Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks” Suggest He Was a Serious Anti-Semite, Not Just a Naive Nazi

Ger­man philoso­pher Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger, wide­ly con­sid­ered one of the most influ­en­tial philoso­phers of the 20th cen­tu­ry, was a Nazi, a fact known to most any­one with more than a pass­ing knowl­edge of the sub­ject. In a New York Review of Books essay, Har­vard intel­lec­tu­al his­to­ri­an Peter E. Gor­don points out that “the philosopher’s com­plic­i­ty with the Nazis first became a top­ic of con­tro­ver­sy in the pages of Les Temps mod­ernes short­ly after the war.” The issue arose again when a for­mer stu­dent of Hei­deg­ger pub­lished “a vig­or­ous denun­ci­a­tion” in 1987. In these cas­es, and others—like his pro­tégé and one­time lover Han­nah Arendt’s defense of her for­mer teacher—the scan­dal tends to “always end with the same unsur­pris­ing dis­cov­ery that Hei­deg­ger was a Nazi.”

What stirs up con­tro­ver­sy isn’t Heidegger’s mem­ber­ship in the par­ty, but his moti­va­tions. Was he sim­ply a shrewd, if craven, careerist, or a gen­uine­ly hate­ful anti-Semi­te, or a lit­tle from each col­umn? What­ev­er the expla­na­tion, Hei­deg­ge­ri­ans have been able to wall off the phi­los­o­phy from sup­posed moral or polit­i­cal laps­es in judg­ment. Arendt did so by claim­ing that Hei­deg­ger, and all of phi­los­o­phy, was polit­i­cal­ly naïve. Recalls Adam Kirsch in the Times:

The seal was set on his abso­lu­tion by Han­nah Arendt, in a birth­day address broad­cast on West Ger­man radio. Heideg­ger’s Nazism, she explained, was an “escapade,” a mis­take, which hap­pened only because the thinker naïve­ly “suc­cumbed to the temp­ta­tion … to ‘inter­vene’ in the world of human affairs.” The moral to be drawn from the Hei­deg­ger case was that “the think­ing ‘I’ is entire­ly dif­fer­ent from the self of con­scious­ness,” so that Heideg­ger’s thought can­not be con­t­a­m­i­nat­ed by the actions of the mere man.

The pub­li­ca­tion of Heidegger’s so-called “black note­books,” jour­nals that he kept assid­u­ous­ly from 1931–1941, may change all that. They show Hei­deg­ger for­mu­lat­ing a phi­los­o­phy of anti-Semitism—using the cen­tral cat­e­gories of his thought—one that oper­ates, as Michel Fou­cault might say, along “the rules of exclu­sion.”

In pub­lished excerpts of a trans­la­tion by Richard Polt, an exec­u­tive mem­ber of the Hei­deg­ger Cir­cle, Crit­i­cal The­o­ry shows how much Hei­deg­ger turned his own con­cep­tu­al appa­ra­tus against Jews. At one point, he writes:

One of the most secret forms of the gigan­tic, and per­haps the old­est, is the tena­cious skill­ful­ness in cal­cu­lat­ing, hus­tling, and inter­min­gling through which the world­less­ness of Jew­ry is ground­ed.

In this short pas­sage alone, Hei­deg­ger invokes lazy stereo­types of Jews as “cal­cu­lat­ing” and “hus­tling.” He also, more impor­tant­ly, describes the Jew­ish peo­ple as “world­less.” As Crit­i­cal The­o­ry writes, “Being-in-the-world (In-der-Welt-sein) is the basic activ­i­ty of human exist­ing. To say that the Jews are ‘world­less’… is more than a con­fused stereo­type.” It is Heidegger’s way of cast­ing Jews out of Dasein, his most impor­tant cat­e­go­ry, a word that means some­thing like “being-there” or “pres­ence.” Jews, he writes, are “his­to­ry­less” and “are not being, but mere­ly ‘cal­cu­late with being.’”

More­over, Hei­deg­ger took up the Nazi char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of Jews as cor­rupt under­min­ers of soci­ety. As rep­re­sen­ta­tives of moder­ni­ty, and its tech­no­crat­ic dom­i­na­tion of human­i­ty, the Jews threat­ened “being” in anoth­er way:

What is hap­pen­ing now is the end of the his­to­ry of the great incep­tion of Occi­den­tal human­i­ty, in which incep­tion human­i­ty was called to the guardian­ship of be-ing, only to trans­form this call­ing right away into the pre­ten­sion to re-present beings in their machi­na­tion­al unessence…

The except goes on at length in this vein, with Jew­ish “tech­no­log­i­cal machin­ery” pos­ing a threat to civ­i­liza­tion. Per­haps most shock­ing­ly, Hei­deg­ger attrib­uted Nazi con­cen­tra­tion camps to “self-destruc­tion,” com­plete­ly absolv­ing by omis­sion, and min­i­miz­ing and excus­ing, the crimes of his par­ty. An arti­cle in Ital­ian news­pa­per Cor­riere Del­la Sera doc­u­ments Heidegger’s defense of Nazism and his claim in 1942 that “the com­mu­ni­ty of Jews” is “the prin­ci­ple of destruc­tion” and that the camps were only a log­i­cal out­come of this prin­ci­ple, the “supreme ful­fill­ment of tech­nol­o­gy,” “corpse fac­to­ries.” The real vic­tims, of course, are the Ger­mans, and the Allies are guilty of ”repress­ing our will for the world.”

Hei­deg­ger intend­ed the “black note­books,” so damn­ing that sev­er­al schol­ars of Hei­deg­ger fought their pub­li­ca­tion, to be released after all of his work was pub­lished. As with all of the philosopher’s dif­fi­cult work, the note­books are often obscure; it is not always clear what he means to say. But major Hei­deg­ger schol­ars have respond­ed in a vari­ety of ways—including resign­ing a chair­ship of the Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger Soci­ety—that sug­gest the worst. Accord­ing to Dai­ly Nous, a web­site about the phi­los­o­phy pro­fes­sion, when Gün­ter Figal resigned his posi­tion in Jan­u­ary as chair of the Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger Soci­ety, he said:

As chair­man of a soci­ety, which is named after a per­son, one is in cer­tain way a rep­re­sen­ta­tive of that per­son. After read­ing the Schwarze Hefte [Black Note­books], espe­cial­ly the anti­se­mit­ic pas­sages, I do not wish to be such a rep­re­sen­ta­tive any longer. These state­ments have not only shocked me, but have turned me around to such an extent that it has become dif­fi­cult to be a co-rep­re­sen­ta­tive of this.

Whether or not this new evi­dence will cause more of his adher­ents to renounce his work remains to be seen, but the note­books, writes Peter Gor­don, will sure­ly “cast a dark shad­ow over Hei­deg­ger’s lega­cy.” A very dark shad­ow.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger Talks About Lan­guage, Being, Marx & Reli­gion in Vin­tage 1960s Inter­views

Mar­tin Hei­deg­ger Talks Phi­los­o­phy with a Bud­dhist Monk on Ger­man Tele­vi­sion (1963)

Human, All Too Human: 3‑Part Doc­u­men­tary Pro­files Niet­zsche, Hei­deg­ger & Sartre

Find cours­es on Hei­deg­ger in our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness