INTRODUCTION 1097
concept of freedom [for] the German student is now brought back to its truth. From
this truth the bond and service of the German student will unfold in [the] future.*Later that same year Heidegger wrote in the student newspaper:
Doctrine and “ideas” shall no longer govern your existence. The Führer himself, and
only he, is the current and future reality of Germany, and his word is your law. Learn
to know ever more deeply within you: “From now on every matter demands deter-
mination and every action demands responsibility.”
Heil Hitler!
MARTIN HEIDEGGER**Critics claim that Heidegger had always been sympathetic to the Nazi cause
and that he apparently disowned his teacher Husserl (who was Jewish). As late as
1953, Heidegger affirmed the “inner truth and greatness” of the Nazi movement.
He once said that philosophy could be done properly only in either the German or
the Greek language and that among the moderns, the Germans alone, as a people
placed by history between the barbarians of America to the west and Russia to the
east, could save Western thought.
Heidegger’s supporters point to his refusal to endorse the firing of two anti-Nazi
deans, which led to his resignation as rector within a year. Furthermore, say some,
it is unfair to judge Heidegger’s early support for the Nazis from a post–World War
II point of view. Heidegger in 1933 could not be expected to know the unspeakable
horrors of 1939 to 1945. Finally, supporters ask philosophers especially to avoid
the argumentum ad hominem:Even if Heidegger were partially compromised, that
is not sufficient reason to dismiss a whole body of thought.
Whatever the truth in this debate, Allied occupation powers considered the
evidence of Nazi collaboration sufficient to bar Heidegger from teaching between
1945 and 1951. Hence, after the war, Heidegger spent much of his time in his
simple hut at Todtnauberg in the Black Forest. He retired permanently from
teaching in 1959. Late in life, he visited Greece and France but lived his final
years largely in quiet seclusion.
In his major work,Being and Time (Sein und Zeit),Heidegger announced the
interest that would dominate his writings throughout his life: “The question of the
meaning of Being.” According to Heidegger, the Pre-Socratics had understood
Being, but subsequent Western thinkers had forgotten Being itself by focusing too
intently on individual beings. As a result, contemporary metaphysics no longer
recalled the seminal question of Being.
In order to gain some understanding of Being, Heidegger suggests we examine
the one being with which we are intimately acquainted: the human being. The
*Die Selbstbehauptung der Deutschen Universitätt (The Self-Affirmation of the German
University, 1933)as quoted in Walter Kaufmann,Discovering the Mind, Volume II: Nietzsche,
Heidegger, and Buber(New York: McGraw-Hill, 1980), p. 221.
**Freiburger Studentenzeitung,November 3, 1933, p. 1, quoted in Martin Heidegger,German
Existentialism,translated with an introduction by Dagobert D. Runes (New York: Philosophical
Library, 1965), pp. 27–28.