Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy Read online

  At the same time, however, it was this narrative that allowed Heidegger to position himself far from actual National Socialism. By the end of the 1930s his criticisms of National Socialism grow increasingly harsh, targeting its absolutizing of the race-concept, its biologism in general, its technologization of the country, its imperialism, and finally even its nationalism. Yet the fact that Heidegger could transform this critique into the philosophical thought of a text like “The Overcoming of Metaphysics” (1939), i.e., into the idea that an overcoming of National Socialism would be the ultimate—necessary—configuration of Western metaphysics, was itself already a result of this narrative’s productivity.33 What thus came about was a shift in Heidegger’s relation to National Socialism: after the first phase of his entry into National Socialism, a phase tied to the hope for an immediate revolutionary realization of the “other beginning” and one that Heidegger establishes in a note as dating from “the years 1930–34,” there follows a second phase, one concerned with “the necessity of its [National Socialism’s] affirmation and indeed for intellectual reasons [denkerischen Gründen],” a phase that views National Socialism as a period of history, entirely fallen prey to “machination,” but nevertheless necessary for the “overcoming of metaphysics” (another formulation of the “other beginning”).34

  How the Jews emerge in this being-historical topography is a question that until now could not be answered.

  Types of Being-Historical Anti-Semitism

  Anti-Semitism as such is at the center of its most divergent forms. In regard to Heidegger, one finds in the Black Notebooks three remarks indicative of three different, internally coherent, types of being-historical anti-Semitism. The concept of a being-historical anti-Semitism should in no way imply that we are dealing with a particularly elaborate or refined anti-Semitism. In principle, Heidegger draws upon specific well-known forms. Nevertheless he interprets them philosophically, i.e., being-historically. The three types of this anti-Semitism become apparent in the following remarks:

  1. The reason for Judaism’s temporary increase in power, however, is that the metaphysics of the West, particularly in its modern development, provided the starting point for the spread of a rather empty rationality and calculative ability, which, in these ways, procured accommodation for itself in “spirit,” without ever being able to grasp the concealed regions of decision on their own terms. The more original and inceptual these future decisions and questions become, the more inaccessible do they remain for this “race.” (In this way, Husserl’s step toward a phenomenological observation distinct from both psychological explanation and the historical accounting of opinions is of lasting importance—and nevertheless nowhere does it extend to the region of essential decisions, but instead everywhere presupposes the historical tradition of philosophy; the necessary consequence of which shows itself at once in the acquiescing to neo-Kantian transcendental philosophy, which ultimately made an advance into Hegelianism in the formal sense inevitable. My “attack” against Husserl is not directed at him alone and is on the whole nonessential—the attack is against the neglect of the question of being, i.e., against the essence of metaphysics as such, on the basis of which the machination of beings is able to determine history. The attack grounds a historical moment of the highest decision between the precedence of beings and the grounding of the truth of beyng.)1

  2. With their marked gift for calculation, the Jews “live” according to the principle of race, and indeed have done so for the longest time, for which reason they themselves most vigorously resist its unrestricted application. The arranging of racial breeding stems not from life itself, but rather from the overpowering of life by machination. What these pursue with such planning is a complete deracination of the peoples by harnessing them in a uniformly fabricated and sleek [gleichgebaute und gleichschnittige] arrangement of all beings. Deracination goes together with the self-alienation of the peoples—to the detriment of history, that is, to the detriment of the regions of decision for beyng.2

  3. Even the thought of an agreement with England, in the sense of an allocation of imperialist “jurisdictions,” does not get at the essence of the historical process which England plays out to the end from within Americanism and Bolshevism, and this means at the same time also from within world Judaism. The question concerning the role of world Judaism is not a racial one, but rather the metaphysical question concerning the kind of humanity which, utterly unattached, can take over the uprooting of all beings from being as its world-historical “task.”3

  Citation 1

  In the second half of the 1930s, sometime around 1937, in Überlegungen VIII, the Jews or Judaism expressly surface for the first time as actors in the being-historical narrative.4 One “of the most hidden forms of the gigantic and perhaps the oldest” would be “the tenacious skillfulness at calculating and trafficking and intermixing, whereby the worldlessness of Judaism is grounded.”5 For Heidegger at this time, the “gigantic” is one of the forms of “machination,” i.e., of the self-totalizing rationalizing and technologizing of the world. This development calls for a definite form of thinking, which he recognizes in the “skillfulness at calculating,” i.e., in the “calculative ability,” of the Jews.

  This peculiar notion requires a more precise interpretation. For Heidegger does not proclaim that this “worldlessness” would be, so to speak, a natural characteristic of Judaism.6 Rather, he thinks that it is first “grounded” through the “tenacious skillfulness at calculating.” This “skillfulness,” however, would be “one of the most hidden forms of the gigantic,” i.e., of “machination.” The origin of the worldlessness of Judaism is thus machination, which brings calculation to power as a world-defining activity. That machination requires and grounds the worldlessness of humans is a well-known thought from the repertoire of Heidegger’s critique of technology; that this grounds the “worldlessness of Judaism” is a problematic narrowing of the point.

  Accordingly Heidegger appears to take a quite banal anti-Semitic ascription (a “marked gift for calculation”) and give it a being-historical transformation—and in this figure of thought his anti-Semitism is anchored. It is the figure of the “haggling Jew” (Schacherjude), who represents one of the most common figures of Judaism in all of anti-Semitism.7 Since the twelfth century in the Christian West, the collecting of interest was forbidden, though the Jews were expressly excused from this by papal decree. Thus they were the sole group in society that was allowed to lend gold. At the same time, they were prohibited from taking up certain skilled trades. This was the historical situation in which “the Jew” immediately (i.e., without pursuing a “reputable profession”) became bound up with money. Originally, schachern means in Yiddish “to pursue commerce.”

  Sociologically, the association of Judaism and money already begins to take hold in that provincial-rural way of life—as in Heidegger’s hometown of Meßkirch—where the peasants and laborers earn their money “by the sweat of their brow,” while Jews, for special reasons or those just mentioned, generate their income otherwise.8 From here, the association returns in myriad attributions. One of these concerns a “world Judaism” that seizes world mastery through the control of national economies and other instruments (this pertains to the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which we will take up shortly in greater detail since Heidegger himself very probably refers to these). Another concerns the Jew’s alleged metaphysical-religious attitude of “Mammonism,” a concept of Georg Simmel’s, which critically caricatures the idolization of money.9 A further variant takes aim at calculation in general.

  Heidegger quite generally connects calculation with rationality. With this he can classify his previous teacher Edmund Husserl within a history whereby “Judaism’s temporary increase in power” damns the “metaphysics of the West, particularly in its modern development,” to decisionlessness. Heidegger speaks of an “attack” on Husserl, though he instantly qualifies this. It would be “on the whole nonessential.” Indeed,
the qualification remains implausible against the background of the initial classification. Husserl is inscribed within a history of “empty rationality and calculative ability” on the basis of his belonging to a “‘race.’” Surely one cannot overlook that Heidegger sets this concept off in quotation marks, but however one interprets this, it cannot mitigate the general direction of Heidegger’s thought.

  Problematic in Heidegger’s utterance is not only the thought that Husserl’s belonging to Judaism would be the reason that his phenomenology “nowhere” reaches into “the region of essential decisions.” Beyond this, even after the war, Heidegger’s frequently delivered critique of “calculative thinking,” which is to be distinguished from “meditative thinking” and which, unlike the latter, can never find its way to a “rootedness” (Bodenständigkeit), acquires a rather bad taste.10 For one of the counterconcepts to a “rootedness” in the “homeland” is that very “worldlessness” which, according to Heidegger—as consequence of “machination”—characterizes Judaism.11 Would rationality as such then be a being-historical invention of the Jews—or does Heidegger rather grasp Judaism as a form in which “machination” actualizes itself?

  Whatever the answer may turn out to be, it is erroneous to relate the “skillfulness at calculating” solely to the philosophy of modernity. Certainly one could say that mathematics attained a new significance in the technological applications and burgeoning natural science of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But it must be clear that the mathesis, even in the mathematical sense, had its origin in Greek thinking.12 This pertains to Heidegger’s narrative of a being-historical relationship between the Greeks and the Germans, for in it there is simply no place for the Pythagoreans, for Plato’s relation to them or for his introduction of mathematics particularly in the Timaeus, for Euclid and his Elements, not to mention for the Egyptians from whom the Greeks learned mathematics (even if interpreting it differently).

  One type of anti-Semitism in Heidegger ascribes to the Jews a “skillfulness at calculating and trafficking and intermixing,” which philosophically he interprets in an alarmingly broad manner. The Jew appears as the worldless, calculating subject, dominated by machination, which is supposed to have calculatingly “procured accommodation for itself in ‘spirit.’” In this sense, then, precisely this “accommodation” would count as the target of Heidegger’s “‘attack.’”13

  Citation 2

  In the first of the citations above, Heidegger indirectly explains Husserl’s phenomenology in terms of the character of a “‘race.’” The quotation marks should signal a certain distance. And, indeed, Heidegger is opposed to the “race thinking” of National Socialism. “All race thinking” would be “modern,” would move “along the route of conceiving the human as subject.”14 Inevitably, Heidegger thus ascribes “race thinking” to the being of modernity (Neuzeit), to “machination.” Race thinking is a “consequence of machination.”15

  It is thus clear that Heidegger wants nothing to do with race thinking. But this in no way means that he doubts the givenness of “race.” “Race” would be “one necessary and indirectly telling condition of historical Dasein (thrownness [Geworfenheit]).” In race thinking this is “falsified into the sole and sufficient” condition. “One condition” is “raised to the unconditional.”16 Accordingly, Heidegger’s distance from race thinking pertains to the theoretical absolutization of one moment of thrownness among other moments, but not to the view that “race” belongs to Dasein.

  Nevertheless, Heidegger does not flesh out how he considers “race” to be “one . . . condition” of thrownness. Attention to the corporeality of Dasein is almost always out of the question for him. Even a cultural connotation is improbable here, since he generally interprets the concept of “culture” dismissively, if not disparagingly. Best would be to look into an ethnic importance for this. Accordingly “race” would be understood as a belonging to a people. But with this, the question of the meaning of “race” is merely repeated in a different context. What does “belonging to a people” mean beyond belonging to a linguistic community (and in this latter respect, the Jews would most assuredly be the better Germans)? The question of “race” in Heidegger will be elucidated in what follows. But even if Heidegger does not adopt the race thinking of machination, one can still reconstruct a convergence with the ideology of National Socialism.

  The philosopher explains on the one hand that “race thinking” is a “consequence of machination.” On the other hand, he holds that “with their marked gift for calculation, the Jews ‘live’ according to the principle of race, and indeed have done so for the longest time.” How do these statements relate to each other? Must one consequence not be that “machination” and the “gift for calculation” belong together? It appears so. Nevertheless, the clarification of this issue requires some prudence, for the question concerns an element of being-historical anti-Semitism.

  The “arranging of racial breeding stems not from life itself,” Heidegger holds. “‘Life’” thus occurs without organizing itself for the formation and ennoblement of races. With this thought, Heidegger does not mean to meddle in matters of biology. Rather he wants to say that the everyday dealings of humans are not concerned with the “keeping pure” of a “race.” It thus requires an “arranging”—i.e., it requires machination, the origin of every “arranging”—for “‘life’” to be organized in this way. On the one hand, Heidegger found this organization among the National Socialists. On the other hand, he also saw it with the Jews, who “‘live’ in accordance with the principle of race, and indeed have done so for the longest time,” which can only mean that they were the first to realize a “distinctive feature” of machination, the “arranging of racial breeding.” According to Heidegger, it was the Jews who took on a pioneering role in the “arranging of racial breeding,” i.e., in the machinational organization of race.17

  The background for this utterance is provided by, among other things, the Nuremberg racial laws, which were unanimously adopted by the Reichstag on September 15, 1935. A “Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor” as well as a “Law for the Protection of the Healthy Inheritance of the German People (Marriage Health Law)” used various criteria to discriminate among Jews, Gypsies, blacks, and half-breeds (incidentally, also women in general, even German women). Generally speaking, it was supposed to guarantee a division of the races by means of which “German blood” could be kept pure, i.e., unmixed.

  Nevertheless, Heidegger does not merely say that the Jews would “‘live’ according to the principle of race, and indeed have done so for the longest time,” for his proclamation continues: “for which reason they themselves most vigorously resist its unrestricted application.” What is an “unrestricted application” of the “principle of race”? And what is the connection between one’s own “application” of such a principle and the fight against its unrestrictedness that follows from this? Can Heidegger mean by this the Nuremberg laws?

  The dating of the remark suggests that it was composed shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War. The November pogroms of 1938 are in the past. On November 10 of that year in Freiburg the synagogue near the university was burned down.18 Even on November 9, Kristallnacht, Heidegger held a session of his seminar on Nietzsche’s second “Unfashionable Observation.”19 Is it possible that when Heidegger wrote “the unrestricted application” of the “principle of race,” he meant the violence that the Jews had to suffer?

  This casts a peculiar light on the idea that the Jews would be the first who “lived” in accordance with the principle of race. The National Socialists make “unrestricted” application of that which the Jews practiced long before them. Further still: the explanation within the very title of the Nuremberg laws, i.e., that they would serve “for the Protection of German Blood,” presupposes the danger of a contagious disease or a strategically acting assailant. The “unrestricted application” of the “principle of race” would then be a
mere defensive measure within a conflict.

  Nevertheless—and this is what is essential in all this—the invention of “race thinking” is being-historically contextualized. It would be a “consequence of machination.” If Heidegger holds the “skillfulness at calculating” to be Jewish, and as typically modern, then all this taken together is now explained as an epiphenomenon of modern technology. For this reason he even writes “life” in quotation marks: “life” as absolute principle would be a consequence of the will to power, i.e., an inheritance from the last of the metaphysicians, Nietzsche. Heidegger inscribes the “racial thinking” of the Jews and the National Socialists into the history of being, into the history of machination. The enmity between the Jews and the National Socialists (Heidegger guards himself here from speaking of the Germans) results from a being-historical competition—and it is particularly problematic that the instigation of this inevitable conflict is assigned rather to the Jews.

  At this point it must be emphasized that Heidegger attempted to conceive the “machinational” conflict between the Jews and the National Socialists in neutral terms. He remarks at one point that we should “not be too loudly incensed over the psychoanalysis of the Jew ‘Freud,’” especially “if and so long as one generally cannot ‘think’ about everything and everyone” otherwise than in such a manner whereby “everything is regarded as an ‘expression’ of ‘life.’”20 With this, Heidegger criticizes even the “Aryan variants of the basic doctrine of psychoanalysis.”21 The philosopher speaks of “Jewish ‘psychoanalysis’” as though this theory were in principle Jewish, a possible interpretation familiar since the birth of psychoanalysis and one that, by the time of National Socialism, had become an anti-Semitic stereotype.22