Heidegger And The Myth Of A Jewish World Conspiracy

In 2014, the first three volumes of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks—the personal and philosophical notebooks that he kept during the war years—were published in Germany. These notebooks provide the first textual evidence of anti-Semitism in Heidegger’s philosophy, not simply in passing remarks, but as incorporated into his philosophical and political thinking itself. In Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, Peter Trawny, the editor of those notebooks, offers the first evaluation of Heidegger’s philosophical project in light of the Black Notebooks. While Heidegger’s affiliation with National Socialism is well known, the anti-Semitic dimension of that engagement could not be fully told until now. Trawny traces Heidegger’s development of a grand “narrative” of the history of being, the “being-historical thinking” at the center of Heidegger’s work after Being and Time. Two of the protagonists of this narrative are well known to Heidegger’s readers: the Greeks and the Germans. The world-historical antagonist of this narrative, however, has remained hitherto undisclosed: the Jews, or, more specifically, “world Judaism.” As Trawny shows, world Judaism emerges as a racialized, destructive, and technological threat to the German homeland, indeed, to any homeland whatsoever. Trawny pinpoints recurrent, anti-Semitic themes in the Notebooks, including Heidegger’s adoption of crude cultural stereotypes, his assigning of racial reasons to philosophical decisions (even undermining his Jewish teacher, Edmund Husserl), his endorsement of a Jewish “world conspiracy,” and his first published remarks on the extermination camps and gas chambers (under the troubling aegis of a Jewish “self-annihilation”). Trawny concludes with a thoughtful meditation on how Heidegger’s achievements might still be valued despite these horrifying facets. Unflinching and systematic, this is one of the most important assessments of one of the most important philosophers in our history.

From the 1930s through the 1970s, the philosopher Martin Heidegger kept a running series of private writings, the so-called Black Notebooks. The recent publication of the Black Notebooks volumes from the war years have sparked international controversy. While Heidegger’s engagement with National Socialism was well known, the Black Notebooks showed for the first time that this anti-Semitism was not merely a personal resentment. They contain not just anti-Semitic remarks, they show Heidegger incorporating basic tropes of anti-Semitism into his philosophical thinking. In them, Heidegger tried to assign a philosophical significance to anti-Semitism, with “the Jew” or “world Judaism” cast as antagonist in his project. How, then, are we to engage with a philosophy that, no matter how significant, seems contaminated by anti-Semitism? This book brings together an international group of scholars from a variety of disciplines to discuss the ramifications of the Black Notebooks for philosophy and the humanities at large. Bettina Bergo, Robert Bernasconi, Martin Gessmann, Sander Gilman, Peter E. Gordon, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, Michael Marder, Eduardo Mendieta, Richard Polt, Tom Rockmore, Peter Trawny, and Slavoj Žižek discuss issues including anti-Semitism in the Black Notebooks and Heidegger’s thought more broadly, such as German conceptions of Jews and Judaism, Heidegger’s notions of metaphysics, and anti-Semitism’s entanglement with Heidegger’s views on modernity and technology, grappling with material as provocative as it is deplorable. In contrast to both those who seek to exonerate Heidegger and those who simply condemn him, and rather than an all-or-nothing view of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, they urge careful reading and rereading of his work to turn Heideggerian thought against itself. These measured and thoughtful responses to one of the major scandals in the history of philosophy unflinchingly take up the tangled and contested legacy of Heideggerian thought.

The first book to document Heidegger's close connections to Nazism-now available to a new generation of students

Martin Heidegger is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth-century, and his seminal text Being and Time is considered one of the most significant texts in contemporary philosophy. Yet his name has also been mired in controversy because of his affiliations with the Nazi regime, his failure to criticize its genocidal politics and his subsequent silence about the holocaust. Now, according to Heidegger's wishes, and to complete the publication of his multi-volume Complete Works, his highly controversial and secret 'Black Notebooks' have been released to the public. These notebooks reveal the extent to which Heidegger's 'personal Nazism' was neither incidental nor opportunistic, but part of his philosophical ethos. So, why would Heidegger, far from destroying them, allow these notebooks, which contain examples of this extreme thinking, to be published? In this revealing new book, Peter Trawny, editor of Heidegger's complete works in German, confronts these questions and, by way of a compelling study of his theoretical work, shows that Heidegger was committed to a conception of freedom that is only beholden to the judgement of the history of being; that is, that to be free means to be free from the prejudices, norms, or mores of one's time. Whoever thinks the truth of being freely exposes themselves to the danger of epochal errancy. For this reason, Heidegger's decision to publish his notebooks, including their anti-Jewish passages, was an exercise of this anarchical freedom. In the course of a wide-ranging discussion of Heidegger's views on truth, ethics, the truth of being, tragedy and his relationship to other figures such as Nietzsche and Schmitt, Trawny provides a compelling argument for why Heidegger wanted the explosive material in his Black Notebooks to be published, whilst also offering an original and provocative interpretation of Heidegger's work.

The world-historical antagonist of this narrative, however, has remained hitherto undisclosed: the Jews, or more specifically "world Judaism." As Trawny shows, world Judaism emerges for Heidegger as a racialized, destructive, technological threat to the German homeland, indeed to any homeland. Trawny pinpoints recurrent anti-Semitic themes in the Notebooks, including Heidegger's adoption of crude cultural stereotypes, his assigning of racial reasons to philsophical decisions (even undermining his Jewish teacher, Edmund Husserl), his especially damning endorsement of a Jewish "world conspiracy" (such as that proposed by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion), and his first published remarks on the extermination camps and gas chambers under the troubling aegis of a Jewish "self-annihilation." Trawny concludes with a thoughtful meditation on how Heidegger's achievements might still be valued despite these horrifying facets of his thought.

Considers the demonization of the Jews as the main factor which led to the Nazi extermination policy. Traces the history of the myth of a Jewish world conspiracy, mainly expressed in the fraudulent "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Mentions the use of the "Protocols" in antisemitic propaganda in Russia, Germany, and France. Analyzing the world-wide spread of the forgery as a phenomenon of collective psychopathology, states that the "Protocols" combines medieval and modern elements, reflecting the complex structure of modern antisemitism in its most virulent form.

Martin Heidegger is perhaps the twentieth century's greatest philosopher, and his work stimulated much that is original and compelling in modern thought. A seductive classroom presence, he attracted Germany's brightest young intellects during the 1920s. Many were Jews, who ultimately would have to reconcile their philosophical and, often, personal commitments to Heidegger with his nefarious political views. In 1933, Heidegger cast his lot with National Socialism. He squelched the careers of Jewish students and denounced fellow professors whom he considered insufficiently radical. For years, he signed letters and opened lectures with ''Heil Hitler!'' He paid dues to the Nazi party until the bitter end. Equally problematic for his former students were his sordid efforts to make existential thought serviceable to Nazi ends and his failure to ever renounce these actions. This book explores how four of Heidegger's most influential Jewish students came to grips with his Nazi association and how it affected their thinking. Hannah Arendt, who was Heidegger's lover as well as his student, went on to become one of the century's greatest political thinkers. Karl Löwith returned to Germany in 1953 and quickly became one of its leading philosophers. Hans Jonas grew famous as Germany's premier philosopher of environmentalism. Herbert Marcuse gained celebrity as a Frankfurt School intellectual and mentor to the New Left. Why did these brilliant minds fail to see what was in Heidegger's heart and Germany's future? How would they, after the war, reappraise Germany's intellectual traditions? Could they salvage aspects of Heidegger's thought? Would their philosophy reflect or completely reject their early studies? Could these Heideggerians forgive, or even try to understand, the betrayal of the man they so admired? Heidegger's Children locates these paradoxes in the wider cruel irony that European Jews experienced their greatest calamity immediately following their fullest assimilation. And it finds in their responses answers to questions about the nature of existential disillusionment and the juncture between politics and ideas.

Globalizing Race explores how intersections between French antisemitism and imperialism shaped the development of European racial thought. Ranging from the African misadventures of the antisemitic Marquis de Morès to the Parisian novels and newspapers of late nineteenth-century professional antisemites, Dorian Bell argues that France’s colonial expansion helped antisemitism take its modern, racializing form—and that, conversely, antisemitism influenced the elaboration of the imperial project itself. Globalizing Race radiates from France to place authors like Guy de Maupassant and Émile Zola into sustained relation with thinkers from across the ideological spectrum, including Hannah Arendt, Friedrich Nietzsche, Frantz Fanon, Karl Marx, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno. Engaging with what has been called the “spatial turn” in social theory, the book offers new tools for thinking about how racisms interact across space and time. Among these is what Bell calls racial scalarity. Race, Bell argues, did not just become globalized when European racism and antisemitism accompanied imperial penetration into the farthest reaches of the world. Rather, race became most thoroughly global as a method for constructing and negotiating the different scales (national, global, etc.) necessary for the development of imperial capitalism. As France, Europe, and the world confront a rising tide of Islamophobia, Globalizing Race also brings into fascinating focus how present-day French responses to Muslim antisemitism hark back to older, problematic modes of representing the European colonial periphery.