’ regarded themselves as the vanguard of the Nazi revolution in the universities. They advocated the early ‘Gleichschaltung’ (political alignment with the Nazi Party) of the German Academics’ Association, the introduction of the Führer principle in the universities, and the ideological alignment of teaching–a point on which there were considerable differences” (Safranski 235). Indeed, whilst in its early days, Heidegger was at one with Krieck and the other members of the group this soon changed as the group degenerated into a clique of unsupportive individuals seeking to promote their careers, highlighting thus one of the realities of Nazi politics: that contestations for personal power were often greater than a shared ideology.

But these tensions would emerge only with time. In the early days of the seizure of power, Heidegger could only see in Nazism the positive. As he wrote to Blochmann on 19 January, Heidegger viewed National Socialism as the sole force capable both of overcoming both the “counter spirit of the Communist world” and the “dying spirit of Christianity”. The former was a dangerous threat in the present; the latter a pernicious influence from the past. As he told Blochmann, National Socialism was a spiritual revolution, the manifestation of a power comparable to the revolution of the mind achieved by the Ancient Greeks. What would it be like if we possessed that culture now, and totally intact? All that is routine and empty would be swept away. The struggle against what remains, however, must be set in motion, and we must bear this beginning in its greatness – while we are still bordered by doubt and darkness – into the future and convert it into a mission”.

In the past, Heidegger had taught and written extensively about individual Greek philosophers such as Aristotle (as in his “Phenomenological Interpretations in connection with Aristotle”, 1922, and his lectures on Plato’s Sophist, 1924–1925), and he would later go on to enlist pre-Socratic figures such as Parmenides and Heraclitus in the rejuvenation of his own philosophy. But that was not the case here. Heidegger’s appropriation of the Greeks was a deification that was at the same time a reification, where the Greeks have become homogenised into an anonymous collective. That collective anticipated, Heidegger argues, and could merge into the collective that is National Socialism, where the latter would take on the archetypal presence of the former. Alfred Denker, Unterwegs in Sein und Zeit: Einführung in Leben und Denken von Martin Heidegger (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2011), pp. 110 and 118).

Heidegger’s invocation of the Greeks was not only a tenet within his political reading of the present; it also formed the context for a personal engagement with the same. In December 1932, Heidegger had sent Blochmann a copy of Plato’s Politeia (known in English as the Republic), reminding her of his earlier recommendation, made in September 1932, that she should read Plato’s “Seventh Letter”. The political symbolic content of this reference is clear. Heidegger was seeking to draw a parallel between what he hoped to achieve in the coming National Socialist state with what Plato had hoped to achieve in his two visits to Syracuse in 368 and 360. Particularly in the second visit, Plato had sought to influence Dionysius and his son in their governance of Sicily by converting them into philosopher-kings. Philosophy was to inform politics, undertaking the “weightiest task of becoming the intellectual leadership of an ideal state”. This, Heidegger now decided, was precisely his mission. He would act as a (perhaps the) guiding figure in the university hierarchy of the new state.[4]

What Heidegger did not tell Blochmann was that Plato had not been seeking to turn his pupils into wise aristocrats but into exponents of democracy, precisely the discredited form of government that Heidegger believed that National Socialism would and should replace. For as Plato wrote in 1 Cf. Plat. L. 7.336d, Plat. Laws 961a ff. “And one piece of counsel I add, as I repeat now for the third time to you in the third place the same counsel as before, and the same doctrine. Neither Sicily, nor yet any other State—such is my doctrine—should be enslaved to human despots but rather to laws; for such slavery is good neither for those who enslave nor those who are enslaved—”.

The parallels that Heidegger drew (at least implicitly) between himself and Plato founders on a second point: that fact that Plato’s mission to bring philosophical enlightenment to the rulers of Syracuse was a total failure. Plato made two visits to Syracuse. A.E. Taylor describes what happened: “Plato made another voyage to Syracuse and spent nearly a year there (361-360) in the hope of remedying the situation of bringing together a union of the two tyrants, Dionysius and Dion, in the spirit of philosophically enlightened rule. On this occasion something was really done on the task of drafting the preliminaries to a constitution for the proposed federation of the Greek cities, but the influence of the partisans of the old regime proved too strong. Plato seems at times to have been in real personal danger from the hostility of Dionysius’ barbarian bodyguards, and it was with difficulty and only by the mediation of Archytas of Tarentum that he finally obtained leave to return to Athens (360 BC)”.[5]  Heidegger would have done well to have taken on board this point in 1933, before he was forced to relive it as nemesis in 1934, when he gave up, in the most abject way, all ambitions to participate in the ideological momentum of the new Nazi state.

In the meantime, whatever his dreams of Syracuse, Heidegger had to remain in Freiburg and teach. Between November 1933 and February 1934, he offered a lecture course on “Sein and Wahrheit” [“Being and Truth”], but even here Being and truth possess a pressing political ambience. Before beginning his lectures, Heidegger addressed his students in words that remind them that they are the harbingers of a new Germany (indeed, Heidegger was, in this period, towards the end of 1933, increasingly turning to students rather than to his academic colleagues as the likely bearers of the future of National Socialism as a pedagogy (Geier 89). He tells them: “you can no longer simply be ‘listeners’. Your duty is to be fellow-knowers and participants in the creation of the university of the future in the German spirit”.[6]

In his lectures, Heidegger explicated the premisses and assumptions of a series of traditional philosophical positions, from the origins of metaphysics through to the “mathematical-logical” methodology of recent philosophy. But in the Introduction, he spelt out what philosophy must become in the new Germany. Under the rubric “the fundemental question of philosophy”, Heidegger brought into view “the fundamental question and fundamental events of our history”, where we learn what “the intellectual-political mission of the German people” is (GA 36/37: 4). Understanding this mission means accepting “the challenging knowledge about what it is, above all, and which must be for everything else, if the nation is to rise to its full stature” (GA 36/37: 4).[7] Doing philosophy is still, indeed, a matter of questioning, but that questioning must now replace abstract questioning regarding matters of ontology (and Heidegger did not appear to recognise the irony of his position) but be a questioning about who we are as members of the new state. For, as he explained, “we are seeking ourselves in a challenging-debating-reverential way. We seek ourselves when we ask who we are. Who is this people [‘Volk’] at this historical point in time and what is its fate in the essence of its Being?”.[8]

Heidegger had welcomed the political developments that were taking place in Germany, but his close colleague and friend, Karl Jaspers, did not. Between 18 and 23 March, Heidegger visited Jaspers in Heidelberg. In his autobiography, Jaspers recounted what happened: “at the end of March 1933, Heidegger paid us for the last time a lengthy visit. In spite of the March election results for the victorious Nazis, we conversed as we had always done. He had bought a record of Gregorian church music and we listened to it together. Then he suddenly said: ‘one must go along with [‘sich einschalten’] what is happening’, with reference to the quickly developing national socialist reality. I was amazed but did not query him” (p. 100). This was the last opportunity for Jaspers to speak his mind but, as Harold H Oliver observes, there was an “asymmetrical relationship” between Jaspers and Heidegger, and the former seemed possessed of an “uncanny need to be judged favourably as a philosopher by his younger colleague” (Oliver 1).[9] It was a dependence that prevented Jaspers from challenging Heidegger at crucial moments such as these (although such a confrontation would not have steered Heidegger away from the path that he had already taken).

In the notebook that he kept to record his engagement with Heidegger, Jaspers went into greater detail regarding his ambivalent relationship with his friend and colleague, and confessed how much to him was “unclear” in that relationship.[10] He also spoke of his “self-deception” regarding Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism, seeing his decision to embrace it as a tactical move undertaken “to protect the university” (presumably to protect it from having a hard-line Nazi rector imposed on it from outside) (Notizen 181-182). Jaspers, however, was not oblivious to the flaws in his friend’s character, speaking at one point of Heidegger’s “Treulosigkeit”, by which he meant not his lack of fidelity but his refusal to open himself to and engage with his friend and close colleague on a personal and philosophical level (Notizen 182). But that Heidegger was not a calculating politician, Jaspers also made clear. “He did not possess a trace of that crafty politicking that step by step, following the ignis fatui of power, deceiving itself and others, was paving the way towards the destruction of Germany” (Notizen 183).

That Heidegger was aware of the radical political differences between himself and his friend we know from a letter that he sent to Elfride on 19 March during his visit to Heidelberg, in which he wrote: “Jaspers is also quite receptive to the actual happenings that constitute the current German Revolution – though with respect to specific decisions he is hampered by an ‘intellectuality’ that hasn’t quite shaken off the Heidelbergian in him”. That “intellectuality” was, however, the result of Jaspers’ critical assessment of what was happening in German politics, events that Heidegger had totally welcomed. But there was a further reason for Jaspers’ reservations: “I find it unsettling”, Heidegger wrote, “how this man sees our destiny and tasks in a thoroughly German way, and with the most genuine instinct and the highest demands, and yet is tied down by his wife”.

Heidegger was being disingenuous. He knew very well that Jaspers’ wife was Jewish and would have witnessed the coming to power of the Nazi Party with dismay. Heidegger would have done well to have registered at this point the impact that his own wife, Elfride, was having upon his own political direction. Writing in a letter to her friend, Elfriede Lieber, in 1932, Elfride described Germany as a “completely defenceless and economically ruined people” and railed against “bolshevism”, which she saw not only in Communism but also in the SPD [German Socialist Party], and its “Jewish-Marxist preparatory work”. What was required to destroy this evil was a “fanatical Peoples’ [‘völkisch’] Movement”, which would meet force with force. And where today to find such a Movement if not with Hitler?” (Quoted in Payen, p. 249).

On 3 April, Heidegger wrote to Jaspers once again, feeling perhaps that he had not quite convinced his longstanding friend of the probity of his course of action: “although much is still in the dark and unresolved, I am increasingly convinced that we are becoming part of a new reality and that the previous age has gone. Everything depends on whether in our philosophy we can create the right point of participation for philosophy and promote this development through words”. We must incorporate the dynamic movement of the present into philosophy. Jaspers did not reply to the letter. We must wait for a direct confrontation between the two until June later that year, but the premisses of an altercation were increasing with every moment of contact.

But now the pained private world intercedes once again. Later that month, on 21 April, Elisabeth Blochmann wrote to Elfride, asking her to act as an intermediary with her husband on her behalf. A “Law for the Restoration of the Civil Service” (“Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Beamtentums”) had been promulgated on 7 April, drafted by the Interior Minister, Wilhelm Frick. The law was accompanied by a questionnaire requiring details of the racial background of employees. The ultimate goal was to exclude Jews from employment in all branches of the Civil Service, including educational institutions, where they were now no longer permitted to teach. This would have effectively put an end to the career of Blochmann (who was half Jewish). The only solution to this impending crisis in her life and career would be if the increasingly influential Heidegger might intercede on her behalf with the Minister of Education, Bernhard Rust. It is was strange request, for Elfride had been even more enthusiastic than Heidegger in her support for National Socialism in the 1920s and would have fully supported the new law. Elfride, however, duly passed on Blochmann’s request to her husband and, as a postcard sent to Blochmann on 10 June testifies, Heidegger did indeed write to the relevant authorities in Berlin, attempting to have her exempted from the law.

On 21 April, Heidegger was unanimously elected Rector of the University of Freiburg. He replaced the incumbent rector, the Professor of Anatomy, Wilhelm von Möllendorff, who had only taken up office in December the previous year, but whose occupancy of the position was curtailed because he was a social democrat. It has been observed that “when Heidegger took over the rectorate, he had not yet made clear his political intentions and would not do so until formally designated Führer by the university”.[11] Indeed, it is possible that Heidegger was elected precisely because he had apparently remained aloof from the more radical sections in the Party, but the fact that he was known as a supporter of National Socialism was regarded as positive by many of his younger colleagues.[12] That his fellow deans had voted for Heidegger, however, because they expected him to pursue “a wise and measured higher education policy” (Manfred Geier, p. 87) seems unlikely.

On 3 May, Heidegger joined the Nazi Party. As he wrote to his brother, Fritz, the following day, “yesterday I became a member of the Party. I did this not only out of inner conviction but from the realisation that this is the only way that an understanding of and insight into the movement as a whole is possible”. He also attempted in the same letter, to persuade Fritz to make the same commitment, offering yet a further idealist construction of National Socialism that he should not view the movement from below but through the eyes of the Führer and his great goal. Heidegger also confided that he had suspended his own philosophical work in the service of carrying out his duties as the new rector (GA 16: 93).[13]

Heidegger was an efficient administrator. His involvement in the pedagogy of the new state has been described as the work of a “philosophical dreamer” (Safranski p. 234), but there was nothing dream-like about the carrying out of his duties as a rector. He took to his new role with zeal. On 27 April, he wrote to his colleagues exhorting them to participate in the “Day of National Work”, where there would at the university would be a procession, which would culminate in a series of addresses and in the singing of the “Horst Wessel Lied”. Two days earlier he had sent a memo to his fellow deans, specifying the percentage of non-Aryan students that could in the future be admitted to the university: “the determination of the policy on the selection of non-Aryans is that for individual faculties under 1.5% for new students, and under 5% for returning ones. Further details are being formulated now in the Ministry and will be sent to all faculties once they are present”.[14] The Nazification of university life in Freiburg was proceeding with grim momentum. On 3 May, Heidegger passed on to his colleagues a missal from Eugen Fehrle, the Minister for Higher Education section in Baden. It read: “students who have recently taken part in the struggle for national revival conducted by the S.A., S.S. or other militia are to receive special dispensation in terms of fees and grants etc, on the submission to their professors of proof of their participation. On the other hand, Jewish or Marxist students are not to receive such dispensations” (Nachlese zu Heidegger, p. 14).

In the following months, Heidegger articulated his duties in various ways depending upon context and audience, whether he was talking to his academic colleagues, students or, as on a rare occasion on 24 January 1934, workers. Irrespective of the context, his central message was the same:  the seizure of power of the National Socialists had brought about a “German Revolution” and helped create a new state that stood in the service of the People [“Volk”]. It was the duty of all citizens to integrate themselves into and participate in this new state. Universities had a special function to perform, as educators, professors and students were best placed to explain and disseminate the mission of National Socialism, “in an inner way”, as he later noted, “to work together with the collectivity of the People in an authoritative way” (“Das Rektorat 1933/34”: 23).[15] Heidegger, assuming the role of “praeceptor Germaniae” circa 1933, saw his duty as rector to make this process possible. He envisaged, however, a greater national arena of power beyond, and sought to broaden that process beyond Freiburg to the other educational establishments of Germany through speeches and lectures, “to put into play the facilitating powers and essential goals” of National Socialism” (Das Rektorat 1933/34: 24).

But Heidegger had to start with his home base. On 6 May, he addressed a congregation of newly matriculated students in Freiburg. By now, Heidegger’s concept of the new Nazi state had become entirely formulaic, and his talk was correspondingly structured around a series of standard National Socialist tropes: “the German People (“Volk”) as a totality has found the way back to itself under great leadership. Through this leadership, the People, who have come to their true selves, have created the state. The People that has shaped itself in this way is growing into a nation. That nation assures the destiny of the People”.

Heidegger’s promulgation of National Socialism took place not simply in language but through language. The above passage is remarkable in its repetition of a small number of recurring tropes, whose full weight emerges more clearly in the original German: “das deutsche Volk im Ganzen hat sich selbst zückgefunden unter einer grossen Führung. In dieser Führung schafft das zu sich selbst gekommene Volk seinen Staat. Das in seinen Staat sich hineingestaltende Volk wächst hinauf zur Nation. Die Nation übernimmt das Schicksal ihres Volkes”.[16] Heidegger had prided himself in his lectures on his ability to make direct contact with students, and by so doing align them with his own type of interrogative thinking, which sought to keep all theoretical issues open to allow the enquiring mind to develop. Here, however, his students were presented with a formulaic litany intended to close down this enquiring mind. It was not just the content of Heidegger’s talk that was one dimensional: the very composition of Heidegger’s text is oppressive. The circular structure of his address, its hypnotic phrasing, is sustained through the near chiasmus of each sentence (where the concluding words of the previous line provide the opening words of the following), through the repetition of evocative tropes and the continuous use of self-reflexive formations (“sich”), the latter intended to give the impression that what was happening in Germany was emerging out of an inner process of self-determination.

In the meantime, attempting to establish his credentials in the highest of places, on 20 May, Heidegger sent a telegram to Hitler asking for the postponement of the scheduled announcement of the managerial committee of the German university “Verband” until that organisation had been thoroughly “gleichgestaltet” (integrated into the Nazi state).[17] The telegram was largely gestural, an attempt to make contact with the Führer. It was an act of personal allegiance, since decisions of this nature were typically taken by the Minister for Education, Bernhard Rust. It is unlikely that Hitler would have read the telegram. Heidegger wrote to the Führer, but he too was a Führer, in his own realm. On 23 May, he sent a lengthy memo to his colleagues on how they should conduct themselves in the forthcoming commemoration ceremony for Horst Wessel (an S.A. “storm-leader” assassinated by Communists in 1930), due to take place three days later. Heidegger’s concern for detail in his instructions was impressively meticulous. Precise times were given, as were locations, and the organisation of the procession specified according to the rank of the participants; he made clear what type and colour of robe or gown the participants should wear but, above all, what type of behaviour was expected: “right from the beginning of the procession, as well as at its end, strict silence is to be maintained and no greetings are to be exchanged”. Once seated, the Horst Wessel song would be sung, and on the repetition of the opening lines the right arm lifted (Nachlese zu Heidegger, pp. 15-16).

Within three weeks of becoming rector, Heidegger’s identification with the new state was total. The philosopher had become a bureaucrat. He sent out missals to his colleagues with an efficiency and a surety that suggests that he had finally arrived and that his theoretical pronouncements now had a greater purpose. One such memo was sent on 24 May, in which he instructed his colleagues to fill out the ethnic questionnaire that accompanied the new law by 1 June. He drew their attention, in particular, to clauses 4: a and b, where “non-Aryans” are asked whether they could not see their exclusion from public life as early as August 1914 (the outbreak of the First World War). It was a strange and provocative question, where answering “yes” or “no” was equally damming.

The martyrdom momentum of National Socialism (its generation of hatred out of a persecution complex), a mentality to which Heidegger seemed particularly drawn) reached its apogee in the commemoration of Albert Leo Schlageter held each year on 26 May. Schlageter had been a member of the German Freikorps, a paramilitary organisation formed after the First World War and committed to undermining the Weimar Republic by carrying out acts of sabotage against the occupation forces. Schlageter was arrested in 1923 for destroying a railroad track in the Ruhr, and was executed by the French military. For those who stood politically to the Right, he became a symbol of heroic resistance to the imposed “system” of the Weimar Republic. The organisation of the annual commemoration, in which Schlageter was sanctified as the saint of self-sacrifice, gave full scope to the ritualistic character of National Socialism, and its mobilisation of itself as an ersatz religion.[18] As Farías observes, “in 1933, Schlageter was declared the first National Socialist German soldier and was thereby … elevated as a cult figure”.[19] In Heidegger’s speech, given on the front steps of the university, and surrounded with the full pomp of banners and uniforms, he attempted “a political application of his authenticity philosophy” (Safranski 242), stressing the solitude of Schlageter’s final hours and the “hard death” that he gave himself over to – not a heroic death in battle but one in front of a firing squad. But it was a death willingly given for the future Germany, and “the participants in the memorial ceremony should let the ‘hardness’ and ‘clarity’ of that death ‘stream’ into them’” (quoted in Safranski 242).

It was standard practice for new rectors to give an inaugural speech, to demonstrate that they reached this position through academic achievement and participation in university life. Accordingly, on 27 May, Heidegger gave a speech on “The Self-determination of the German University” (“Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität”). It was attended inter alia by the minister for culture in Baden, the rector of the University of Heidelberg, and the archbishop and mayor of Freiburg. As with the Horst Wessel commemoration the previous day, the occasion was an opportunity for a national pageant. In his talk, Heidegger exploited the same lofty tone and the same cultic solemnity of the Horst Wessel ceremony. Was this an act of identification with the Nazi martyr? (an identification already made in the Schlageter commemoration. Indeed, is this how Heidegger really wished to engage with National Socialism – on a ritualistic-symbolic level?). The ceremonial tones of the occasion took his colleagues by surprise. As Manfred Geier relates (drawing upon contemporary sources), “many of the conservative and liberal members of the Plenary Senate, who had voted for the famous philosopher, because they expected from him a wise and measured higher education policy, were shocked by the theatre [of the event], which Heidegger himself had stage managed. They had to stand upright and sing both the “Deutschlandlied’ and the Horst Wessel song … on the fourth line they were to raise their arms and shout ‘Sieg Heil’ ”.[20]

In his speech, Heidegger identified three forms of duty that students must in the future perform. Existing alongside “Wissensdienst (in the service of Knowledge i.e., the university)”, there was “Arbeitsdienst (service in the government-organised emergency labor force), and Wehrdienst (paramilitary service in the Sturmabteilung force)” (Stassen xiii). In his vision of National Socialism all three were connected in a “community of struggle”, a “Kampfgemeinschaft”, although, typically, .Heidegger does not say how this would happen (indeed, according to the later testimonies of Heidegger’s colleagues, the three duties in fact interfered with one another, physical-cum-quasi martial exercises displacing the time and energy of the students).[21]

Heidegger’s speech was elevated in tone and rhetorically dense. As Karl Löwith, one of his erstwhile pupils who was in the audience, observed, Heidegger enlisted the philosophical concepts formulated earlier in Being and Time in the service of political expediency. “Heidegger’s speech was philosophically demanding – a minor stylistic masterpiece. But from a strictly philosophical standpoint, it was strangely ambiguous from beginning to end. It succeeded in positing existential and ontological categories at a specific historical ‘moment’ (Sein und Zeit, para 74) in a way that suggested that their philosophical intentions a priori go hand in hand with the political situation, and that academic freedom goes with political coercion”.[22]  Nowhere, as Löwith continues to tell us in his account, was the logic of this connection spelt out.

At the centre of Heidegger’s speech lies one critical question: is academic scholarship (“Wissenschaft”) of any relevance today? The answer that he gave would have dumbfounded the party faithful. Scholarship is certainly relevant to today’s Germany, but only if “we place ourselves under the power of the beginning of our intellectual-historical Dasein. This beginning is the flowering of Greek philosophy. In it for the first time, Western man stood up out of its folkdom on the basis of its language against existing powers and confronted and grasped true Being”.[23] For the Greeks, scholarship and intellectual activity were more than a mere superficial matter of culture; they formed the very core of their lives, as they lived it in the polis: “for the Greeks, scholarship was not simply a cultural asset but the most inward determining form of the Dasein of the entire national state” (Selbstbehauptung, p. 110).

The new Germany must take unto itself the legacy of the Greeks. Their philosophy knew no distinctions of historical time or place, and neither does the spirit of the new Germany, for “the beginning is still here. It lies not behind us, as something that is long since gone, but is before us in advance anticipating the greatest of all that will come” (Selbstbehauptung, p. 110). It is by incorporating and mobilising the primal energies of Greek thinking, and integrating them into the dynamic politics of the present, that scholarship and learning in the universities can go forward: “it is only by identifying with the People [‘Volk’], by being keenly aware of the role of the state, and realising what our intellectual duty is that will produce in us true knowledge about the essence of scholarship, whose bringing to fruition has been given to us as a task” (Selbstbehauptung, p. 110).

These are words drawn from the political rhetoric of the day, and most listeners to the speech might well have expected Heidegger to have ended his speech with appropriately concluding words, such as a trenchant quotation from Hitler’s Mein Kampf, since the redolent trope of “Kampf” had been used throughout the talk. Heidegger, however, did not quote Hitler. He found a different and, for many in the audience, a surprising author for his concluding sentiments: Plato, from whose Republic Heidegger took the maxim, spoken by Socrates, that “everything great stands in a storm” (Republic 497 d, 9) (Selbstbehauptung, p. 117). As Manfred Geier observes, “storm” is an idiosyncratic way of translating the Greek “episphale”, which can more accurately be rendered as “swaying” or even “uncertain”.[24] But the “storm” motif had become part of Heidegger’s vocabulary in describing the events of 1933 (and had already appeared in the letter to Blochmann of 19 January, where he had made known his enthusiasm for National Socialism). Here, as the concluding word in his speech, “storm” is intended to convey a sense of energy and drama, of a natural force or event that was taking place in the immediacy of the moment and is, as was the Nazi “revolution”, unstoppable.

Although one reviewer, Richard Harder, professor of Classics at the University of Kiel, praised the “Rede” as a “militant speech, a call to arms of the mind, a determined and compelling commitment to the present” (Harder in Alfred Denker and Holger Zaborowski, Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus, in Heidegger Jahrbuch 4, 2010, p. 140), many in the audience would have been mystified by it. Most would have expected a purely Germanic content and would have seen the recourse to the ancient Greeks either as a distraction from the actual goals of the new Germany, or even as something worse, a reactionary position, elitist and not in keeping with the levelling process aimed at in the “Volksgemeinschaft”. And the play with conflicting notions of time (past, present and future are all elided into the same space at one point in his speech) and the focus on the potency of language introduce a degree of intellectual sophistication that some might have felt to be not in keeping with pragmatic needs of the day. Others amongst the Party faithful might well have viewed Heidegger’s reference to “volklich’” instead of “völkisch“, as an expression revealing political confusion. Indeed, those members of the audience (and many were wearing S.A. uniforms) expecting a forthrightly political focus, an inspirational paean to the new regime, could not have helped but notice that there was a complete absence of reference to Hitler or National Socialism. And the final use of the “storm” motif might have been seen by many as simple literary affectation.

But there were problems not only with the content of Heidegger’s talk but also with its delivery. Nazi culture was a physical culture where the body and demeanour mattered. In his talk, Heidegger did not make a good impression, either as a speaker or as a man. Bernd Martin (drawing upon the observations of a contemporary historian, Hermann Heimpel, who was amongst the audience), offers us the following brief but very revealing pen sketch of the reception of Heidegger’s talk. If Heidegger was seeking to impress the National Socialist youth, which he had repeatedly extoled as the harbingers of the new Germany, he did not succeed: “the new generation of power bearers looked completely bored throughout the speech, and had shown more interest in gazing at their brown boots stretched out in front of them. The little man standing up there at the lectern, dressed in his academic robe, they disregarded as not of their own”.[25] This would not be the last time that Heidegger, purely on his looks and comportment, would be deemed as foreign to the new Germany.

       In a private tete a tete following the talk, the Baden minister of culture, Otto Wacker, criticised Heidegger and his speech on a number of accounts, but most notably for its lack of reference to the importance of race. The views that Heidegger had expressed in his talk, Wacker concluded, represented a “type of private National Socialism”, one that (according to one commentator) approximated to “an idealistic ‘deutscher Sozialismus’ centred on the moral and spiritual will of the community” (Kisiel 291). It was a version of National Socialism that, in the view of Wacker, as Heidegger later related, “evaded the perspective of the Party programme” and did not represent the political agenda of the new state (Das Rektorat 1933/34, p. 30). Heidegger, indeed, was fully aware of the importance of race qua “Volk”, but for him the latter was not a concept based on genetics or biology but was something that adhered to the local regionalentity of selfhood, and was tied to identity with the “Heimat”,  a position that became clear in his later essay, “Creative Landscape: Why do we remain in the provinces?” (“Schöpferische Landschaft: Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz?”, 1934). “Volk” for Heidegger was an ontology of collective selfhood, particularly of a rural collective. That there could, however, be a critical slippage between these two versions of “Volk”, between Nazi racism and idealised ethnicity, is something that Heidegger did not seem to have realised.

In the same period, the public and the private seem to have been moving in two different directions for Heidegger. On 10 June, he sent a postcard to Blochmann following her request of 21 April that he might act as a mediator with the Minister for Education regarding her suspension as a non-Aryan from her teaching duties in Halle. Heidegger had, indeed, attempted to intercede with Minister Rust, but his entreaties had got no further than one of the minister’s deputies, Alfred Baeumler. No decision had as yet been taken (the eventual decision was negative: she was suspended). The postcard reveals for the first time (and this is just less than two months after he had become rector, and only one month after he had joined the Nazi Party), Heidegger’s frustration with what he terms the “dilettantism” of administration within the Nazified educational hierarchy.[26]

But Heidegger overcame his doubts (perhaps he had no choice) and continued to promote his vision of a unified National Socialist university system with vigour. On 10 and 11 June, he gave a paper in Berlin on “Teaching and Research, and on the 18 attended a meeting of the Academics’ Association in Berlin, which was later that week followed by a talk in Heidelberg on “The University in the New Reich”. The paper led to a confrontation with Jaspers. What appalled Jaspers was the systematic denigration of, indeed dismissal of, university culture expressed in the speech (Heidegger’s caustic comment that “the traditional university is dead”), and the fanatical mindset evident in statements such as “the possibility could exist that the university will suffer death through oblivion and forfeit the last vestige of its educational power” if it does not fully adopt the policies of the new state and free itself from “humanising Christian ideals”. Teaching and true research must be “interlocked with the whole through its rootedness in the Volk and its bond to the State”. During their private conversation afterwards, Heidegger had come across to Jaspers like “a man intoxicated, with something threatening emanating from him’” (Jaspers quoted in Safranski 250). In his autobiography, Jaspers explained what happened later that evening: “at dinner, he said in a very angry tone that there were too many professors in Germany, that this was a nonsense, that we should only have two or three. ‘Which then?’, I asked. No answer. ’How can such an uneducated man such as Hitler come to rule the country’? ‘Education is irrelevant’, he replied, ‘just look at his wonderful hands’ ”. (Heidegger / Jaspers, Briefwechsel p. 257). The two men did, however, stay in touch, but the end was close.

Jaspers was not the only friend or colleague to be alienated by Heidegger’s uncritical worship of the new state. Rudolf Bultmann was another. The two had been colleagues in Marburg, and Heidegger seems to have developed a particular respect for Bultmann due to their shared affiliation with theology. Heidegger regarded Bultmann as a person of integrity who, unlike Jaspers, did not hanker after public recognition. The correspondence between the two is voluminous and detailed. On 18 June, Bultmann sent a letter to his friend. The former had read extracts from Heidegger’s rector’s speech in the newspapers. He wrote, “they deeply moved me and continue to move me – so that I was unable to send just a short message of thanks – because I lacked the peace of mind for it”.

These are sound positive words, and Heidegger might well have been expecting that the letter would continue in this vein, but it did not. The real reason that Bultmann could not write a note of congratulation was because he had severe reservations about what his friend was doing and the values that supported that doing. Unlike Jaspers, who had been reluctant to confront Heidegger with his reservations, Bultmann went into critical detail. Heidegger had written in his speech, “we want to be ourselves!” [“wir wollen uns selbst!”]. Bultmann retorts, “how blind this wanting seems to me” It is an empty activism. It has nothing to do with the “struggles that are taking place within the world of the spirit”. Bultmann then goes to the heart of the matter: what the Nazis have brought about is “an atmosphere of hubris and clandestine fear that oppressively spreads around everything”. And he concludes by sending his friend his best wishes, but these wishes come “out of a concern that you have not committed yourself to the right place at the right time”.

Heidegger believed his mission was to establish a framework for a National Socialist pedagogy in German universities, and he travelled the length and breadth of the country in furtherance of this. But there were moments when he suspended this public role in response to an inner need and something that possibly might be called conscience. On 12 July, Heidegger wrote to the Baden Education Minister, Eugen Fehrle, who had instructed him to pension off two of his Jewish professorial colleagues, the classicist, Eduard Fraenkel and the chemist, George de Hevesy. Heidegger wrote to Fehrle saying that he was fully aware of the necessity of implementing the measures outlined in the “Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service”, but both of these men had international reputations and the standing of the University and that of German academia would be seriously impaired by their dismissal. And he added, “in my opinion, in these cases the precondition of excepted probation in a fully exceptional measure is realised”. There is, however, no such clause as “exempted probation” in the 1933 Law.[27] Fraenkel had also failed to meet certain requirements spelt out in the secondary questions of the questionnaire, particularly the question regarding his efforts in the First World War. On 19 July, Heidegger wrote again to the Ministry, pointing to a number of mitigating circumstances that prevented Fraenkel’s participation in the war effort (“Stellungsnahme”, pp. 144-146). De Hevesy was allowed to stay, but Fraenkel was dismissed.

 For all his avowed commitment to National Socialism, Heidegger could not accept one of its central tenets (indeed, perhaps its central tenet): antisemitism (There is a general consensus here. See the already cited titles by Bernd Martin: 27-28; Hugo Ott 207-208; Alfred Denker 107 and Manfred Geier 90). During the course of his professional life (and, indeed, in his personal life) Heidegger had befriended many from that faith, from students such as Hans Jonas and Hannah Arendt in Marburg to Herbert Marcuse and Emmanuel Lévinas in Freiburg. And for all of his differences with the Jewish Edmund Husserl (who had been forced to retire from his position at Freiburg, but well before Heidegger became rector) there is nothing to suggest that they were founded on anything other than philosophical divergences.  Even in 1933, he was still writing to his erstwhile pupil, Karl Löwith. It is possible to see here one further reason for his later marginalisation from the hard-line Nazis in the educational establishment.

On 21 August, a new constitution for German universities was put in place by the Education Department in Baden, designating Heidegger as the Führer rector, which allowed him to make decisions unilaterally without consulting the senate. He had been rector since May and ambassador for the National Socialist reconfiguration of German universities since then, but he clearly felt his direction had not produced the results that he hoped for. On 22 August, he wrote to Carl Schmitt, jurist and major figure in the legal establishment of the Nazi government, the author of The Concept of the Political (1932), ostensibly regarding a publication of the latter, but the real matter was Heidegger’s growing disillusionment with the institutional direction of the universities and their failure to put the tenets of National Socialism into place. He vented his frustration to Schmitt: “unfortunately here things are desolate. The cohort of intellectual forces that should lead us into the future is becoming ever scarcer”.[28] It is a note of disillusionment that will increase over the coming months, although Heidegger did all he could to suppress it and to push on with plans for institutional reform.

Matters had become critical with Jaspers. On 23 August, he wrote to Heidegger, who had sent him a copy of his rector’s speech. Jaspers wrote back in positive tones, praising the speech: it had a “real substance”, which makes it the “only document until now that has any actual academic sense of purpose that will last”. In reality, however, Jaspers was appalled at what he had read, but he withheld his damning judgement in the interest of their friendship. As he noted regarding the concluding words of Heidegger’s speech “everything great stands in a storm”: “the image is pure gesture and full of false pathos, without truth” (Notizen, p.35). He was later to write, “Heidegger’s intellectual quality was still there, but the content of his speech and Heidegger’s actions had sunk to an unbearably abject and alien niveau” (Heidegger / Jaspers, Briefwechsel p. 258). What so dismayed Jaspers were sentiments such as the following: “the much-lauded academic freedom is being expelled from the German university, for this freedom was a fake freedom because it was only a negative one. It primarily meant being disengaged, arbitrary in one’s views and inclinations, uncommitted in one’s actions and behaviour” (“Selbstbehauptung”, p.113). Independent thinking, promoted by Heidegger himself in all of his earlier lectures, and the encouragement to say no to existing models of philosophy, is here undone. Philosophy now meant not critical thinking but adhering to the dominant ideology of the period.

Heidegger’s efforts to integrate National Socialism into the university system continued through the following months. On 30 August, writing to Blochmann from his cabin in Todtnauberg, Heidegger had explained how he set great store on the “Dozentenschule” that was being planned by the education department in Berlin. “Everything depends on the education of the teaching staff. As the primary educators, they must educate themselves [in National Socialism] thereby finding a secure and constant form. Otherwise, the whole thing will choke on mere organisation”. What was required was the decisive will to implement such policies. Heidegger supported the initiative but, once again, feared that there were insufficient numbers of committed people to see these measures through. In fact, Heidegger was wavering in his optimism regarding the new state, and started to express for the first time disgruntlement with the demands of being a rector. In the same letter, he said that he was sorry that things had still not been clarified in Berlin regarding Blochmann’s exemption from the Aryan clause of the questionnaire, and that he was not able to reassure her that there would be a positive outcome. His personal intervention in her case meant little because he was, he felt, being schemed against: “they are very distrustful [of me], and there are also intrigues”.

On 4 September, Heidegger received for the second time the offer of a chair from Berlin University (the first offer was made on 28 March 1930). It came, as he explained to Blochmann the following day, “connected with a political duty”. He travelled with Elfride for the interview on the 8. On the 30, he declined the nomination. He gave his reasons in a memo sent to his colleagues: “I will not be going to Berlin but will stay at our university and try, through the possibilities that are given according to the provisional constitutional rules set down in Baden, to reach a genuine and lasting reality in order to prepare a unified plan for a future university constitution for entire Germany. At the request of government departments in Berlin, I will for the future remain in the closest contact with the work being done there” (quoted in Bernd Martin, p. 33).

It was at this time that Heidegger declined similar a similar nomination to the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Munich, but this was less a matter of Heidegger rejecting Munich as Munich rejecting Heidegger. In general, Heidegger’s modus operandi and presentation of self were becoming suspect. One internal report from the philosophy department at  Munich described his philosophy as a “methodologically disorganised confession of a faith”, adding “he is less an educator as someone who attempts to inspire and intoxicate young people through his language” (quoted in Martin 33). As Martin summarises, Heidegger’s “frenetic activity, his ritualistic promulgation of a new beginning, his dictatorial treatment of his colleagues” were starting to give signs that there was an egregious messianic quality to his character (according to Bernd Martin, p. 36).

On 14 September, Blochmann wrote again saying that there had been a change of personnel in Halle and that she thought she would find greater favour now. On the 19th, Heidegger replied, saying that her appeal had still not been resolved in Berlin. On the 23rd, Blochmann wrote to say that she had been officially dismissed from her post. Heidegger was, in fact, as he related in his letter of the 19, having his own problems in Berlin. The call to the Chair had been tied to an administrative assignment as leader of the Prussian Union of Teachers. “Academic activity was a secondary consideration”. Behind all these machinations, he felt that there lay a “higher power” and that he had become a pawn in a political-administrative power game, as competing groups, and specific individuals within those groups, jockeyed for control of the educational apparatus of the Third Reich. It was gradually dawning on Heidegger that, on account of his national and international reputation, he was being treated simply as a titular figure.

The key players within the academic policy formation of the new state were two other personages, Ernst Krieck and Alfred Baumler. Both were at the centre of power: Baumler in Berlin, and Krieck in Frankfurt. In terms of propaganda value, Krieck, as editor of the journal A People in the Making (Volk im Werden) was the more important of the two, but in terms of institutional centrality, it was Baumler who exerted the greatest influence, as professor of philosophy in Berlin and director of the Institute for Political Pedagogy. The relationship between Heidegger, Krieck and Baumler was complex and fraught. Through his encounter with them, Heidegger came to feel that, within the educational politics of the new Nazi Germany, he did not have the support from higher echelons that Krieck and Baumler had, both of whom were confidants not only of the Minister for Education, Bernhard Rust, but also of Alfred Rosenberg, leader of the Party’s Foreign Policy Office and recognised as the leading theoretician in the Nazi Party. The subtleties of the power games were, as Heidegger confided to Blochmann on 19 September, “bottomless”.

It was also in this visit to Berlin in September 1933 that Heidegger seems to have realised for the first time that National Socialism (or, at least, his personal vision of it) and Nazism were not the same thing. On the level of ideology (its anti-Communism, the promotion of a völkisch state and Germanic fundamentalism) they looked the same, but beneath that ideology Nazism worked on a different level. Indeed, on this latter level, Nazism possessed the internal dynamics of closed groups such as the Mafia: both employed the use of violence, which the Nazis demonstrated in the Night of the Long Knives of 30 June-2 July 1934, where brutal political pragmatism was infused with personal vendettas. Indeed, as with the Mafia “aggression was a socially sanctioned form of action” (Arlacchi 12).[29] Nazi party organisations were criss-crossed with similar petty contestations for power on a local level, the same sleezy quid pro quos, the modus operandi of personal preferment, exploitation of fear, the cultivation of insecurity, cronyism and sycophantic affiliations, and jockeying for positions within a hierarchy, the same practice of intimidation and strong-arm techniques to achieve personal ambition. It was as system of terror framed by the absence of humane ethical standards. As with the Mafia, the Nazi Party too could be typified as a “central criminal association, with a strict code of honour and its own constitution and initiation rites”.[30] It was this alliance, in Hannah Arendt’s words “between the mob and the elite”, that Heidegger failed to recognise in 1933 Hannah (Arendt quoted in Safranski, p. 231).

This was not a world to which Heidegger belonged, as he made clear in his major prose work of this period, published in March 1934: “Creative Landscape: Why do we remain in the provinces?” (“Schöpferische Landschaft: Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz?”). The text represented a distantiation not only from Berlin but (indirectly) from those who inhabited that world – the careerist self-promoting aspirants in the Nazi Party. “Provinces” in the title is not quite the right word, for where Heidegger chooses to remain is in his cabin outside Todtnauberg. It is a place of retreat, beyond time and history, where he can be by himself, on his own (“but this isn’t loneliness, it is solitude”) (GA 13: 11).[31] His only human contact is with the local small farmers (translated in the only existing English version of the text as (“peasants” but “small farmers” lacks the pejorative connotations of “peasant”).

It is in his cabin, surrounded by an ever-changing sky and a landscape that knows its own rhythms, that Heidegger has his “work-world”, and where he can make contact with an inner self that is” rooted in the Alemannia-Swabian soil” (“Schöpferische Landschaft”, pp. 9 and 11). But when he tells us this, he is careful to emphasise that this is an experiential reality, and that he is not just mouthing the “dishonest chatter about ‘folk-character’” that has become fashionable in certain circles (and Heidegger can only mean amongst the ideologues of the Nazi Party). Their ideological appropriation of peasant culture Heidegger viewed as a “pernicious falsehood” (“verderblichen Irrglauben”) (“Schöpferische Landschaft”, p.12). “Creative Landscape” represented Heidegger’s first step away from what he had come to regard as the wrong type of National Socialism.

And yet, Heidegger did not give up hope that the right type of National Socialism might be found. Between 4–10 October, Heidegger hosted a camp (“Lager”) in Todtnauberg, “a mixture of scout camp and Platonic academy founded around the “philosophy” of National Socialism” (See Safranski, p. 260). The camp reflected Heidegger’s growing feelings that the future of his pedagogic plans lay with students and not with professors. As well as his own students intending to attend his lecture course in the coming semester, students from Tübingen and Heidelberg were also invited. In his own words, the camp “was intended to prepare teachers and students for the work of the semester proper, to explain my views on the nature of academic scholarship (“Wissenschaft”), and to put these views up for discussion and debate” (quoted in Hugo Ott p. 227). As he had written in a letter sent to forthcoming participants, “the success of the camp depends on how much new courage we can muster, on our clearness of vision and alertness for what is to come, on how we can free ourselves as far as possible from the past, and on the strength and resolve of our embrace of loyalty, sacrifice and service. From these powers spring true allegiance. And this alone can sustain and strengthen genuine German fellowship” (quoted in Hugo Ott, p 229).

On 13 October, Blochmann wrote again: she was emigrating to England since she could see no way of securing a livelihood in Germany. As she explained, several universities there had departments dedicated to the education of social workers (an area in which she had expertise), but she would also be happy to teach German in a girl’s public school. Heidegger replied three days later, telling her not to give up hope but, if she were to go abroad, she “should go as quickly as possible, show up in person and do the rounds, of course, with all the necessary documents”.[32] It was advice that Blochmann took, leaving Germany in January 1934 and, via Holland, arriving in England soon after. After unsuccessfully seeking employment in London, she finally secured the position of “Lektorin” at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford (the initial invitation was for two months, but it was extended). She then became tutor of German in the same college, from where she wrote to Heidegger on 26 February 1934, saying that she had not entirely abandoned hope of coming back to Germany. She eventually did return but not until 1952, when (now a British citizen) she was appointed to the newly founded Chair of General Education (Pedagogy) at the University of Marburg.

Heidegger’s hopes for a transformation of German higher education, and consequently for his role in that transformation, were by the end of 1933 fading. What was not fading, however, was his faith in Hitler. On 11 November, he attended a celebration of the Führer in Leipzig, who had called a plebiscite the following day to confirm him as the sole source of political power in Germany and to support his decision that Germany should leave the League of Nations. The outcome was a formality, but one (according to Heidegger) that was supported by the “fundamental law of honour” inscribed into the new state. As Heidegger made clear in his speech, in terms whose logic (if it exists) is convoluted and specious: “the German People have been called to cast a vote for the Führer, but the Führer asks nothing from the People. Rather he is giving the people the most immediate possibility of a free decision, the noblest one – that is, to know if the entire People want their own existence or if they do not want it. Tomorrow the People decide nothing less than their own future”.[33] Hitler is an absolute who transcends the petty machinations for power in which Heidegger was increasingly becoming embroiled. This and other speeches at the time that he gave (a further one was given a few days later in Tübingen) has been seen as “evidence of an irrational infatuation, of a desperate clinging to an ideal whose actual development has long since gone”.[34]

Towards the end of 1933, a new imperative came to the fore in Heidegger’s thinking. Clearly frustrated by his attempts to implement National Socialism in the universities, he now decided that students must cease to view themselves purely as scholars.  On 25 November, he gave a radio talk on “The Student as Worker”. This would be the first in a number of talks that Heidegger would give over the following months stressing the bond between intellectual work and manual labour. As was clear from his “Call for Work Service”, given on 23 January 1934, the concept of manual labour was becoming an ideal for Heidegger, the pivotal value in his vision of a university that has an immediate practical value. “Such service creates the basic experience of toughness, of closeness to earth and tools, of a rigour and the discipline of the simplest physical activity and, with it, what is most essential working in a group”.[35] The concept of intellect, which the ‘educated and their envoys still wish to retain as the actual position of the ‘intellectually creative’, will be entirely abolished”.[36] It is an educational policy that brings with it a totally new conception of academic knowledge: “the knowledge [“Wissen”] of genuine scholarship [“Wissenschaft”] is essentially not at all different from the knowledge that farmers have, or lumberjacks or excavators and miners. For knowledge means: to know one’s way around in the world into which we have been put, collectively [“gemeischaftlich”] or singly”.[37]

It is a utopia of converging wills, which unites “those who labor with their hands with those who perform brain work” (GA 16: 234).[38]  As such, it reflects the same desire for totalisation that informed Heidegger’s earlier philosophical work, such as Being and Time, where all had to be integrated into the single model of “Being” (“Sein”). But once again, Heidegger’s rhetoric floats free from its subject. His notion of “knowledge” remains undefined, and the practical ways that the knowledge of lumberjacking might engage with university education are left unspecified. Indeed, it is inconceivable how a unified concept of “knowledge” as posited in Heidegger’s talk could be arrived at to merge these two practices. But such is the imperative in this and other speeches to find unity and convergence in his vision of the new state that Heidegger simply occludes the logical aporia that this process entails.

This is, however, “Führertum” conducted in the suburbs of Freiburg. No one is listening other than those who work for the provincial Nazi newspaper, the Alemanne. The speech to the workers was one of Heidegger’s final speeches as rector of Freiburg University. Towards the end of February 1934, he announced his intention of resigning from that post, this resignation to take effect from 23 April. The signs had been there as early as September of the previous year, when he declined the chair in Berlin, and when he realised that his own idealised version of National Socialism was entirely ineffectual and out of keeping with the power politics that was the reality of Nazism. More specifically, Heidegger’s authority to appoint and retain staff was being undermined by the Education Department. As he was retrospectively to note in 1945, “the growing disapproval of my work as rector by the ministry was soon manifested in the impertinent request that I replace the deans of the Faculties of Law and Medicine (Professor Wolf, Professor Möllendorff) with other figures, on the grounds that they were politically unacceptable. I refused to accede to this request and tendered my resignation“ (quoted in Hugo Ott, p. 235).

Such sentiments cast Heidegger in an overly positive light. Hugo Ott’s explanation is more in keeping with the logic of the situation: “Heidegger had aspired to a leading role – perhaps the leading role – withinin the new university system of the Third Reich. That hope had proved chimeric” (quoted in Hugo Ott, p. 244). And Heidegger aggrees. As he related in his Der Spiegel interview: “I spoke with the Minister [Rust] in November 1933 in Berlin. I presented my views to him on academic scholarship and the universities and the possible structure of the faculties. He listened to everything so attentively, that I had hope that my presentation would have an effect. But nothing happened“ (Spiegel Interview, p. 33).

There were, however, other reasons for Heidegger’s marginalisation that had little to do with his institutional status or occupancy of positions of power. Heidegger had attracted many enemies both to his person and to his style of philosophy from within the Nazified academic and educational hierarchy. As Hugo Ott writes, there existed a “conspiracy between his Freiburg colleagues, the Minister of Education and the Heidelberg faction that controlled him – by which Heidegger meant Gauleiter Scheel and the rector of Frankfurt University, Ernst Krieck” (Hugo Ott, p. 235). Krieck, along with Heidegger and Baumler, was a member of a committee of university professors dedicated to promulgating National Socialism (the KADH). The members of this group shared an ideology, but otherwise they had little in common. in a letter of 30 March to Elisabeth Blochmann Heidegger described Krieck’s programme as “subaltern” and, on a personal level, Krieck gave the impression of a “small, upwardly-mobile, self-promoting” type who, in spite of his “control of the phraseology of the day”, lacked any “knowledge of the greatness and severity of tasks ahead of us”. The personal hostility was tangible, and it was here that Heidegger would find his greatest challenge: in the terrain of personal interaction.

In addition, many from within the Nazi Party saw Heidegger’s quest for a new philosophical style not as a vital matter in his developing methodology but as a wilful and idiosyncratic expression of a peculiar mind. Both his person and philosophy, according to a former colleague in Marburg, the Professor of Psychology, Erich Jaensch, was “talmudic-rabulistic” (and, as the allusion to the Talmud suggests, being “Jewish” was no longer purely a matter of race but a way of thinking). Heidegger was a “dangerous schizophrenic”, the producer of “psycho-pathological documents” (quoted in Victor Farías, p. 167). Heidegger’s neologistic language was unnecessarily difficult, linguistically opaque, obscurantist, and the tone of his writing and lectures arrogant. His tendency to question everything in philosophy had resulted in the destruction of any point where an intellectual hold on matters could be achieved. Krieck saw in Heidegger’s philosophy “a ferment of dissolution and subversion for the German People” (quoted in Manfred Geier, p. 93). As Krieck’s reference to “das deutsche Volk” implies, Heidegger lacked sympathy with the popular mind, something that was reflected in his use of language which, like that of Georg Simmel (with whom Heidegger has often been aligned), possessed a “Jewish quality”.[39] Heidegger, in fact, pursued an “un-German” line of total mystification. Regarding the terminology Heidegger used in Being and Time, where he attempted to find a new vocabulary for shades of meaning and contact with the world not hitherto brought to the surface, Krieck observed, “it is the goal of his philosophy to make the straightforward twisted, the elementary obscure, the simple confusing, the clear impenetrable, the sensible unsensible” (Ernst Krieck p. 184).

But things were already over for Heidegger. On 2 May 1934, he wrote to his successor as rector at Freiburg, the jurist professor Eduard Kern, explaining that he had resigned because he had not been able to achieve his “volkspolitischen” educational goals. He also made it clear that he would not be prepared to participate in any way in the traditional handing-over ceremony of the rectorship. The latter Heidegger now regarded as a “superannuated office” (a view that he did not hold a year earlier with his own ascension to the rectorship.[40] In the meantime, Heidegger continued with his teaching duties. In the summer semester of 1934 (May – August), he gave a lecture course on “Logic as the Search for the Essence of Language” (“Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache”). In its opening words, Heidegger set out the problematic in which he and his students must work: “we will not join those who refuse to accept and learn the rules of logic, for they simply surrender themselves to inherited conceptual practices and pattern in an uncritical way. Those who think that they are freeing themselves from the formal rubbish of logic become the lowliest slaves to established forms of thought”.[41]

So, logic must not be dismissed. What is necessary is that, in philosophical terms, it is undone from within. As Heidegger went on to argue in his lecture, we must identify what the real enemy was and destroy it: “what is required is a struggle (“Kampf”), in which our intellectual-historical Dasein becomes decisive. That requires a struggle but one for which today we still do not possess the relevant weapons, and there is something that is even more problematic, we do not even know who our enemy is, and therefore always run the risk, that instead of attacking and destroying him, we inadvertently make with him common cause. This struggle will only exist when we realise, and that means take seriously, the fact that our intellectual history goes back 2000 years in its unity, and in it dispersed power is still present – even if we apparently seem to know nothing about it”. (Logik als die Frage, pp. 8-9).

            Heidegger’s words do not engage at any explicit level with the  ideology of National Socialism, but they nevertheless reproduce the spirit and, in place, the terminology of that ideology, as in section 13, which is a lengthy disquisition on what it is to be a ‘Volk’. In particular, the notion in the passage of an enemy that lies within but cannot be seen parallels the Nazis’ claim that they were fighting a hidden enemy within the nation that was Communism and Jewry. Heidegger’s introductory words to his lecture reveal a political subconscious of which the philosopher seems unaware.

The bloody events of the Röhm putsch took place between 30 June and 2 July. As Heidegger tells us later, after that date it was blatantly clear what type of regime that any office-holder in the state, including in the universities, one would be dealing with (Das Rektorat 1933/34, p. 40). Heidegger may have been disengaging himself from the public sphere, but academic commitments made the previous year had to be honoured. On 15–16 August 1934, he gave two lectures in a course for overseas’ students at Freiburg University. The lectures culminated in “the Essence of the National Socialist Revolution as the Transformation of German Reality”. Heidegger may have stepped back from his office as rector, but he still harboured hopes, as his paper “On the Establishment of a Docent School”, penned on 29 August, indicates, of giving some direction to the pedagogic development of the new state (even if his personal involvement will be minimal). The planned school was intended to prepare university teachers for the goals of the “future German university” (GA 16: 308).[42] But this is, once again, the projection of a National Socialist ideal on a reality that does not exist.

Heidegger seems to have registered this at some level because he now retreated to his cabin in Todtnauberg – to think. As he told Elfride from there on 11 October, he has started to write again after almost eighteen months of sterility brought on by his political and administrative commitments. The uncritical idealism regarding Nazism has gone; the voice of reason returns: “I’ve now started writing again and – regardless of the new lecture course and its preparations [for the coming semester] – I’d like to keep writing for as long as there’s a storm blowing. In the months after the rectorship, I felt drained and was afraid that I had a long barren period before me. But now it [the will to think and write] is here again and quite different too – quite free, simple and essential, I feel – and yet it is difficult to hold on to because a new and unaffected language is needed”.

Perhaps in search for such a language or, more accurately, in search of a model for such a language, Heidegger turned not to philosophy but to literature, and to one author in particular, Friedrich Hölderlin. Heidegger had discovered Hölderlin’s poetry during the First World War while stationed in France through the edition published in 1913 by the young Norbert von Hellingrath, who was killed in action at the Battle of Verdun in 1916. As he had written then to Elfride on 30 August 1918: “Hölderlin is at the moment turning into a new experience for me – as though I were approaching him wholly primordially for the first time”. Now, too, in 1934, Heidegger draws inspiration from the poet, in the solitude of his cabin. As he wrote to Elfride in a letter of 11 October: “it is difficult being alone with Hölderlin – but it is the difficulty of everything great”. In fact, Heidegger will return throughout his writing, in essays written typically as lectures over a number of years, from “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry” (1936), through to a final study, “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven” (1959), celebrating a poet in whom he saw the voice of “the great beginning that may possibly come”, a poet who found his poetry “in the shining of earth and heaven, in the holy which conceals the god, in the poetising-thinking Being of mankind”.[43]

On 30 November, Heidegger travelled to Constance to deliver a paper to the “German Society”. Its title was “The Contemporary Situation and the Future Task of German Philosophy” (“Die gegenwärtige Lage und die künftige Aufgabe der deutschen Philosophie”), in which he argued that the “historical Dasein” of a People is established “through poetry and the actions of the state”.[44] What purported, however, to be a statement on contemporary philosophy (although no contemporary philosophers are mentioned) soon elided into a treatise on history and the “inner possibility of history” (“Die gegenwärtige Lage”. p. 326). And here Heidegger gave full vent to the missionary rhetoric that had accompanied his appropriation of the politics of the new state, and within which, and its predictable rhetoric, he is still trapped, in one sense a victim of his own language. What he tells his audience is that we must recognise that “the past is the power of the mission; the future is the power of the commission. Only when we, feeling this power of the mission, draw our commission to us, are we able to be truly of the present” (“die Gewesenheit ist die der Sendung, die Zukunft ist die Macht des Aufrags. Nur wenn wir, unsere Sendung ahnend, unserm Auftrag uns zu-ringen, vermögen wir wahrhaft gegenwärtig zu sein”) (“Die gegenwärtige Lage”, p. 324). The only entity that guaranteed this coming to presence of this historical mission is the state, which makes possible “the release to inner freedom of all the essential energies of the People in accordance with the law of its inner order” (“Die gegenwärtige Lage”, p. 333). And yet, for all its statist rhetoric the paper was remarkable on one account: of all the major pronouncements that Heidegger made in this period, there is no mention of Hitler or National Socialism.

On 21 December, Heidegger wrote to Elisabeth Blochmann, who was now a resident in England, tutoring in German at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. The triumphalist tone of his earlier writing has gone. His style in this letter is more modest and sober in its ambit. He has returned to working on Hölderlin, but he does not think that the quality of what he has written so far is good enough to justify publication. He can and will do better. The letter seems to indicate that the previous grandiose investments in politics have been abandoned. He writes: “but all of that [his recent lecture courses and seminar on Hegel] is only a preparation, clarification and mental attunement for the real task, which is quietly growing. Otherwise with the university, I have no contact at all” (“Die gegenwärtige Lage”, p. 336). As he later wrote, looking back at this critical turn in his life “after April 1934, I lived beyond the university, in so far as I took no interest in the “developments’ there, but only sought to carry out my basic duties of teaching to the best of my ability. But also teaching became in the years that followed more of purely a self-conversation in my essential thinking with myself (Das Rektorat 1933/34, p. 38). A form of inner emigration has begun.

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[1] Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, translated by Ewald Osers (Cambridge, Mass, Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 233-234.

[2] Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, translated by Allan Blunden (London, Basic Books, 1993), p. 203.

[3] Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany before and after 1933. Translated by Elizabeth King (University of Illinois Press, 1994), p. 34.

[4] See Geier, p. 83.

[5] A.E. Taylor, Plato: The Man and His Work (London: Routledge, 2011), p. 9.

[6] In Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 184.

[7] Martin Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2001), p. 4.

[8] Sein und Wahrheit, p. 4.

[9] Oliver, “The Psychological Dimension in Jasper’s Relationship with Heidegger” In Heidegger and Jaspers, edited by Alan M Olson (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994), p. 1.

[10] Karl Jaspers, Notizen zu Martin Heidegger, edited by Hans Saner (Munich: Piper Verlag), p. 181.

[11] Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press), p. 85.

[12] Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, p. 238

[13] See Martin Heidegger, “In neue Aufgaben hineingestellt (Brief an den Bruder)” In Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 93.

[14] Martin Heidegger, “An die Deutschen Studenten” in Nachlese zu Heidegger: Dokumente zu seinem Leben und Denken, edited by Guido Schneeberger (Bern, 1962), p. 13.

[15] Martin Heidegger, Das Rektorat 1933/34: Tatsachen und Gedanken in Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1983), pp. 21-43, p. 23.

[16] Martin Heidegger, “Zur Immatrikulation (6 May 1933)” in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 95.

[17] See Martin Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 105.

[18] See Hans-Joachim Gamm, Der braune Kult. Dast Dritte Reich und seine Ersatzreligion (Hamburg, 1962). p. 24.

[19] Victor Farías, Heidegger and the Nazis, p. 89.

[20] Quoted in Manfred Geier, Martin Heidegger, p. 87.

[21] See Bernd Martin, “Martin Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus”, in Martin Heidegger und das “Dritte Reich”, edited by Bernd Martin (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), pp. 26 and 35.

[22] Karl Löwith, My Life, p. 34.

[23] Martin Heidegger, “Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, pp. 107-117, p. 108.

[24] Manfred Geier, Martin Heidegger, p. 88.

[25] Bernd Martin, “Einführung”, in Martin Heidegger und das Dritte Reich, edited by Martin, p. 4.

[26] Martin Heidegger, “Zum Minister nicht vorgedrungen”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 122.

[27] See Martin Heidegger, “Stellungsnahme zur Beurlaubung der Kollegen v. Hevesy und Fraenkel”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, pp. 140-141.

[28] See Martin Heidegger, “Hier ist es leider sehr trostlos”, in Reden und andere Zeugnesse, p. 156.

[29] Pino Arlacchi, Mafia Business: The Mafia Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, translated by Martin Ryle (London: Verso, 1986). p. 12.

[30] Henner Hess, Mafia (Bari, 1973), p. xi.

[31] Martin Heidegger, “Schöpferische Landschaft: Warum bleiben wir in der Provinz?”. In Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2002), 9-13, p. 11.

[32] See Martin Heidegger, “Nicht nach Berlin”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 177.

[33] Quoted in Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, p. 157.

[34] See Bernd Martin, Martin Heidegger und das “Dritte Reich”, p. 35.

[35] See Martin Heidegger, “Der Ruf zum Arbeitsdienst”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 238.

[36] See Martin Heidegger, “Der Ruf zum Arbeitsdienst”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, pp. 238-239.

[37] Quoted in Guido Schneeberger, Nachlese, p. 201.

[38] See “Zur Eröffnung der Schulungkurse fur die Notstandsarbeiter der Stadt an der Universität”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p .234.

[39] Ernst Krieck, “Vom Deutsch des Deutschen Sprachvereins”, in Volk im Werden (1934), p. 183.

[40] See Martin Heidegger, “Rektoratsübergabe: ein veraltete Einrichtung”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 277.

[41] Martin Heidegger, Logik als die Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2020), p.8.

[42] See Martin Heidegger, “Zur Einrichtung der Dozentenschule”, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 308.

[43] Martin Heidegger, Erläuterungen zu Hölderlins Dichtung (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1981), pp. 176 and 162.

[44] See “Die gegenwärtige Lage und die künftige Aufgabe der deutschen Philosophie, in Reden und andere Zeugnisse, p. 318.