Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy Read online

  Heidegger & the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy

  Peter Trawny

  Translated by Andrew J. Mitchell

  The University of Chicago Press

  Chicago & London

  PETER TRAWNY is professor of philosophy and founder and director of the Martin Heidegger Institute at the University of Wuppertal in Germany. He is the author of many books and editor of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks. ANDREW J. MITCHELL is associate professor of philosophy at Emory University and the author of The Fourfold: Reading the Late Heidegger.

  Originally published as Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung

  © Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2014. 3rd, revised and extended edition 2014.

  The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

  The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

  © 2015 by The University of Chicago

  All rights reserved. Published 2015.

  Printed in the United States of America

  24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15 1 2 3 4 5

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30373-4 (cloth)

  ISBN-13: 978-0-226-30387-1 (e-book)

  DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226303871.001.0001

  The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the Goethe-Institut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Trawny, Peter, 1964– author.

  [Heidegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung. English]

  Heidegger and the myth of a Jewish world conspiracy / Peter Trawny ; translated by Andrew J. Mitchell.

  pages cm

  “Originally published as Hiedegger und der Mythos der jüdischen Weltverschwörung © Vittorio Klostermann GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, 2014. 3rd, revised and extended edition 2014.”

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-226-30373-4 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-226-30387-1 (ebook)

  1. Heidegger, Martin, 1889–1976—Views on Jews. 2. Antisemitism. 3. Jews—Identity. I. Mitchell, Andrew J., 1970—translator. II. Title.

  B3279.H49T639513 2015

  193—dc23

  2015014460

  ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

  To be German: to cast forth the innermost burden of western history and to take it upon one’s shoulder.

  MARTIN HEIDEGGER, Überlegungen VII

  ///////////////

  And can you bear, Mother, as once on a time,

  the gentle, the German, the pain-laden rhyme?

  PAUL CELAN, “Nearness to Graves”

  Contents

  /////////////////////////////

  Preface to the English Translation

  Introduction: A Thesis in Need of Revision

  The Being-Historical Landscape

  Types of Being-Historical Anti-Semitism

  The Being-Historical Concept of “Race”

  The Foreign and the Foreign

  Heidegger and Husserl

  Work and Life

  Annihilation and Self-Annihilation

  After the Shoah

  Attempts at a Response

  Afterword to the German Second Edition

  Afterword to the German Third Edition

  Abbreviations

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Name Index

  Preface to the English Translation

  /////////////////////////////

  As the discussions of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism began earlier this year with the publication of the philosopher’s Überlegungen, the first sequence of the Black Notebooks, the effect was unforeseeable. That holds still today. The question is: what future is there for a thinking that sees in “world Judaism” a destructive power of history—a form of destruction that ultimately destroys history itself?

  In the meantime, the first attempts (along with mine) to deal with and delve into this question have appeared.1 Other attempts will certainly follow because the ongoing publication of the Black Notebooks will confront us with further problematic statements on Judaism and the Shoah. On the other hand, trusted voices have remained silent. Thus the apologist branch of “Heideggerians” finds itself in a crisis—because in the face of the Heideggerian idea of “world Judaism” the usual defensive and reflexive justifications of Heidegger are infinitely more difficult to pull off than are the customary attacks on a thinker whom one has always already assumed to be an anti-Semite. Renowned Heidegger scholars find themselves in an intellectual bunker seeking to save whatever there is to save. The moral Inquisitors are the only ones to triumph. Both answer these questions in their own way.

  To have to speak of “Heidegger’s anti-Semitism” is painful not only to the old devotees of this philosopher. Indeed, it has long been known that Heidegger shared banal anti-Semitic stereotypes with the majority not only of Germans, but perhaps even of Europeans. That he transformed these stereotypes into the history of being was hitherto unknown. This transformation, carried out at the end of the 1930s, is the problem.

  The conflict is already under way in the very concept of anti-Semitism. Can one characterize Heidegger’s ideas, which he himself most likely did not consider anti-Semitic, as anti-Semitic? This is unavoidable. In order to interpret Heidegger’s statements an actual understanding of anti-Semitism is presumed. Even if we are aware of the fact that the significance of anti-Semitic ideas before the Shoah is not congruent with that of such ideas after the Shoah, historical relativism is out of the question.

  Thus we cannot ignore that Heidegger’s statements stem from a context in which the anti-Semitic stereotypes that he applied were all well-known. Even Heidegger’s thought, unstated but implicit in his ideas, that the Jew would be the representative of the modern was widespread. It was even self-critically discussed by Zionists.2 It is nevertheless clear that Heidegger took no notice of these discussions, where, for obvious reasons, Zionist viewpoints increasingly dominated the issue of assimilation. Heidegger had many Jewish students, but scarcely an interest in Judaism.

  Heidegger denied himself such an interest, above all in the 1930s and 1940s, as he intellectually battled with Christianity. The decision for the early Greek thinkers and poets, the decision even for Hölderlin, was at the same time also a decision against the rigorous monotheism of the Jews and Christians. Hölderlin’s turn of phrase “god of the gods,” i.e., god of a differentiated sequence of “gods,” also had an effect on Heidegger’s thinking.3 The phrase is simply incompatible with Judaism and Christianity.

  One could object that an anti-Semitism could never come about in Heidegger’s thinking since the philosopher constantly pointed out that every “anti-” necessarily depends upon what it rejects and battles. In point of fact, he emphasizes this in the Überlegungen as well.4 But it does not follow that he thereby forgoes attacks against Judaism, much less against Christianity. If Heidegger here falls short of one of his own ideas, this is no rarity in philosophy. The mastery of the text has its limits.

  Without having known something of Heidegger’s ideas in these Notebooks, Emmanuel Levinas appears to have demarcated the central conflict between Heidegger’s thinking and Judaism.5 Here the terror before a universal technology, there the terror before the mythos of holy places and their gods. There the idea of a universal face of man, here the differentiation of the peoples into Greeks, Romans, Germans, Russians, French, English, Japanese, etc. The urgency of a confrontation with these oppositions has only intensified with the publication of the Überlegungen.

  There have
been and will be further attempts to diminish the significance of the Black Notebooks in the context of Heidegger’s work as a whole. Do not the titles Überlegungen (Considerations), Anmerkungen (Remarks), Vier Hefte (Four Notebooks) already indicate that Heidegger minimized their importance? It is a hopeless attempt. Heidegger had always favored simple titles (Contributions to Philosophy, Mindfulness, even Being and Time), but then gave to later Black Notebooks the names Vigiliae and Notturno. With the publication of the Black Notebooks there appears in the collected works of Heidegger—alongside the being-historical treatises and the lecture courses and independent lectures—a further, distinctly esoteric dimension that stands in connection with these other two divisions of the collected works. Only the complete publication of the Black Notebooks will show to what extent Heidegger’s thinking unfolded itself in “paths” and not works.

  It is well-known that during the war years Heidegger also ascribed a specific role to Americans in his being-historical narrative: “The Americans, however, take the condition of nullity as the promise of their future, since they indeed decimate everything under the guise of ‘happiness’ for all. In Americanism, nihilism reaches its pinnacle.”6 This is scarcely to be distinguished from the role that Heidegger attributes to “world Judaism,” even if the allusion to the “pursuit of happiness” from the Declaration of Independence is a direct reference to American history. The American reader not only of my book, but also of the Überlegungen, will most likely be a Heidegger scholar. Such ascriptions do not surprise him/her. But in the Black Notebooks they assume a more specific shape when situated within a being-historical topography.

  Heidegger’s thinking is perhaps the catastrophic echo in philosophy of the catastrophe that shook the twentieth century. It may be that philosophy does not have the task of being a catastrophic echo. Nevertheless, the thinking of the twentieth century would be poorer were this echo not to reach us. It is unlikely that it will fade away. Our only future lies in this echo of the twentieth century.

  Peter Trawny,

  July 12, 2014

  Introduction

  A Thesis in Need of Revision

  Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, Emmanuel Levinas, Werner Brock, Elisabeth Blochmann, Wilhelm Szilasi, Mascha Kaléko, Paul Celan—Jews who in one way or another each encountered Martin Heidegger. For them he was teacher, object of admiration, lover, revered thinker, supporter. It has been well established that, as a philosopher and teacher in the 1920s, Heidegger attracted “young Jews” to him; indeed, there was understood to be a general proximity between his thinking and Judaism.1 The encounter with Jewish students after 1945 was painful, as with Celan, and torn between admiration and repulsion.2 But without doubt there was also rapprochement. Arendt’s return to Germany at the beginning of the 1950s was also a return to Heidegger.

  Certainly there were worries. Jacques Derrida, also of Jewish origin, in a short text entitled “Heidegger’s Silence,” spoke of a “wounding of thinking,” of “a silence after the war with regard to Auschwitz.”3 Heidegger did not express himself publicly on the Shoah. The public for him was no moral authority, rather the opposite. Heidegger spoke often of the “dictatorship of the public realm.”4 Silence, keeping silent, was for him a philosophical comportment. Did he ever speak of Auschwitz in his personal, intimate encounters? There are no accounts that tell of this, although there is a poem for Hannah Arendt, a single testament, that speaks of a “burden.” But how much store should we set in a poem?

  The worries did not lead to Heidegger’s being accused of anti-Semitism. Rüdiger Safranski, in his influential biography, decisively proclaimed that Heidegger had not been an anti-Semite.5 Up to now, this has been the prevailing opinion, one that supplies the important apologist thesis: Heidegger was indeed involved with National Socialism, for a longer or shorter period of time as some would have it, but he was not an anti-Semite. Does his own biography not speak against this? How could someone be an anti-Semite who lived so freely with Jews and even had at least one “Jewish lover”?

  Anti-Semitism was and is that which is directed against Jews, sprung from rumor, prejudice, and pseudoscientific sources (whether from race theory or simply racist), functioning affectively and/or administratively, and leading to (a) defamation, (b) universal vilification, (c) isolation: professional prohibitions, ghettoes, camps, (d) expulsion: emigration, (e) annihilation: pogroms, mass executions, death camps. Additionally, today, we also deem anti-Semitic anything that is supposed to characterize the Jew as “Jew.” On the one hand, these various stages are not easily separated; on the other, I find it problematic to assume that a verbal defamation need end in the Shoah.6

  A new look at Heidegger reveals a facet previously unknown: at a certain stage along his path, the philosopher admitted anti-Semitism into his thinking; more precisely, he admitted a being-historical anti-Semitism (seinsgeschichtlicher Antisemitismus).7 There appears to be no doubt of this, as will be shown. But everything depends upon explaining what is meant by the concept “being-historical anti-Semitism.” The primary intention of the following reflections is to develop a sense for this.

  The introduction of such a concept must be well considered, for obviously it could have disastrous consequences. The “anti-Semite” is morally and politically finished—especially after the Shoah. The suspicion of anti-Semitism could strike Heideggerian philosophy with great vehemence. How could it be that one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century was an advocate not only of National Socialism but also of anti-Semitism? Such a question is not easy to answer. It stigmatizes Heidegger’s thinking and places us squarely before an enigma.

  In Heidegger’s case the further question arises of whether and to what extent anti-Semitism contaminates his philosophy as a whole. Does an anti-Semitic ideology so possess Heidegger’s thinking that we would have to speak of an “anti-Semitic” philosophy? Would we then have to keep our distance from this philosophy because an “anti-Semitic philosophy” does not and cannot exist? After decades, would we not have to acknowledge that Heidegger’s thinking is actually not a matter of “philosophy,” or even of “thinking,” but instead just an uncanny error? These questions are all to be answered in the negative, though no easy path leads to that answer.

  The concept of “contamination” is particularly important for what follows. Anti-Semitism, which infests certain passages of the Black Notebooks, con-taminates it, brings one thing into contact with another. Consequently, the thinking that was previously conceived to be a matter of neutral theoretical insight now appears in a different light. This occurs because contamination takes hold at the margins of thinking, dissolving them, blurring them. And with this the topography of Heideggerian thought starts to waver. The interpretation ventured here positions itself in relation to this instability. It seeks to arrive at an answer to the question of how far this contamination reaches and how it is to be delimited.

  The predicate “anti-Semitic” is particularly dangerous, because for the most part it is used to announce an ideological complicity with the Shoah. Do all paths of anti-Semitism lead to Auschwitz? No. The etiology of genocide is always problematic because it is always multiple. Heidegger’s utterances about the Jews cannot be tied to Auschwitz. Nevertheless, even if there is no evidence that Heidegger approved of the “administrative mass murder” (Arendt) of the Jews, even if there is no indication of this, Heidegger must have known what took place in the death camps. Thus we can never entirely exclude the possibility that he held such violence against the Jews to be necessary. A thinking beyond good and evil follows its own necessities. This lasting possibility is what poisons particular statements of Heidegger’s.

  These previously unknown statements are found in the so-called Black Notebooks—a characterization coined and applied by Heidegger himself for thirty-four black, oilcloth notebooks in which, between roughly 1930 and 1970, he gave his thinking a unique form.8 For the most part, they have simple titles like Considerations, Remark
s, Four Notebooks, Hints, and Preliminaries. The titles Vigiliae and Notturno are unusual, not only in the context of the Black Notebooks, but in the whole of Heidegger’s work. All notebooks bear Roman numerals. The entire collection of notebooks has not been completely preserved. Überlegungen I, the first notebook of all, is missing. What happened to the missing notebook is unknown.

  The series of Roman numerals does not unconditionally follow the order of composition. This is so partly because Heidegger wrote in multiple notebooks at once. Since corrections are found in only a few places and the entries themselves are by no means merely aphoristic, we cannot assume they were written directly into the notebooks. Preparatory drafts must have existed but have not been retained. The texts we are concerned with are thus neither private jottings, nor even mere notes. Instead, we are dealing with revised philosophical writings.

  According to information from Hermann Heidegger, his father had decided that the Black Notebooks were to be published as the conclusion to the Gesamtausgabe [the “Collected Edition” of Heidegger’s works]. That decision was subsequently altered for good reasons. The manuscript is simply too important for its publication to be postponed by the arbitrary duration of other editorial projects. Martin Heidegger’s decision appears to confirm this special role for the manuscript. Are the Black Notebooks something like his philosophical legacy?

  The status of this unique manuscript in relation to the treatises both published (such as Being and Time) and unpublished (such as the Contributions to Philosophy), as well as to the lecture courses, essays, and lectures, depends on how we answer this question. If it were a philosophical legacy, then, in relation to all the other writings, it could be read as a kind of distillation, or foundational text, or even as both of these. Speaking in favor of this is that Heidegger makes continual reference to the Black Notebooks in the unpublished treatises. Speaking against it is that the Notebooks rarely achieve the philosophical intensity characterizing the Contributions to Philosophy, for example.