Martin Heidegger

I 

The spiritual strength of the West fails, its structure crumbles, this moribund semblance of a culture caves in and drags all powers into confusion, suffocating them in madness....

Whether or not this will happen depends on one thing: whether we [Germans], as a historical-spiritual people, will ourselves again.

Martin Heidegger, May 1933. 

Quoted by Thomas Sheehan, Heidegger and the Nazis. p. 1.

II

Let not theories and 'ideas' be the rules of your being. The Führer himself and he alone is German reality and its law, today and for the future.

Between1933-34.

Ibidem, p. 1.

III

The individual, wherever he stands, counts for nothing. The fate of our people in their State is everything.

Between1933-34.

Ibidem, p. 1, 2.

IV

That is the power to preserve, in the deepest way, the strengths [of the Volk] which are rooted in soil and blood.

A discourse on May 1933. About the spirituality of the German people.

Ibidem, p. 4.

V

For me it is clear that, putting aside all personal motives, I must decide to accomplish the task that will allow me to best serve the work of Adolf Hitler.

On September 4, 1933, in response to an offer to take the chair at the University of Munich.

Ibidem, p. 5.

VI

Needless to say, non-Aryans shall not appear on the signature page.           

Wrote in the botton of a letter - on December 13, 1933 - to a group of German academics, requesting financial support for a book of pro-Hitler speeches by professors that was to be circulated to intellectuals around the world. 

Ibidem, p. 5.

VII

By family background and intellectual orientation Dr. Baumgarten comes from the Heidelberg circle of liberal-democratic intellectuals around Max Weber. During his stay here [at Freiburg] he was anything but a National Socialist. I am surprised to hear he is lecturing at Göttingen: I cannot imagine on the basis of what scientific works he got the license to teach.

After failing with me, he frequented, very actively, the Jew Fränkel, who used to teach at Göttingen and just recently was fired from here [under Nazi racial laws]....

Have there been any changes in his political attitude since then? I know of none. Unquestionably his stay in the United States - during which he became very Americanized - allowed him to acquire a solid understanding of that country and its inhabitants. But I have excellent reasons for doubting the sureness of his political instincts and the capacity of his judgment.

On December 16, 1933. Heidegger, unbeknownst to Dr. Eduard Baumgarten, a student of American philosophy, wrote that damning letter to Dr. Vogel, head of the organization of Nazi professors at Göttingen.

Ibdem, p. 6.

VIII

(…) In short, this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that he was stupid. Agriculture is now a motorized food-industry—in essence, the same as the manufacturing of corpses in gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of nations [it was the year of the Berlin blockade] the same as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs.

On December 1, 1949.

Ibdem, 8,9.

IX

Hundreds of thousands die en masse. Do they die? They succumb. They are done in. Do they die? They become mere quanta, items in an inventory in the business of manufacturing corpses. Do they die? They are liquidated inconspicuously in extermination camps. And even apart from that, right now millions of impoverished people are perishing from hunger in China.

But to die is to endure death in its essence. To be able to die means to be capable of this endurance. We are capable of this only if the essence of death makes our own essence possible.

On December 1, 1949.

Ibdem, p. 9.

X

An extraordinary apathy constitutes the mark of this type of race. I can only add that instead of the word "Jews" [in your letter] there should be the word "East Germans," and then exactly the same [terror] holds true of one of the Allies, with the difference that everything that has happened since 1945 is public knowledge world-wide, whereas the bloody terror of the Nazis was in fact kept a secret from the German people.

On January 20, 1948, answering a the letter of a his former student who had inquired why he had not yet spoken out about the Nazi terror and the murder of  Jews.

Ibdem, p. 9.

XI

The stuff which is now being bandied about as the philosophy of National Socialism - but which has not the least to do with the inner truth and greatness of this movement (namely, the encounter between global technology and modern man) - is casting its net in these troubled waters of "values" and "totalities."

On 1953.

Ibidem, p. 10.

XII

The two men who, each in his own way, have introduced a counter movement to nihilism - Mussolini and Hitler - have learned from Nietzsche, each in an essentially different way. But even with that, Nietzsche's authentic metaphysical domain has not yet come into its own.

On 1936.

Ibidem, p. 12.

XIII

SPIEGEL: Do you believe that Germans have a special qualification for this return?

HEIDEGGER: I think of the special inner kinship between the German language and the language and thought of the Greeks. This is something that the French confirm for me again and again today. When they begin to think [about the mystery of Being], they speak German. They assure me that they do not succeed with their own language.

In 1966, about the return to Being in the Second Origin - a new comprehension of the being nature.

Ibidem, p.13.

XIV

This Europe, which in its ruinous blindness is forever on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on one side and America on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same: the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man....We [Germans] are caught in a pincers. Situated in the center, our nation incurs the severest pressure. It is the nation with the most neighbors and hence is the most endangered. With all this, it is the most metaphysical of nations. We are certain of this vocation....

Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 37. Quoted by Thomas Sheehan, Heidegger and the Nazis, p. 14.

XV

The entry of America into this planetary war is not an entry into history. No, it is already the last American act of America's history-lessness and self-destruction. This act is the renunciation of the Origin. It is a decision for lack-of-Origin.

On 1942. Quoted by Thomas Sheehan, Heidegger and the Nazis, p. 14.

XVI

When the British recently blew to smithereens the French fleet docked at Oran, it was from their point of view "justified"; for "justified" merely means what serves the enhancement of power. At the same time, what this suggests is that we [Germans] dare not and cannot ever justify that action....

About a Germans' moral superiority during the war.

Ibidem, p. 15.

XVII

It is important to realize that, when it comes to "victory," this historical people has already won and is unconquerable so long as it remains the people of poets and thinkers that it is in its essence, so long as it does not fall victim to the ever-pressing and thus fearful threat of straying from, and thereby misunderstanding, its essence.

Between 1942-43.

Ibidem, p. 15.

XVIII

The Germans and they alone [nur sie] can save the West for its history.

On 1943.

Ibidem, p. 15.

XIX

The planet is in flames. The essence of man is out of joint. Only from the Germans can there come a world historical reflection—if, that is, they find and preserve "the German essence" ["das Deutsche"], (...) [if] they prove strong enough, in readiness for death, to rescue the Origin from the small-mindedness of the modern world, and to preserve it in its simple beauty.

On 1943.

Ibidem, p. 15, 16.

Today everything stands within this reality, whether it is called communism or fascism or world democracy.

From the standpoint of the reality of the Will to Power I saw even then [1939-1940] what is. This reality of the Will to Power can be expressed, with Nietzsche, in the proposition: "God is dead." . . .This means: The supersensible world, more specifically the world of the Christian God, has lost its effective force in history.... If that were not the case, would World War I have been possible? Even more: If that were not the case, would World War II have become possible?

Ibidem, p. 15, 16.

XXI

The positive possibilities I then saw in the movement had to be under scored and affirmed in order to prepare a gathering of all the capable forces, a gathering grounded not just in facts, but in what mattered. Immediate and mere opposition would not have been in keeping with my conviction at the time (which was never blind faith in the Party). Nor would it have been prudent.

Heidegger, after the war, about his convictions in 1933.

Ibidem, p. 18.

XXII

After resigning the rectorate it was clear to me that the continuance of my teaching had to lead to an increasing resistance to the bases of the National Socialist worldview. This did not require any special attacks on my part; it would be enough to articulate my basic philosophical position in contrast to the dogmatic obduracy and primitiveness of the biologism proclaimed by [Alfred] Rosenberg.

Ibidem, p. 18.

From

Thomas Sheehan, Heidegger and the Nazis. The New Tork Rewiew of Books, Vol. XXXV, No. 10 (June 16, 1988), pp. 38-47.

http://www.stanford.edu/dept/relstud/faculty/pdf/88-nazi.PDF  

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