German Existentialism by Martin Heidegger

Author:Martin Heidegger [Heidegger, Martin]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, pdf
Publisher: Philosophical Library/Open Road
Published: 2014-11-04T05:00:00+00:00

THE CALL TO LABOR SERVICE

A Lecture by Professor Heidegger8

The new road to the education of our German youth leads through Hitler Labor Service.

This service provides a deep experience of toughness, down-to-earthness, of the strength and legitimacy of the simplest and most realistic work within the framework of the group.

This service provides a deep experience of the clarity and confirmation of the continuity of tradition that is subject to daily trial and decision, and experience of the responsibility of the individual toward the people to which he belongs.

This service provides a deep experience of the foundations of true comradeship, which develops only through the pressure of a great common danger, or through continually growing devotion to a task whose results can be grasped; it has nothing to do with the sentimental exchange of emotional outpourings between individuals who have agreed to eat, sleep and sing under the same roof.

This service provides a deep experience of the effective condition for a true consciousness of individuality, and takes the final decision concerning a choice of profession out of the realm of bourgeois and expedient reckoning of prospects.

We must consider the effect, already visible, of the Labor Service upon current life, and learn to grasp that it is preparing a mighty enrichment of the German existence of our growing youth. In the German colleges a new foundation for scholarly work will slowly emerge. On this account the concept of “spirit” and “spiritual work” that has hitherto flourished among the educated, and which its supporters wish even now to save because of a unique quality of spiritual creativeness, will vanish utterly. Only then shall we learn that work is spiritual in its own right. The animal and the almost animal cannot work, for they lack the fundamental experience required — that of decisive action toward a task, the ability to stand firm in resolution once an order has been received — in short they lack freedom, that is to say, spirit. A so-called “spiritual undertaking” justifies that name, not because it is directed toward “higher spiritual matters,” but only when as an undertaking it reaches far back into the need of the historical existence of a people, and is effectively — because consciously — motivated by the toughness and danger of human existence.

There exists only one single German “way of life.” It is that which is rooted in the enduring core of the people and in a way of work freely offered to the will of the State, a way whose enrichment is being shaped in the National Socialist Revolution. The lame, the complacent, the halfhearted will go into the Hitler Labor Service because to remain aloof would perhaps endanger their examination results or prospects of obtaining an appointment. The strong and unbroken, who permeate their existence with the secret of a new future for our people, are proud that toughness is demanded of them; for this is the moment when they approach the hardest tasks, that bring neither reward nor praise, but only joy

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