A few months ago the news of the publication of Heidegger's Black Notebooks (so-called as they are bound in black waxcloth) came as a bombshell.Footnote ² Crucial citations were circulated both in Germany and France prior to their publication suggesting that Heidegger's philosophy was inherently antisemitic. The Nouvel Observateur referred to une nouvelle ‘affaire’ Heidegger;Footnote ³ Die Zeit to ‘the poisoned heritage’Footnote ⁴ and Die Neue Züricher Zeitung to a ‘veiled philosophical antisemitism’.Footnote ⁵

Even those not familiar with Heidegger's work know at least one thing about him: that he was a Nazi. Why should we then be so scandalized to learn that Heidegger was also an antisemite? After all that is part of what defines the National Socialist ideology which Heidegger so readily endorsed. There have been endless debates about how to understand Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism. From the outset these discussions centred not only on Heidegger, the man but on Heidegger the philosopher. Not only did Heidegger join the National Socialist Party early in 1933 and encouraged others to do likewise but, more significantly, he claimed in his infamous Rectoral Addresses 1933/4 that National Socialism reflected his own philosophical standpoint. He regarded it as a force that could counter the global advance of modern technology and foster an adequate relationship to our human essence.

All this has been well documented but until now the question whether Heidegger's political views have tainted his philosophy has not been settled. The debate about Heidegger's philosophy started in the 1980s with the publication of Victor Farias’ book: Heidegger and Nazism (1987) in which he argued that Heidegger's philosophy was thoroughly fascistic. In 2005 Emmanuel Faye went further, claiming provocatively that Heidegger's philosophy inspired the Final Solution and that fascist and racist ideas were so engrained into the fabric of Heidegger's thought that it no longer deserved the name philosophy.Footnote ⁶

These publications sent shock waves across the philosophical community. However the arguments provided by Farias and Faye were criticized as ill-founded; critics claimed that their scholarship was poor and, in the case of Faye, that the most contentious citations were either fabricated or based on hearsay.Footnote ⁷ While there is no doubt that Heidegger was a Nazi, at least for a time, no decisive evidence has been provided to suggest that his philosophy should be discredited. Indeed, what we know about the period remains sparse. We know that Heidegger resigned as Rector from the University in 1934 and that he decided never to get involved in party politics again: This is why he remained as he put it ‘in the provinces’ (1934). Indeed, we know much about his regrets: we were told that his involvement with party politics was ‘the greatest stupidity of … [his] life’Footnote ⁸; that he felt pained that his much admired teacher Edmund Husserl suffered from the Nazification decree which called for a summary retirement of all civil servants of ‘non-Aryan’ descent and that ‘it was a human failing’ on his part that he did not once more express his gratitude or admiration at Husserl's sick bed or at the time of his death (Cf. Spiegel Interview page 52).Footnote ⁹ He did not attend the funeral in 1938. We also know Heidegger's feeble excuse for never publicly condemning National Socialism was that he did not want to put his life and that of his family at risk.Footnote ¹⁰ That much we know. However, what we do not know is what he thought about the persecution of the Jews and the atrocities that were happening around him at the time. In his published works and interviews, no reference is made, for example, to the ‘night of broken glass’ (Reichskritstallnacht) or the death camps apart from a short reference in the Bremer Lectures shortly after the war (1949), where he distinguishes between authentic death with the industrial liquidation of human beings and aligns his critique of factory farming with the death camps. To my knowledge the only other reference that he makes to the death camps is in a letter to Marcuse in January 1948 in which he equates the murder of six million Jews with the crimes committed by the Allies against the Germans from the Eastern territorities after the war – the only difference being ‘that everything that has occurred since 1945 has become public knowledge, while the bloody terror of the Nazis in point of fact had been kept a secret from the German people’ (Ibid. 31).

Our hope now is that these Black Notebooks covering the period from the 1930's onward will finally shed some light on Heidegger's views on these matters.

Yet such hopes are quickly dashed. In the volumes just published covering the years 1931–42 there is no mention of the Reichskristallnacht or the persecution of the Jews and apparently in the volumes to come there is no reference to the death camps either. However something quite different and unexpected has come to light, namely that Hannah Arendt and others were mistaken when they claimed that Heidegger did not share the National Socialist party's antisemitic ideology. The Black Notebooks reveal that Heidegger was an antisemite, indeed, quite a crude and vulgar one. Moreover, according to their editor, Peter Trawny, they show conclusively that Heidegger's critique of modernity and thus his philosophy is inherently antisemitic. Trawny was so disturbed by what he read that despite Heidegger's expressed desire for these notebooks to be published as the last of his collected works, he persuaded Herman Heidegger, the executor of the archive, to defy his father's wish and to publish them immediately. Further, he decided to write a book on the Black Notebooks showing how Heidegger's philosophical thought is infected by the antisemitic myth spread by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, namely, that there is an international Jewish conspiracy planning world domination.Footnote ¹¹

While the press in general endorsed Trawny's view, some felt that he had gone too far. François Fédier, the official translator of Heidegger's work into French, called for Trawny's book to be banned. He insisted that there is no antisemitism in Heidegger's work and one should not dismiss Heidegger's philosophy on the basis of a few remarks taken out of context.Footnote ¹² The joint launch of the Black Notebooks and Trawny's book became a media circus. It was televised and featured on several talk shows and every mainstream German and French newspaper covered the story.

Following these debates I was curious to explore what this furore was all about. The Black Notebooks (34 in total) are a kind of philosophical diary written between 1931 and the 1970s. Yet unlike a diary only a few of the entries are dated and it is not always clear whether they were written in chronological order. Further, it seems that the Black Notebooks are a revised version of an original which is no longer available. The volumes under review cover the years 1931 to 1941 (eleven of twelve Notebooks in total; the first one from 1930 is missing). According to Trawny, it is not known whether Heidegger kept notebooks from the period 1941 to 1945. A notebook dated 1945–6 surfaced in January 2014.Footnote ¹³ Apparently, like all the later notebooks, this one does not contain antisemitic statements. It appears that the contentious passages appear in the volumes under review (vols. 94–96 of the Collected Works).

What is startling while reading these volumes and after having followed the debates is that the Jews are hardly mentioned. Heidegger's main reflections are about his retreat from the political, his disappointment with National Socialism and with the University, his critique of imperialism which he saw exemplified in America, England and Russia, his critique of Catholicism and, finally and most importantly, his apocalyptical vision of the inevitable end of history which he believed would result in a radical new beginning that could save mankind.

Such apocalyptical thought informs much of Heidegger's later work. Heidegger believes that the root of our malaise lies in the fact that we have severed our relation to Being. This is expressed in his critique of modern technology. We are told that modern technology has come to dominate every aspect of our lives alienating us from ourselves and our relation to Being. The problem is that we no longer think, we only calculate and measure. Heidegger calls our age the ‘age of machination’ (Machenschaft); it reflects the way Western metaphysics is consumed by the ‘will to power’. In philosophy this makes itself manifest by the fact that philosophy, or rather philosophy professors fail to distinguish between an object of scholarship and the matter of thought. They believe that their raison d’être is to provide watertight arguments and conclusive proofs. Yet we are told that this has nothing to do with philosophy or ‘thinking’. What matters is not whether Descartes made a mistake but what he was trying to think: The matter of thought. As Heidegger reiterates throughout these volumes: The question is more important than the answer. The function of the question is to make us perplexed about the matters themselves.

Heidegger fears that modern technology instils in us the belief that we can control nature through calculation and measurement. We regard nature as disposable and manipulable. Yet our power is illusory since by objectifying nature, we ourselves become objectified. We come to regard ourselves as replaceable and refer to ourselves as human resources and as human assets. What counts is what can be measured and not what is essential to us: thinking. The more our technological thinking takes over, the more mankind will become brutalised. (Vol. 96: 254) This is reflected in how we react to atrocities:

‘Whether the Bolsheviks kill one individual because of her convictions – without any legal investigation – or a hundred thousand people is immaterial. Our society, oriented toward quantitative thinking, believes one hundred thousand to be more than One whereas really One single person is already too many and cannot be overtaken by any number […] There is a danger that the killing of a few against the killing of many thousands is not perceived as bad and we refer to something “subhuman” only when the numbers of people involved are considered sufficiently large’. (Vol. 96: 237). Our obsession with numbers undermines the value and meaning of each individual life.

Many may agree with the views expressed above. Rather than outrage, we may feel that his critical voice still has pertinence in our time.

Indeed, what is fascinating about these Black Notebooks is that they explain why his affiliation with National Socialism was short lived. We learn that he detests its crude racism and antisemitism. He condemns the concept of race and the veneration of Blut und Boden [Blood and Soil] (Vol. 96: 55) in equal measure. He realises that the very concept of ‘race’ is a modern one; it is part of the age of machination:

Heidegger thus clearly rejects a ‘vulgar’ National Socialism (Vol.: 94: 142). It falls prey to the machination of our age of which biological racism is just a symptom (Cf. Vol. 94: 381). National Socialism turns out to be nothing other than a rational socialism (Rationalsozialismus). This accounts for his disillusionment. German Nazism turns out to be in essence the same as Soviet Bolshevism and American capitalism.

Moreover, Heidegger disapproves of the idea that philosophy should be defined by nationality. He rejects the concept of a National Socialist philosophy (Cf Vol. 94: 509) and deplores the ‘childish efforts to create a German philosophy’ (Vol.: 96: 212). However, Heidegger is not consistent. Although he claims that there is no such thing as German or French philosophy, throughout these Black Notebooks Heidegger dismisses English and American philosophy as not being proper philosophy but having succumbed to technological thinking by focusing on pragmatic and epistemological questions alone and argues that ‘only the German can give a new poetic voice to Being’. (Vol: 94: 27).

It soon becomes evident that Heidegger's reflections are Janus faced. Although he is critical of vulgar National Socialism (Vol.: 94: 142) and its inherent vulgar antisemitism – there are passages in these volumes, notably the last one Vol.96 dating from 1938 to 1941 which strike quite a different note. They reveal how Heidegger held fast to a spiritual National Socialism ‘geistigen Nationalsozialismus’ (Vol 94: 135) that coincides with its own form of spiritual or philosophical antisemitism. It is in 1938/9 that he mentions the Jews for the first time as a contributing factor in the forgetfulness of Being which defines our modern condition. There are passages which reveal not only Heidegger's antisemitic sentiments but also a terrifying lack of compassion for the plight that the Jewish people were facing in Nazi Germany at the time. Take this one as an example:

There is something cold-blooded and unsympathetic about this passage. The Jews have not only introduced the concept of race or at least have identified themselves longest according to that principle, but, more disturbingly, he mocks their plight: Heidegger is maliciously confounding the Jewish practice of endogamy with the principle of race in order to make a heartless joke about the way they have been subject to the Nueremberg Racial Laws, laws which deprived them of all rights and systematically excluded them from civil life. So when Heidegger says that it is in a way absurd that the Jews oppose the Nazis’ racial theories as they have ‘lived according to the race principle for longest’ – he seems to regard their suffering as self-inflicted.

We find a similar form of warped reasoning when Heidegger reflects on the Second World War in 1941:

A chilling passage this. Heidegger deplores the fact that the Jews were allowed to leave Germany – failing to acknowledge that many were forced to flee. Heidegger seems to advance a kind of conspiracy theory: Once ‘allowed out’, the Jews are dispersed all over the world emigrating to countries such as Russia, USA, Australia, Chile, Argentine and the UK. World Jewry becomes elusive (unfassbar) and exerts its power behind the scenes instigating the war against the Third Reich; a war in which the Jews do not have to expose their own lives, while the best blood of the German is being shed.

Even if one takes into consideration that both Heidegger's sons were fighting at the front at that time, one would not expect him to endorse such a conspiracy theory. After all, Heidegger was well aware of the plight Jews had to endure. As is well known, Heidegger was always keen to emphasise that he had many colleagues and students of Jewish descent with whom he remained friends throughout. In the last interview with Der Spiegel, for example, he recalls how he had remained friends with Karl Jaspers (who had a Jewish wife) and Helene Weiss who had to emigrate to Scotland. Cf. Spiegel Interview, op. cit., 50 As we know, to have Jewish friends in no way proves that one is not an antisemite yet Heidegger clearly cites this fact as a kind of alibi.

With citations such as these a different Heidegger comes to light; not one who is free from any crude antisemitism. Although there are only about twelve passages in total which express such antisemitic sentiments, Trawny is justified in feeling a sense of outrage. We simply cannot treat these passages as insignificant, they do show how Heidegger articulates views which we could easily find in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Here is a final proof that Heidegger was not only attracted to National Socialism as an anti-modern intellectual movement, he actually shared its crude and virulent anti-Semitism. This is something no one could have expected.

At issue is not only Heidegger, the person but also Heidegger the philosopher. Some passages (though few in number) clearly suggest that Heidegger also advances a philosophical or highfalutin antisemitism that is tied up with his critique of modernity.

This passage shows how Heidegger's antisemitism is deeply embedded in his philosophical critique of modernity and his account of the history of Being: Jews thrive in this decline of the West – and the age of machination. Western metaphysics has made room for an empty rationality which reflects the Jewish way of thinking – namely their tasteless ‘talent’ for calculation.

Moreover Heidegger clearly believes that the Jewish people as a ‘race’ can never save us from our decline.

According to Heidegger, mankind can only be saved if we are able to overcome the age of machination and our will to power and instead become guardians of Being. The Jewish people as a ‘race’ are inherently prevented from achieving this. The above passage continues by referring to Edmund Husserl. Heidegger expresses his admiration for Husserl's philosophical achievement, however he does so in order to make the antisemitic point that whatever Husserl's insights, the fact that he is a Jew made it impossible for him to escape calculative rationality and the ills of Western metaphysics – Although Heidegger immediately adds that his critique is not against Husserl alone, it is a candid acknowledgement as it does not question the initial claim, that Husserl's thought or philosophy is limited by the fact that he is a Jew. That he belongs to the Jewish ‘race’ prevents him from penetrating into the ground of philosophy – the question of Being.

The point is that a Jew cannot become a guardian of Being, Heidegger repeats this in the following two passages:

Here Heidegger's apocalyptical thinking comes to the fore. The passage outlines the history of Being from its inception when we were called to be the guardians of Being to its dreadful decline when our guardianship is transformed to a will to serve the aimless demands of machination – the Machenshaft. Initially it appears that those who are rootless, viz. the Jews have the upper hand. Impelled by the utmost destructiveness, they win a battle, a battle which is however not worth winning – as it leads to the end of history. The hope is expressed that in the moment of utter destruction – the zero point of history – we can become guardians of Being again. However we are told that the Jews won't be able to hear the call of Be-ing because they remain bound up with calculating about beings and take their calculations for reality. By their very nature they will exclude themselves from the new beginning.

‘Novel’ about these passages is not Heidegger's critique of modernity and his turning away from the Judeo-Christian tradition to the Greeks. Readers familiar with Heidegger's work are only too keenly aware of his virulent critique of modernity and the age of machination. They are equally aware that Heidegger repeatedly criticises Husserl for epitomizing the tradition of philosophy by failing to address the question of Being. However, what is ‘new’ and shocking – or what at least Heidegger has not expressed anywhere else and to my knowledge is only mentioned in the passages I have just cited – is that Heidegger believes that the Jews, by their very nature, cannot address the question of Being and thus cannot become guardians of Being. This is the nouvelle ‘affaire’ heideggerienne.

The Black Notebooks reveal how Heidegger's critique of modernity and his account of the history of Being are informed by his antisemitism. Of course this is not visible in the philosophical writings with which we are familiar. And we may wonder whether he always had the Jews in mind or whether he associated our modern condition with the Jews only in the passages we have just cited. This is impossible to establish – however, the likelihood is that this view is not a brief aberration but one he held throughout his life. It thus seems clear that Heidegger advances not only a vulgar antisemitism but moreover a highfalutin one in the context, and in the language of his philosophical critique of modernity. This may say something important about the way Heidegger understands his critique of modernity.

This raises the question how are we meant to understand his critique of modernity? Is it essentially antisemitic? The answer must be negative. The fact remains that the published texts – which articulate a critique of modernity – provide a critique of the Judeo-Christian tradition as such, however, show no trace of antisemitism and have been, and still can be commented on and influence contemporary thought without propagating antisemitism. The texts have not changed. There is no need to revise our understanding of them. The new scandal is thus that Heidegger articulates a philosophical antisemitism but not that his philosophy is essentially antisemitic. We have learned how his thinking is antisemitic. Yet this does not discredit Heidegger's philosophy.

A nagging question remains which I find impossible to answer: Why did Heidegger wish the Black Notebooks to be his last published work? Were they meant to represent the pinnacle of his writings? Could it be that Heidegger had simply forgotten what he had said about the Jews in these Black Notebooks in the thirties (after all Trawny claims that the Jews are not mentioned in the later notebooks)? This is highly unlikely as Heidegger edited them in the 1970s shortly before his death. A charitable interpretation would be to argue that Heidegger always insisted that we should treat his collected edition as paths (Wege) and not works (Werke). This could suggest that he wanted to show that his paths also include Irrwege (paths that lead us astray). Yet this is too simplistic. If he really felt that he had made a mistake, he could have acknowledged it in the same way as he admitted that his affiliation to National Socialism was an error. The only conclusion I can draw is that Heidegger never changed his mind on this, namely that the Jews are the representatives of our modern condition – they are so entrenched in it that they can never allow for a new beginning, they can only increase our alienation.

Even if I am correct in my thinking, it is impossible to know why exactly he only wanted to make these views known after his death and why they were meant to be published as the last volumes of his collected works. He was particularly secretive about the Black Notebooks; no one was meant to have access to them in advance. Whatever the reason, one thing is certain: he never left anything to chance. Heidegger was a true spin doctor of his own fate. However much Heidegger despised modernity and mass media, the man ‘who remained in the provinces’ was well in control of his own image. Even the last interview with Der Spiegel was well orchestrated, as a recent study by Lutz Hachmeister shows.Footnote ¹⁴ Heidegger laid down what questions could be raised in advance, insisted on editing the interview before its publication and made sure that it be published posthumously (it came out three days after his death). There is certainly a reason why he wished these Black Notebooks to be his final legacy, however what that reason is, we may never know.

Once again we fail to find what we are so desperately looking for in these Black Notebooks. We want Heidegger – one of the key thinkers of 20^th century philosophy – to acknowledge the atrocities that were happening around him in the name of the German people. We are looking for a moral or ethical response. Yet there is none, not in Heidegger's work nor coming from Heidegger, the man. I guess we still foster what Paul Celan was after when he visited Heidegger in his hut in Todtnauberg in 1967: ‘a hope, today for a thinker's word to come in the heart’Footnote ¹⁵ [eine Hoffnung, heute, auf eines Denkenden kommendes Wort im Herzen] but the Black Notebooks have shattered such hopes once and for all.