Nazi Foundations in Heideggers Work

Faye, Emmanuel.
Watson, Alexis.
Golsan, Richard Joseph, 1952South Central Review, Volume 23, Number 1, Spring 2006, pp.
55-66 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press
DOI: 10.1353/scr.2006.0006

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NAZI FOUNDATIONS IN HEIDEGGERS WORK / FAYE

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Nazi Foundations in Heideggers Work

Emmanuel Faye, Paris XNanterre
Translated by Alexis Watson and Richard J. Golsan

FOR MANY YEARS I have been interested in the work of Martin Heidegger
and the effects of his hermeneutics on our concept of the history of
philosophy, notably in Cartesian studies. Five years ago, I became aware
of particularly odious texts that had just been published in the sixteenth
volume of Heideggers so-called Collected Works, or Gesamtausgabe
(GA). These texts exceed in their radicalism what one had been able to
read up until then in the earlier editions of Guido Schneeberger. As a
result, I began reexamining the essence of Heideggers work. I was surprised to see that his Hitlerism was not only the subject of speeches and
conferences, but it constituted an explicit thread in a considerable number of his lectures. It was not only as Rector of the University of Freiburg,
but also as a professor of philosophy, that Heidegger put body and soul
to the service of spreading Nazism.
The importance of my work on Heidegger can only be understood,
then, if we take into account the current state of his entire oeuvre. Dealing simply with works and translations, most of which are sugar-coated,
published in France and abroad over the past fifty years, is inadequate.
One must deal with the sixty-six volumes which today appear in German in Gesamtausgabe. There we discover that under apparently philosophical titlesThe Fundamental Question of Philosophy, Of the
Essence of Truth, LogicHeidegger taught his philosophy students
the very doctrine of Hitlerism, with its racist concepts and vlkisch supremacy of the German essence, its praise of the Weltanschauung (or
world vision) of the Fhrer, and its reference to the blood voice and
the blood heredity (das Geblt). Heideggers Nazism is thus not limited
to a few speeches of the moment. It can be found at the heart of his
teachings from 1933 to 1944. Equally important, far from having distanced himself from these lectures, he planned to include their publication in his collected work: the lectures of 1933 to 1944 today represent,
in effect, twenty volumes of the Gesamtausgabe.
In my own work, I have attempted to gauge just how deeply this Nazi
indoctrination penetrated. I have discovered, along with the volumes
recently published, a certain number of unpublished texts, especially
South Central Review 23.1 (Spring 2006): 5566.

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two seminars from the years 19331935 which shed an even more radical light on the question of his Nazism. The most radical textthe seminar that is strictly speaking Hitlerianis entitled On the Essence and
the Concepts of Nature, History, and State, which I analyze and edit in
part in chapter 5 of my book. But the second unedited seminar, the one
on Hegel and the State, also brings entirely new elements to light. I
have brought these unedited texts to the public eye, so as to make us
fully aware of the necessity of a re-examination of the ensemble of
Heideggers work and its very foundations.
I want to stress that the guiding thread of my research was not initially that of Heideggers Nazism, but his conception of man. It was
while I was in the process of explaining the very substructure of his
work that I was able to gauge the extent to which Nazism was inscribed
therein. Since then, it is apparent to me that it is absolutely impossible
to separate ideology from philosophy in Heideggers work. Can we, in
effect, seriously endeavor to take the sixty-six volumes in Gesamtausgabe one by one and form two piles: to the right, the works that are pure
Nazi ideology, to the left, those which might be considered relevant to
philosophy? Heidegger himself conceived of his Gesamtausgabe as a
whole. He organized its publication chronologically so that the most
overtly Hitlerian and pro-Nazi lectures would appear after his death, so
that they should take their place at the heart of the work itself, with no
reservation or repentance. It is this whole, this ensemble, which he bequeathed as his legacy, as his complete work, for generations to come.
My research on National Socialism itself convinced me that it constitutes, strictly speaking, less an ideology than a movement (Bewegung).
Of course, Nazism encompasses a certain number of constants: racism,
anti-Semitism, the radical affirmation of the superiority of the German
essence and spirit, the desire to expand Germanys vital space for
colonization, the expulsion and even total extermination of peoples said
to be inferior as well as those identified as the enemy. But these invariants were only affirmed one at a time, or they were softened or placed
on the back burner according to the circumstances on power relations
of the moment. We know, for example, of the speeches in favor of peace
by the Fhrer in the first years that followed the political coup, even as
he was thinking of nothing but the rearmament of Germany. The
movements extraordinary capacity to adapt is something we must
always keep in mind. Nevertheless, it is as movement that Heidegger
sings the praises of National Socialism in his 1935 seminars, where he
exalts the internal truth and grandeur of this movement (die innere
Wahrheit und GrBe dieser Bewegung). Moreover, this point is crucial

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to understanding the evolution of the relationship between Heideggers

work and the National Socialist movement. It also helps us to understand euphemistic strategies which he incorporated into his work, first
of all in the 1920s, and then after the Nazi defeat of 1945. Thus for
example, at the end of the1940s, in an unedited letter to Ernst Jnger
archived at Marbach, Heidegger affirmed, with regard to an aphorism
by Rivarol, that the movement continued in a state of stillness.

1. THE POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF BEING AND TIME,

IN LIGHT OF RECENTLY PUBLISHED LECTURES

My research also deals with the 1920s, from Heideggers lectures of

1925 entitled The current conflict for a historical vision of the world to
Being and Time, published in 1927. I discovered the importance of intellectual bonds which linked Heidegger to racist authors and protoNazis like Erich Rothacker, Alfred Baeumler, Oskar Becker, and even
the raciologist Ludwig Clauss, to whom Heidegger would confide: what
I think, I will say once I am a tenured professor. It is necessary to
remain aware of this context in order to understand the affirmations of
Being and Time such as the famous 74 on historicity, in which
Heidegger declares that existence is not defined as destiny, except
through a community and a people. The identification of the authentic
Dasein with Gemeinschaft and with the Volk is thus confirmed in 1927
in Being and Time. And I provide, in the first chapter of my book, enough
information along those lines for us to proceed with a deeper reexamination of Being and Time.
In addition, the lectures currently available from 193334 reveal to
us that Heidegger, in his book on Kant from 1929, only re-addresses the
question What is man? so as to transform it in his seminars and writings from the 1930s, into Who are we? He responds, we are the
people, the only people who still have a history and a vlkisch destiny. In effect, Heidegger understands this people as vlkisch, that is
to say according to his own terms, as a race (Rasse). For him, it is necessary to accomplish a total transformation of the existence of man,
in accordance with the education for the National Socialist worldview,
inculcated in the people through the Fhrers speeches (GA 36/37, 225).
Can we seriously believe that for Heidegger these pro-Nazi views
are only a fleeting political aberration that can be ignored in assessing
the value of Being and Time? This would run counter to the most explicit affirmations of Heidegger himself. In effect in 1934, he explained

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to his students that carethe most central term of Being and Time
is the condition in which it is possible for man to be political in essence (GA 36/37, 218). Heidegger declares at this timeone year after the National Socialist movement came to powerthat we
ourselves, that is to say the German people, united under the Hitlerian
Fhrung, are faced with an even greater decision than that which
served as the origin of Greek philosophy! This decision, he specifies,
was articulated in my book, Being and Time. It concerns, he added, a
belief which must manifest itself through history and concerns the
spiritual history of our people (GA 36/37, 255). At the foundation of
Heideggers work, one thus finds not a philosophical idea, but rather a
vlkisch belief in the ontological superiority of a people and a race;
moreover, the term vlkisch designates in its Nazi usage the conception
of a people as a marriage of blood and race, with a strong anti-Semitic
connotation, according to the Grimm dictionary. Frankly, an attentive
reading of key paragraphs in Being and Time on death and historicity,
with their celebration of sacrifice, of the choice of heroes and of the
authentic destiny of Dasein in the community of the people, shows that
this belief was already in place as of 1927.
With Heidegger, the question of man has thus become a vlkisch question. It is in this sense that I spoke earlier of Heideggers intention to
introduce Nazism into philosophy. Of course, no true philosophy can
align itself with the project of the extermination of human beings, a
project to which the Nazi movement was committed. Therefore, I do
not wish to say that Heidegger produced a National Socialist philosophy, but rather that he did not hesitate to utilize philosophical expressions such as truth of Being or essence of man to express something else entirely.

2. THE IDENTIFICATION OF BEING IN THE STATE AND THE

DISCUSSION OF CARL SCHMITT IN THE TWO UNEDITED SEMINARS
FROM 19331935
The recently published lectures are not the only texts where the teachings of Heidegger reveal themselves as impregnated with Hitlerism. As
I indicated earlier, unedited seminars exist as well. It is in the latter that
we best see the intensity of Heideggers Hitlerism. In the winter seminar of 19331934, the final three meetings treat the essence and concept of the State. In front of a hand-picked audience consisting largely
of his students wearing the uniform of the SA or the SS, Heidegger de-

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livered what he called a lecture on political education, with the goal

of forming a political nobility in the service of the Third Reich.
In fact, it is the entirety of Heideggerian doctrine that is implicated in
this teaching of Nazi politics: in the lecture he equates, in effect, the
ontological relationship between Being and beings with the political
relationship between the State and the people! He declares, in fact, that
the State is to its people what Being is to beings. It is a question, he
says, introducing the eros of Fhrer State into the souls of the people.
As in State, Movement, Peoplethe most radically Nazi of Carl
Schmitts booksone must bring everything back to the living bond
of racial essence that unites the Fhrer and his people. Heideggerian
identification of Being with the vlkisch State, with the Fhrer State, is
total. He affirms, in effect, in the conclusion of his seminar, that the
State is the most substantive reality that must give a new sense, an original
sense, to the totality of Being. Moreover, it would be difficult to find a
more radical exaltation of the total domination of Hitlerism over the
minds of the people. After having made the tribute to vlkisch destiny
and to the eros of the people for the Fhrer State, Heidegger describes
how the essence and the superiority of the Fhrer have inscribed themselves in the Being and souls of the people in order to bind them primordially and passionately to the task. The faith Heidegger manifests
in his lectures leads, in fact, to a total possession of the human being,
subjugated body and soul, by the Hitlerian Fhrung.
In the other unedited seminar published in partial form in chapter 8
of my book, Heidegger affirms in 1935, that the Nazi State will last
longer than 100 years. So the goal of his lectures in this instance is to
reinforce the notion of the Reichs duration over the long-term. In these
two seminars as well, he explicitly refers to Carl Schmitt and his concept of the political. According to Heidegger, Schmitts distinction between friend and foe is not close enough to the source. Like Alfred
Baeumler, Heidegger identifies the political with the self-preservation,
(Selbstbehauptung) the people and the race. Thus, he can affirm that his
concept of the political is original while Schmitts is simply derivative. This does not mean that Heidegger completely rejects Schmitts
doctrine, since he embraces Schmitts friend/foe distinction. Nor is it
possible to speak of breaking new philosophical ground in this instance,
because the concept of self-preservation, taken from Spengler, Baeumler
and from Heideggers own rectorate speech, is trivial. Heideggers comments on Schmitt are, in reality, the expression of an effort on his part to
affirm his supremecy over Schmitt, to claim for himself the role of the
true spiritual Fhrer of the movement.

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3. THE LEGITIMATION OF RACIAL SELECTION DURING THE PERIOD

19391942, AND THE PERVERSION OF THE WORD METAPHYSICS
As discussed, my study of Heidegger is not restricted to the years
19331935. Previously, I had assumed that this period (19331935) represented the culminating moment of Heideggers Nazism. In fact, the
period from 19391942 was blacker still. During the latter period, racial selection and racial thought would become guiding themes in
the lectures on Nietzsche as they are reedited in the so-called definitive
edition, in a text from 19391940 entitled Koinon (GA 69), and in his
writings on Junger that have recently been published (Zu Ernst Junger,
GA 90). Heidegger goes so far as to affirm that racial selection is metaphysically necessary, that racial thought springs from the experience
of the Being as subjectivity. Within this context, Heidegger does not
hesitate to speak of the not-yet-purified German essence. In some of
the ways in which he uses the word metaphysics, it is impossible to
deny that he intends not a moral approval of Nazismlike Nietzsche,
Heidegger situates himself outside all moral judgementsbut an ontological and historical legitimitization of Nazi racism. Furthermore, the
word Legitimization is also at the heart of his meditation on Jungers
Nietzschianism (cf. for example GA 90, 170).
It is necessary, in order to understand what Heidegger had in mind, to
reflect on the lectures that have most recently appeared in the so-called
definitive edition, and not on Nietzsche (1961). In the latter, Heidegger
had modified the text of his lectures to make them more palatable. Thus,
I discovered that the lecture of MayJune 1940 on European Nihilism, given at the moment of the invasion of France by Nazi armies,
concludes, in the original, with the exaltation of the total mobilizationthat is to say fundamentally radicalof the Wehrmacht. This
mobilization constitutes for him a metaphysical act which, without
question, surpasses in profundity the suppression of philosophy in
the curriculum (GA 48, 333)! Therefore, the fact of the suppression of
the teaching of philosophy is secondary to him! What constitutes a metaphysical act for him, implicating the determination of the totality of
being as unconditional power and as will for planetary domination, is
that the mobilization of the Wehrmacht permitted the clear victory of
June 1940. The use of the word metaphysics with regard to the
Wehrmacht and racial politics is not then a philosophical usage, but
rather a politically militant one andin a worda Nazi usage.

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Heideggers strategy, which succeeded well for him most notably in

the French reception of his work, consisted of reversing his discourse
on nihilism and metaphysics after the defeat of Nazism, which after
Stalingrad was a quasi-certainty, and accomplished historically in 1945.
This was the only real turning (Kehre) in his work, and it was strategic. Indeed, in his 1936 lectures on Schelling, he voiced an explicit
tribute to Mussolini and Hitler, whom he presented as the two men
who launched counter-movements [against nihilism] in Europe, undertaken through the political organization of the nation, that is to say of
the people (GA 42, 4041). So it is clear that Nazism, for him, in no
way coincides with nihilism, but constitutes on the contrary a countermovement to European nihilism.
Moreover, as we have seen, at the outset of the 1940s, the adjective
metaphysical still had a largely positive significance for him. In his
texts on Jnger from the same period, very recently published in volume 90 of the Gesamtausgabe, it is not so much nihilism that preoccupies Heidegger, as it is what he calls the next zone of decision, where
the struggle concerns exclusively the question of world power. And
he specifies that the decision consists above all in determining if the
democratic empires (England, the United States)will prevail or if imperial dictatorships of absolute military power for its own sake [which is
for him the characteristic of the Third Reich] will prevail (GA 90, 221).
What is at stake in this war of the Third Reich for world domination?
What Heidegger labels the force of the not-yet-purified essence of the
Germans (GA 90, 222), which is to be joined with a new truth of
Being. Hence, it is a question not only of assuring the domination of
the Hitlerian Reich, but equally one of advancing toward the purification of the essence of the Germans themselves. It is in this context that,
from 1940 to 1942, Heidegger sprinkles in his writings declarations
legitimizing racial selection and exalting what he calls racial thought
and racial Being (Rasse-sein). At this stage, metaphysics is not yet
corrupted in ways that it will become for him, once Heidegger realizes
that the defeat of the Reich is imminent.
It is necessary, of course, to underline the ambivalance of the
Heideggerian discourse on metaphysics, which becomes increasingly
pronounced from 1936 to 1942: on the one hand, the theme of metaphysical accomplishment allows for the legitimization of the identification of the totality of being with power and all that follows: the mobilization of the Wehrmacht, racial selection, and the future purification of
the German essence; on the other hand, the ontological difference allows for the rejection of all definitive determination of the meaning of

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the word Being and therefore the sustaining of the largest possible
indetermination and opacity as to the foundations of the work, which
remain hidden and so therefore seem to elude criticism.
But let us come back to the passage in the lecture on Nietzsche dealing with the question of racial selection. Heidegger writes the following, in a sentence in which he raises the selection of race to the level of
an idea, while underscoring the words principle and thought:
It is only where the unconditional subjectivity of the will to
power becomes the truth of being in its totality that the principle behind the institution of racial selection, that is to say not
merely a simple formulation of race deriving from itself, but
the thought of race as knowing itself, is possible, which is to
say metaphysically necessary. (GA 50, 5657; Nietzsche II, 309).

This clearly signifies that Heidegger supports, in a lecture drafted for

the winter of 194142, an interpretation of the history of philosophy
according to what he calls the metaphysics of subjectivity, elaborated
in his view from Descartes to Nietzsche, culminating in racial selection
as it has already been implementedin a murderously radical mannerby National Socialism. This historical and ontological legitimization of Nazi racism is doubly intolerable: it radically compromises all
modern philosophy starting with Descartes, whereas absolutely nothing in Cartesian philosophy justifies this distortion, regardless of the
premises of Nazi racism. And it gives racial selection legitimacy as
thought and as an historic-ontological necessity. In a comparable fashion, Heidegger presents, in his writing of the same period entitled Koinon,
racial selection as springing from the experience of being as subjectivity (GA 69.70). Moreover, in the subsequent lectures on Nietzsche,
where he speaks of the potency of the supreme possibility of command, beginning with the most simple decisions, Heidegger underlines and confirms the fully positive and non-critical tone of this paragraph and of the following one, where the question is the authentic
essence of the gigantic and of high style. So, no matter what the
apologists of Heidegger say, we are very much dealing with a text legitimizing and not rejecting Nazi racism. This is an important point,
which has been underscored by the German philosopher Kurt Flasch.1
In an attempt to attenuate this metaphysical legitimization of racism, Heidegger added, in 1961, a phrase that is not found in the lectures
of 194142, as it is not found in the edition of the lecture in
Gesamtausgabe. In this phrase, Heidegger opposes metaphysics and

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biology: Just as the will to power is not conceived in biological terms,

but rather ontological terms so Neitzches thoughts on race do not possess biological connotations, but rather metaphysical ones (Nietzsche
II, 309). Jacques Derrida was right to worry over this phrase, in Of Spirit,
and to ask if metaphysics of race was more serious or less serious
than a naturalism or biologism of race.2 Unfortunately, he left this question unanswered and never came back to this pivotal point, which has
since been neglected by commentators. Today, since we know this phrase
was added after 1945, we understand that it permits Heidegger to allow
the belief that the racial thought he discussed did not in fact coincide
with Nazi racism. In reality, Heideggers reservations with regard to
biologism do not constitute an effort to distance his thought from National Socialism. This is true for the two reasons that I discuss at great
length in my book. This is moreover a crucial issue.
First, what Heidegger critiques as liberal biology,which is not
National Socialist racism but Anglo-Saxon Darwinismis rejected as
originating from a trend in liberal thought that comes from the individual and not from the community. But Heidegger in no way rejects
what he calls new biology, which leans on notions of the surrounding world (Umwelt)that he shares with Ludwig Clauss and Jacob
Uexkull and of shape (Gestalt) or of attitude (Haltung)that he
shares this time with Ernst Jnger and Erich Rothacker.
On the other hand, the different conceptions of race that oppose each
other within National Socialism can in no way be reduced simply to
biological theses: Hitler himself, in his discourse on race at the congress of Nuremberg in the year 1933, defined race with reference to the
spirit.3 Moreover, Heidegger, exactly like the Nazi philosopher Alfred
Baeumler, whom he praised in his lectures on Nietzsche for also denying that Nietzsches (notion of race) was not biological, allied blood to
spirit in his conception of stock (Stamm) and race (Rasse). In short, the
Heideggerian discussion of biological does not in any way constitute
a rejection of racism: on the contrary, he raises Hitlerian racism to the
status of an ontological doctrine, to a level where no scientific refutation is subsequently possible.

4. AFTER 1945: THE ONTOLOGICAL NEGATION

CONFRENCES DE BRME

OF THE

Only after 1945, in the Bremen Lectures of 1949, does Heidegger

make the planetary extension of nihilism under the domination of the

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technical the overriding theme of his writings. He reverses field in order to affirm that the Second World War has decided nothing (see for
example the conclusion of the conference on the 27th of June 1945 on
poverty), and to make his famously scandalous claim: the concentration camps and mobilized agriculture amounted to the same thing!
Heidegger proffered globalizing arguments which attribute the ravages
of the blackest years of the twentieth century not to the criminal madness of the Nazi leadership but rather to the entirety of the history of
western philosophy, reduced to the status of a mechanism for overwhelming
the earth with technology. This constitutes a return to the language of
cloudy indetermination along with the hope of a final salvational god,
and the very belated identification of nihilism with planetary technology.
In proceeding thus, Heidegger in no way manifests the lucidity of a
great thinker, but on the contrary a will to destroy both historical and
philosophical truth. This is extremely grave. In fact, his discourse after
the war, as I show in the last chapter of my book, directly inspires the
revisionist enterprise of Ernst Nolte, who was, initially, a close friend
and remained a disciple.
The slow work of euphemization in the language as well as the details of the strategy of the turn after 1945what Carl Schmitt would
call Heideggers come-backwould require another study. Nevertheless, the relevant material on the concentration camps in two passages in the Bremen Lectures sets the tone for, and proves the existence
of, an intimate relationship between Heideggers work and the most
radical form of negationism, or Holocaust denial, which strikes at the
very existence of victims.
I would therefore like to return to the Bremen Lectures drafted by
Heidegger in 1949. In a well-known opening passage (published for the
first time in French by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe), Heidegger equates
mobilized agriculture and the manufacture of cadavers in the gas chambers and concentration camps. In a second, less well-known passage,
Heidegger asks if those who perished in the concentration camps could
even be said to be dead. With great emphasis and pathos, Heidegger
asks three times: Sterben Sie? (Are they dying?). This passage is an
excerpt from a conference entitled The Danger, that Heidegger refrained from publishing in his lifetime. He seems in fact, if we believe
the statement of Heinrich Wiegand Petzet, not to have delivered this
lecture in 1949 after all.
What does Heidegger mean here? Certain commentators have attempted to justify his arguments by reading them as we read, for example, the very powerful passages written by Theodor Adorno at the

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beginning of the third part of Adornos Negative Dialectics, in which he

shows that at Auschwitz, the individual was even dispossessed of his
death. But Heidegger says something else entirely. He barely lingers on
the conditions of the extermination of the victims. What he supports, in
an extremely obscure and cloudy fashion, is that man can die if and
only if Being itself appropriates the essence of man into the essence of
the Being beginning with the truth of his essence. What are we to make
of this jargon, where the word essence (Wesen) is repeated three times?
That man cannot die, cannot be described as mortal, unless he is essentially in the shelter of the essence of Being, and if his essence loves the
essence of death. It is, therefore, very easy to see that it is not the
conditions of death that dispossess man of the ability to die, but rather a
radical deprivation of essence for whomever is not in the shelter of Being.
Now, the texts from the beginning of the 1940s that are published
and analyzed in chapter 9 show that essence for Heidegger, as for his
disciple and interlocutor Oskar Becker, has a racial significance. This
can easily be seen in texts dating from 1940 and dealing with the question of racial Being (Rassesein) and of the not-yet-purified German
essence. It is in the context of these 1940s texts that the Bremen Lectures become unbearable. What Heidegger wants to say is that the victims of the concentration camps could not be dead because they were
not, in their essence, mortal: they did not sufficiently love death, they
were not in custody of Being. Behind this, there is the entire Nazi
conception of death as Opfer, as sacrifice of the individual for the community, that we find already stated in Being and Time, with the notion
of self-sacrifice, and celebrated by Heidegger on 26 May 1933, in his
speech praising Albert-Leo Schlageter, gunned down in 1926 and designated as a hero by the Nazis. To die for the German people and for
ones Reich, for Heidegger, is the strongest and most noble death (GA
16, 759760). But those who perished in the concentration camps, they
are, he says, grausig ungestorben: horribly un-dead (GA 79, 56). They
are not dead, they cannot even die, they were not mortal. This is why I
spoke of an ontological negationism, which calls into question the very
being of the victims. This judgment coincides with the profoundly pertinent analyses of Adorno on the so-called authentic conception of
death in Being and Time, and the way in which he shows that with
Heidegger, death itself took on a racial meaning.4
In conclusion, recall that philosophy has as its vocation to serve the
fulfillment of man and not his destruction. But Heidegger, through the
vlkisch and racist principle which is explicitly his starting point, destroys man in his very being. And in a profoundly perverse manner, he

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imputes to philosophy itself the responsibility for the totalitarian aberrations of the modern age. The radically discriminatory and racist principles upon which Heideggers work rests demand a complete re-evaluation of the status of that work. It is not, in its foundations, a philosophy,
but rather an attempt to destroy philosophy. Therefore, it is the role of
philosophy to explore, through further research, the real significance of
his writings. This is an essential task for contemporary thought.
NOTES
1. Faye macht seine Landsleute darauf aufmerksam, dass Heidegger unter dem
Eindruck der Siege der deutschen Panzerarmeen in Frankreich erklrte, die
Motorisierung der Wehrmacht sei ein metaphysischer Vorgang. In Heideggers Text
zur Nietzschevorlesung im Winter 1941/42 steht der Satz, Rassenzchtung sei
mataphysisch notwendig. Nun kan man streiten, was Heidegger metaphysisch
notwendig heit. Nach Kritik am Nationalsozialismus klingen solche Stze nicht.
(Kurt Flasch, Er war ein nationalsozialistische Philosoph. Mit Emmanuel Fayes Buch
gibt es eine neue, notwendige Debatte ber den braunen Faden in Martin Heideggers
Denken, Sddeutsche Zeitung, June 14 2006, p. 16.)
2. Jacques Derrida, Heidegger et la question. De lesprit et autres essais (Paris,
1990), 93.
3. For Hitlerian and national-socialist doctrines of race, see the remarkable study
by Arthur Comte and Cornelia Essner, La qute de la race (Hachette: Paris 1995).
4. Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. Zur deutschen Ideologie (Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1965), 110.