Although the definitive account of Heidegger’s life has as yet to be written, there are a number of biographies that have opened up his work and his life for us in different ways. I will consider these in their order of publication:

Walter Biemel, Martin Heidegger in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten. Rororo Bildmonographien (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1973), pp. 178 (with illustrations). Published in English as Martin Heidegger: An Illustrated Study (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1977).

Walter Biemel was a student of Heidegger in the 1940s at the University of Freiburg, and he speaks in his book of the excitement that he felt in Heidegger‘s seminars, swept along in the “movement of thought” that “electrified” the intense work that was undertaken there through in-depth readings of the key texts of Western philosophy (p. 16). In his short study, Biemel takes the reader carefully through Heidegger’s philosophy, acknowleging that he can do no more than describe  the “fragments” of the greater whole (p. 8), focusing upon Being and Time, the essay “The Origins of the Work of Art”, the “Letter on Humanism” and a selection of Heidegger’s later writings on language and technology. Biemel’s methodology is exegetical and expository; a “following” (a word he uses often) of Heidegger’s ideas rather than a confrontation with them. As such, his monograph has much in common with the seminal accounts of Heidegger’s philosophy, such as Otto Pöggeler’s Martin Heidegger’s Path of Thinking (1963) and William J. Richardson’s Heidegger: Through Phenomenology to Thought (1963) in providing a comprehensive introduction to the philosopher’s work.

Biemel concedes from the very beginning of his book that many readers will regret the lack of information on Heidegger’s personal life. As he notes, “it is a widespread opinion that a work can be made accessible by understanding the life of its author; indeed, can virtually be explained by the latter” (p. 7). Biemel’s approach is to reverse that equation: “here we are not presenting a life that we can experience beyond the work, but his work is his life” (p. 7). This assertion may be true, but many will still feel disappointment that so many important areas in Heidegger’s life, from the personal to the crucially political (there is no discussion, for example, of Heidegger’s actions in the Third Reich), are left undiscussed or only touched upon in a marginal way. To argue that “the attempt must be made to reveal the stimulating experiences of his thinking in his apparently monotonous life” (p. 8) seems unnecessarily to privilege one form of Heidegger’s existence over another. This is perhaps not the best basis for a biography.

When it was published, Hugo Ott’s Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 1992), pp. 366. Translated into English as Martin Heidegger: A Political Life (London: Harper Collins, 1994). pp. 406, was the most substantial biography on Heidegger although Ott terms it a “preparatory biographical study”, p. 6), his focus being largely upon Heidegger’s childhood and student days, and on the years 1933–1945. Ott’s biography is the product of thorough and original research. Between 1972 and 1997, he was professor for economic and social history at Freiburg University, and he used his proximity to the Heidegger archive in Freiburg to bring to light a large amount of primary material that previously had been unexplored. This is most notably so in the case of Heidegger’s early years. Here, Ott found the letters of Heidegger’s friend, Ernst Laslowski, and the diaries of Engelbert Krebs, as well as many of the essays and poems published in small journals by Heidegger himself. The result is that we now have a much more detailed picture of Heidegger in his formative years as a student of Catholic theology.

Ott, however, makes it quite clear from the very beginning of his biography that what really interests him is Heidegger’s politics and political career, and most notably his affiliation with the Nazi party in the years 1933–1934, and how this influenced his treatment of his colleagues (what Ott calls his “devious behaviour”, “abwegiges Verhalten”, p. 4), with the result that everything either leads up to 1933–1934 or is a consequence of those years. Ott ignores those areas that lie beyond his political focus. He observes, for example, that “relatively little discussion [in my book] is devoted to Heidegger’s Marburg period, important though it is. It seems to me that these years from 1923 to the summer of 1928 were something of an interlude [my emphasis] in Heidegger’s life” (p. 5). On the contrary, these were crucial years for Heidegger the man (which involved a much documented relationship with Hannah Arendt), as they were for Heidegger the philosopher (they saw the publication of his magnum opus, Being and Time). Ott argues that he avoids this period in Heidegger’s life out of considerations of tact: “I was searching throughout for criteria that would help me to understand Heidegger from the inside. One finds oneself walking a very fine line on these occasions. Where do the limits of discretion lie? At what point does one begin to invade personal privacy?” (p. 6). Ott cites Heidegger’s relationship with Hannah Arendt as an area that he is too discreet to explore. The fact is that Hannah Arendt, a Jewish intellectual living in New York, came out in an article published in the journal Die Merkur in 1969 to defend Heidegger against precisely the accusations that Ott makes in his book. Indeed, Heidegger’s philosophy qua philosophy, as opposed to its status as an emanation of his political views, receives little to no coverage in Ott’s book. Instead of which, we learn much about the shortcomings of Heidegger’s character, such as his “inability to participate with any moral authority in the creation of a liberal political democracy” (p. 373). Ott does not mention the obvious fact that all of Heidegger’s colleagues, from Wilhelm Rickert to Edmund Husserl, likewise held themselves distant from politics during the Weimar period.

Ultimately, Ott’s biography lacks the detail, the breadth and scholarly objectivity that any successful study of Heidegger’s life must possess. That omission is fully redressed in what is the longest and most detailed of Heidegger biographies to date: Rüdiger Safranski’s Ein Meister aus Deutschland: Heidegger und seine Zeit (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 1994). Translated by Ewald Osers as Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998) pp. 474. As the title of his book indicates, Safranski is fully aware of the complicated and pained relationship that existed between Heidegger and the pressures of the age, and he treats this relationship in a balanced and measured way. Safranski, who cannot be accused of sharing Heidegger’s politics (he studied with Adorno in Berlin in the late 1960s, and his previous publications grew out of his research into working-class literature in the Federal Republic), adopts a more objective position than Ott on Heidegger’s engagement with the politics of 1933. As he notes in his introduction, “on philosophical grounds, he became, for a while, a National Socialist revolutionary, but his philosophy also helped him to free himself from the political scene” (p. x). The positive consequence of such an approach is that it allows Safranski to produce a broader, more impartial treatment of Heidegger’s ideas, and one that keeps our assessment open to their complexity and sometimes contradictory nature.

Safranski writes with great fluidity, creating a sense of movement and drama even in his narrative, painting on a large canvas with bold strokes, covering much material quickly, often with perhaps over-imaginative reconstructions, in an energetic process of Verstehen, in which the motives and intentions of individuals are reconstructed in an act of empathy. Such a style is certainly in keeping with one form of biographical writing but, seen from the point of view of scholarship, it is an approach that has its pitfalls, often leading to speculations that remain factually ungrounded. Describing, for example, Heidegger’s decision to support the events of 1933, Safranski tells us that Heidegger was motivated by a “hunger for concreteness and compact reality”, and that he welcomed the violence that the events of that year as “redeeming” (p. 231). They are colourful tropes; but the words are those of Safranski, not Heidegger. Rather too often Heidegger’s mentality is reconstructed rather than documented. These are reservations that do not, however, detract in any way from what remains the most compelling and comprehensive biography on Heidegger published to date.

In 2005, Rowohlt commissioned a second monograph on Heidegger to supplement the earlier volume by Walter Biemel, which had almost exclusively focused on Heidegger’s philosophy rather than his life. The result was Manfred Geier’s Martin Heidegger (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt rororo Monographien, 2005), pp. 138 (with illustrations). Geier came to his project after writing biographies on Kant, Karl Popper, and Jean-Paul Sartre, all for Rowohlt in their rororo Monographien series. All of these works demonstrate Geier’s exemplary ability to analyse, summarise, condense information, clarify difficult ideas (without simplification) and find appropriate examples from primary material.  Geier approaches Heidegger’s philosophy through the lecture courses that he gave at Marburg and Freiburg, and which were subsequently published as volumes in his Gesamtausgabe (Collected Works). Using these as a basis he attempts “to follow the individual stages of Heidegger’s thought, which [Heidegger] himself experienced as hesitating and circumscribed by setbacks and mistakes. It was also a path that went through the great illusions and catastrophes of the twentieth century, which found their philosophical expression in Heidegger’s work” (p. 8).

Some readers will have reservations about Geier’s approach. It could be argued that from the very beginning of his career Heidegger set himself a number of quite specific philosophical problems to solve (for example, devising a language for his new version of ontology, as in Being and Time, or later finding an idiom in which Being could manifest itself in its own terms, as in Contributions to Philosophy), and that his attempts to solve these problems were carried out quite independently of historical factors. Nevertheless, the terms of reference are productive ones. Viewed this way, Heidegger’s philosophy can be seen as a sustained product of enquiry, as a constellation of ideas that was constantly in the process of being formed and re-formed. Such an approach allows Geier to move back and forth between Heidegger’s life, his writings, and the time in which he lived, with great economy and illustrative verve. Geier’s incisive and superbly written monograph should be translated into English.

A recent biography of Heidegger is Alfred Denker’s Unterwegs in Sein und Zeit: Einführung in Leben und Denken von Martin Heidegger (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2011) pp. 238. Denker sets himself a clear goal: “in this book I will attempt to follow Martin Heidegger on the path of his life and work. In doing this, we will not only come closer to Heidegger the man, but also be introduced to his philosophical thinking” (p. 10). Denker is the director of the Martin-Heidegger-Archiv in Meßkirch and has used his access to the archive to excellent effect in other publications, such as Martin Heidegger und seine Heimat, edited with Elsbeth Büchin (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 2005). For the Heidegger-Jahrbuch he has also co-edited, with his colleague Holger Zaborowski, several volumes of primary materials related to Heidegger’s life, including Heidegger und die Anfänge seines Denkens (2004) and Heidegger und der Nationalsozialismus (2009.

Unterwegs in Sein und Zeit is more general in its ambit than these works, and largely aimed at readers new to Heidegger. As its title indicates, Denker attempts to provide an overview of both Heidegger’s life and his work in the same volume. It is an ambitious task. The author strives for balance in his book, a balance of material (between the philosopher’s life and writings) and a balance in approach (between compassion and critical distance). On the controversial matter of Heidegger’s affiliation with National Socialism, Denker rehearses the arguments made against the philosopher by Victor Farias and Emmanuel Faye (although Hugo Ott is not mentioned), while outlining the case made by apologists, such as Francois Federer and Friedrich-Wilhelm von Hermann. Denker seeks to move beyond both camps, stressing the “many-sidedness” (“Vieldeutigkeit”, p. 106) of the political and ideological factors that faced many, and not just Heidegger, in the early months of Hitler’s seizure of power in 1933, because matters were less clear to those who were participating in these events at that time as they now appear retrospectively to modern historians. It is true that at times Denker’s rather Olympian style leads to pronouncements that are just a little too sweeping. To be told that “Martin Heidegger always behaved in a modest fashion, which was friendly and straightforward. Nevertheless, his character was complicated – a mixture of pride, obstinacy, guile and modesty. He found it difficult to make relationships with others” (p. 11) is to compress too many generalisations into a single statement. It is possible that what we are being told here is that Heidegger’s philosophy was greater than the man. But what we need to know is: why? Alfred Denker is at present working on a study of Heidegger’s life in three volumes: all readers of Heidegger will look forward to its publication.

The most recent and most extensive biography on Heidegger (indeed, its German translation calls it “the Biography” – “die Biographie”) is:

Guillaume Payen, Martin Heidegger: Catholicism, Revolution, Nazism, translated from the French by Jane Marie Todd and Steven Rendall (Yale University Press: New Haven and London, 2023, originally published in French in 2016). pp. 692

There is much that is good about this biography. It is well researched, offers impressive detail (particularly on Heidegger’s childhood), and all the major primary and secondary sources are covered in an array of footnotes (although they sometimes present in a confusing way in the French original – the editors at Yale University Press have simplified matters for the English translation). The biography provides in-depth discussions of crucial episodes in Heidegger’s life, such as his involvement in Freiburg university’s de-Nazification process of 1945-1946 (pp. 417–428), and his early contact with his future French adherents in 1946 (432–441). Such discussions (and other examples could be given) are the best to date in the secondary literature on Heidegger.

And yet I have major problems with this book. We are told on the dustjacket that Payen is a historian, although we are not told what type of historian (social, intellectual, cultural or economic?). It is normal in the scholarly description of a historian to specify his or her discipline, and it is not possible to find out from his other publications, because there are no other publications (at least in terms of monographs). I suspect that he is a political historian, because the focus of this biography is almost entirely on Heidegger’s politics.

Payen structures his biography around what he sees as the three major phases in Heidegger’s life: “Catholicism”, “Revolution” (a vague term that seems only to map on to the radical idiom of Being and Time), and “Nazism”. Payen covers Heidegger’s Catholicism and then his apostasy in a detailed and cogent way; “Revolution”, however, is an unconvincing rubric. Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time (Sein und Zeit, 1927), was a one-off work: it produced no revolution (although Sartre was inspired by it – as in his Being and Nothingness (L’Être et le Néant, 1943). Likewise, Heidegger’s second major work, Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosophie, 1936-1938), was a radical text in its idiom but it was not published in his life and produced no followers.

 For Payen, the core of Heidegger’s life was Nazism, and the greater part of his biography is spent in documenting this aspect. The subject is first broached on page 243, and the remaining 360 pages of the biography are (but not exclusively – although he does return with tedious repetition to it) largely devoted to this matter. What is telling are the differing amounts of space given to the respective periods of Heidegger’s life. The twelve years between 1933 and 1945 (covering the Third Reich), for example, receives eighty-nine pages (275–364), the 26 years between 1950 and1976 (a period in which Heidegger did some of most original work, regained contact with Hannah Arendt, became acquainted with Paul Celan and consolidated his attachment to France) thirty pages (453–483). Although Payen claims in his Introduction that he wishes to uncover “the multiplicity of the person himself” (1), his unrelenting focus on Heidegger and Nazism imparts to the biography a peculiarly static quality, as if Heidegger never developed and changed as a person or a philosopher.

The ultimate result of this approach is that Heidegger’s philosophical work is marginalised. There are, for example, only five pages devoted to Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) (174–179), which Payen mysteriously calls a “Blut und Boden” work (196), and yet elsewhere the book is allied to the “European avant garde” (142). Contributions to Philosophy, a ground-breaking work in which Heidegger attempted to find a new language for his philosophy, is only accorded two paragraphs, both of which make a political point (388 and 391). Other key texts, such as the “The Origin of the Work of Art” (“Der Ursprung des Kunstwerkes” 1935), are simply listed as titles (370), and yet the latter is a seminal essay, heralding the “Turning” (“Kehre”) in Heidegger’s thinking, where the aesthetic (I think under his renewed interest in Nietzsche) came to play an increasingly central role in his work. The fact that Heidegger also produced a substantial body of poetry is not mentioned.

That Heidegger supported the Nazi Party between 1930 and 1934 is undeniable. But what followed after 1934 is a complex matter and needs to be treated in a nuanced way. Payen is very selective in his choice of documents and does not discuss those that impede his thesis. I will give just one example. In 1949, Heidegger got back in touch with Jaspers 1949. On 8 April 1950, he sent Jaspers a letter confessing his “shame” for what had happened in the Third Reich. He ended by saying that ‘then came the persecution of the Jews, and everything fell into an abyss”. Heidegger may be being disingenuous here (simply telling Jaspers what he thinks he wants him to hear). But this letter should be at least mentioned in a biography. The eye looks at this phrase more than once.

After 1934, Heidegger played no further part in the Nazi state, educationally or otherwise. On the contrary, in his private correspondence (with Kurt Bauch, for example), he explicitly and increasingly distanced himself from the state.  Payen makes no distinction between “Nazism” (which he never defines) and Heidegger’s continuing vision (mistaken as it might have been) of “National Socialism”. Indeed, as becomes clear at many points in his book, Payen makes no distinction between Heidegger’s purported “Nazism” and the nationalism, patriotism, and pride in the German mind that he often expressed in his work, as, for example, in his discussion of Hölderlin. Payen believes that Heidegger’s “conversion” to Nazism took place in 1929 (247), but “conversion” is too abrupt a designation for a growing affiliation that took place over a number of years, beginning, in my reading, sometime between 1926 and 1927. We are told that Heidegger “approved of the strong-arm [foreign] policy conducted by Hitler” (392), that he “approved of Nazi eugenics” (400) and “the philosopher was cognizant of all or part of the criminal spirit and actions of the Wehrmacht in the East” 403). None of these assertions are supported with documentation.

That Heidegger made antisemitic comments is also undeniable, and the fact that they occupy only a small space in his work and appear largely in his Black Notebooks does not make things any better. As far as I can ascertain, however, he never made any of these comments in public. At one point in Payen’s biography, he asserts that Heidegger was a Holocaust denier (444). It is to Heidegger’s shame (a shame that Herbert Marcuse in a letter to the philosopher in 1947 said that he should be feeling) that in the post-war era he made no reference to the death camps, but this does mean that he denied they existed. He simply passed over them in regrettable silence.

In terms of the style of Payen’s biography, Heidegger is rarely allowed to speak with his own voice, and consequently appears as lacking in an interiority, without doubts, fears, confusions or regrets, although Heidegger had all of these: regarding himself, his philosophy and his career, and regarding his two sons during the second world war. In Payen’s historical hands, Heidegger is the object of a discourse rather than its subject. The personal seems banished. This is no more so the case as in Payen’s treatment of Heidegger’s personal life, most notably in his handling of Heidegger’s relationships with women, such as Princess Margot von Sachsen-Meiningen (1911–1998). In 1942, she attended his lecture course on Hölderlin’s poem, “The Ister”, which began a four-year period of contact that came close to destroying Heidegger’s marriage. She is referred to just once in Payen’s biography (and her name is missing from the Index in the original French edition). The other women in his life, Countess Dorothee von Podewils, Dory Vietta, Hildegard Feick, Marilene Putscher, Andrea von Harbou (Heidegger had a penchant for the aristocratic) are just listed, and in half a page treated as a collective. But they were individuals and although information about them is difficult to find, some nevertheless exists. Payen refers to them all as his “mistresses” (409), but as Heidegger grew older “close female friends” might be a more accurate designation. These women were not simply the female objects of Heidegger’s libido. Some were, such as Sophie Dorothee von Podewils (whom he met in 1952), the author of the novel Wanderschaft (1948), were writers or translators. It seems likely that Heidegger was attracted to the minds of these women rather than just to their bodies (perhaps to compensate for the possible lack of intellectual synergy with his wife, Elfride).

Only two pages (171–172) are devoted to the relationship that Heidegger conducted with Hannah Arendt between 1924 and 1925 (perhaps because.it stands at odds with Payen’s focus on Heidegger’s antisemitism). This is, however, one of the great philosophical romances of the twentieth century (comparable to Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir) and has attracted entire books such as Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt: For the Love of the World (1982), Elzbieta Ettinger, Hannah Arendt Martin Heidegger (1995), and Daniel Maier-Katkin, Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness (2010).

In his Introduction, Payen says that “every original questioning opens an unsuspected perspective on what we see” (2), but there is very little that is new or original in this biography. Payen’s focus on (indeed, obsession with) Heidegger’s “Nazism” has a long lineage, beginning with Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity (1964), and continuing through to Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism (1987), Emmanuel Faye’s Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (2005) and the latest work of Richard Wolin, Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology (2023). If you are working within the paradigm of ideology and philosophy, then the insistent focus on Heidegger and Nazism may be warranted. But as the basis for a biography, it is not. Both in terms of his self-understanding and in his engagement with others, Heidegger was a highly complex person. This complexity comes to voice in the many letters he wrote, to his wife, and to people such as Karl Jaspers and Hannah Arendt, and (surprisingly perhaps) in his prefatory comments to his lectures, where he admits to the struggle that he is having to renew his poetic idiom. To neglect these, as Payen largely does, so that he can get down to what really matters – Heidegger’s Nazism – is to neglect Heidegger’s life.