Nature, History, State by Heidegger Martin; Fried Gregory; Polt Richard

Author:Heidegger, Martin; Fried, Gregory; Polt, Richard
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1394908
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-07-16T16:00:00+00:00

3 WHO BELONGS? HEIDEGGER’S PHILOSOPHY OF THE VOLK IN 1933–4

Robert Bernasconi

I

It is clear that Heidegger was a committed Nazi during 1933–4, the period primarily under consideration here. But although there has been a great deal of debate about the relation of his politics to his philosophy, the discussion of his adherence to National Socialism has, with relatively few exceptions, tended to rest on the false unstated assumption that National Socialism was a largely uniform movement. As Christopher Hutton explains, there is a “considerable communication gap” between specialist studies on Nazi Germany and the wider academic public when it comes to exploring the competing understandings of German identity within National Socialism.1 This communication gap is especially in evidence in the debate about Heidegger’s Nazism. It is not enough to examine what Heidegger said in order to compare it either with our preconceived notions of National Socialism or even with his subsequent accounts of what he understood by the Nazi movement at that time. If we are to understand what Heidegger was saying and why he was saying it in the way he was, then at very least we need to have an understanding of the debates within the Nazi party so as to figure out his place in them. To be sure, because Heidegger’s defense after the war partly rested on his claim that in company with many intellectuals he worked to transform some of the essential formulations of National Socialism (GA 16: 398), there is always a suspicion that asking “what kind of Nazi” he was is simply an exercise in apologetics.2 But that would be a poor excuse for not pursuing the difficult scholarly task of trying to locate Heidegger within the ongoing debates among his contemporaries on the meaning of National Socialism so as to read him more rigorously. I will show that Heidegger’s account of the Volk at the beginning of the Nazi period marks a decisive step in his philosophical itinerary and that it does so in an overdetermined political context. Understanding this step is crucial to the interpretation not just of his politics, but also of his philosophy, given—and I here confirm what others have long believed—they cannot always be neatly separated.

National Socialism was fractured from beginning to end but, because of the unique value that the Nazis placed on the unity of the German people, they can frequently be found in pursuit of biological community as well as psychic and spiritual conformity, or both, however those were to be understood. Frequently the emphasis was placed on the biological. As Alfred Rosenberg put it in 1934, the task of National Socialism was to turn the German nation into “one huge block of seventy millions suffused with the same blood,”3 but whatever weight was placed on the biological, it was never all that mattered in a context of extreme antagonism with neighbor turning on neighbor. Appeals to unity were admissions of disunity, and by a remorseless logic that is not peculiar to National Socialism, but which

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