Heidegger's Nazism and Antisemitism: Why Hannah Arendt Could Never Let Him Go
In the winter of 1950, a forty-four-year-old woman who had fled Germany in 1933 walked back into a small German town called Freiburg. She was Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), by then an American citizen, a refugee, a Jew, and already the author of the manuscript that would soon become The Origins of Totalitarianism. The man she had come to see was Martin Heidegger (1889–1976), her former teacher and lover, who had joined the Nazi Party on May 1, 1933, and who, less than four weeks later, had stood at the rectoral podium of Freiburg University to declare the spiritual mission of the German people under the swastika.
She did not denounce him. She did not turn away. She knocked on his door. And for the next twenty-five years, until her death, she did not let him go.
This is, on its surface, an unforgivable story. It is also the most uncomfortable question Western philosophy has yet to answer honestly: can the deepest thinker of the twentieth century have collaborated with its greatest evil, and if so, what does that say about thinking itself?
The Rectoral Address: When Philosophy Wore the Armband
The conventional alibi runs as follows. Heidegger's involvement with Nazism was a brief, opportunistic episode — a ten-month rectorship in 1933–34, a youthful misjudgment quickly retracted, after which the philosopher retreated into the silence of Being. Heidegger himself, in his postwar defense to the Freiburg denazification committee in December 1945, advanced precisely this version. His widely read 1966 Der Spiegel interview, granted on the condition of posthumous publication, refined it further.
The archive tells a different story. On May 27, 1933, Heidegger delivered his rectoral address, "The Self-Assertion of the German University," before an audience that included SA and SS officers. He spoke not under coercion but as a believer. He spoke of Führung, of blood and soil rendered into the ontological vocabulary of his own philosophy, of a German people summoned to its historical destiny by the new state. The address was, in its philosophical structure, an attempt to graft Sein und Zeit's analysis of authentic existence onto the political body of the Third Reich.
He remained a dues-paying member of the NSDAP from May 1933 until the regime collapsed in 1945. He never publicly recanted. After the war, the denazification committee stripped him of his teaching license, and he did not return to the lectern at Freiburg until 1951. The ten-month rectorship was the public episode. The membership card lasted twelve years.
And then, in 2014, the cellar opened.
The Black Notebooks: An Antisemitism Woven into Being
For decades, defenders of Heidegger argued that whatever his political folly, his philosophy itself remained untouched — that Being and Time could be read without the rectoral address staining its pages. The publication of the Schwarze Hefte, the so-called Black Notebooks, by editor Peter Trawny in March 2014, ended that argument.
The notebooks, which Heidegger had stipulated be published last in his collected works, contained passages of metaphysical antisemitism. Not the vulgar, biological racism of Mein Kampf, but something more disturbing: a philosophical antisemitism in which "world Jewry" became the agent of the technological uprooting of Being, the rootless principle of calculation that had hollowed out the West. Heidegger had not merely failed to oppose the genocidal regime. He had, in his private metaphysical reflections, assigned to "the Jewish" a structural role in the very catastrophe he claimed to diagnose.
The Italian philosopher Donatella Di Cesare, herself a former student of the Heideggerian tradition, drew the conclusion that many had resisted for half a century. The antisemitism was not external to the philosophy. It was woven into its understanding of history, technology, and Being. The cellar was the house.
Arendt's Long Quarrel: Thinking, Judging, and the Banality of Evil
Arendt knew. She knew more, and earlier, than almost anyone else who continued to read him. In a 1946 letter to her mentor Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), she wrote that she could only regard Heidegger as a potential murderer — a stunning phrase from a woman not given to rhetorical excess. In the same correspondence she dismissed his postwar self-defense as a "swimming pool of lies." She had escaped Germany in 1933, the very year of his rectoral address; she had been interrogated by the Gestapo; she had spent the war helping Jewish refugees escape from southern France.
And yet she went back to Freiburg in 1950.
To read this only as the persistence of an old love affair is to miss almost everything. The young Arendt of 1924 had indeed been the eighteen-year-old student of a married thirty-five-year-old professor, and the affair shaped her in ways she never disavowed. But the woman who returned in 1950 was no longer that student. She was the theorist who would publish The Origins of Totalitarianism the following year, the woman who would coin the phrase the banality of evil a decade later in Jerusalem, watching Adolf Eichmann (1906–1962) protest from inside his glass booth that he had only been thinking about logistics.
Arendt's central philosophical wager — the question that animates everything from The Human Condition to her unfinished final manuscript The Life of the Mind — was a single question with two faces. What is the relationship between thinking and judging? Can a person think profoundly and still consent to evil?
Eichmann was one answer: a man who could not think at all, who lived inside clichés, and whose inability to think made him capable of administering mass murder without inner resistance. Heidegger was the harder answer, the one Arendt could never finish writing. Heidegger could think — few in the twentieth century could think more powerfully — and he had nonetheless lifted his arm in salute. If Eichmann proved that the absence of thought enables evil, Heidegger proved something far more dangerous: that the presence of thought does not, by itself, prevent it.
"Heidegger at Eighty": The Essay That Refused to Forgive and Refused to Condemn
In October 1969, Arendt published in the German journal Merkur an essay titled Martin Heidegger ist achtzig Jahre alt — "Martin Heidegger at Eighty." It was her most extended public statement on her teacher, written four years after Eichmann in Jerusalem had provoked the firestorm over the banality of evil, and six years before her death.
The essay performs a remarkable double movement. Arendt insists on the philosophical stature of Heidegger's thinking, the way his lectures of the 1920s had constituted "a rumor" that something genuinely new was happening in philosophy, drawing the best minds of Europe to Marburg and Freiburg. And then, in the famous parable that closes the piece, she compares Heidegger to Thales, the pre-Socratic philosopher so absorbed in contemplating the heavens that he fell into a well, while a Thracian servant girl laughed.
The parable is devastating in its courtesy. The thinker, Arendt suggests, is structurally vulnerable to losing the ground beneath his feet. The very capacity that lets him see the depths makes him liable to fall into them. The "déformation professionnelle" of philosophy is the temptation to mistake the abyss of one's own thought for the world. Heidegger had fallen. Arendt did not minimize the fall. But neither did she conclude that the act of looking upward should be abandoned.
"The wind that blows through Heidegger's thinking — like that which still, after thousands of years, blows toward us from Plato's work — does not spring from the century he happens to live in. It comes from the primeval, and what it leaves behind is something perfect, something which, like everything perfect, falls back into the primeval."
— Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger at Eighty (1969)
It is the most generous sentence ever written by a Jewish refugee about a man who had worn the swastika. It is also, on a second reading, the most unforgiving. Arendt is saying: the thinking is real, and that is precisely what makes the betrayal unforgivable. A lesser thinker could be dismissed as a lesser man. Heidegger could not be dismissed, and that was the wound that did not close.
Why She Could Not Let Him Go
The conventional reading reduces Arendt's lifelong attachment to a personal failure — the inability of an aging woman to renounce the great love of her youth. This reading flatters our moral confidence by suggesting that we, in her place, would have made the cleaner choice.
The harder reading, and the one her own work demands, is that Arendt refused to let Heidegger go because letting him go would have meant abandoning the question he embodied. If she had simply denounced him as a Nazi and closed the file, she would have been spared a great deal of pain. She would also have been spared the philosophical task that defined her life: to think through how thinking itself becomes possible after Auschwitz, and how a civilization that produced both Heidegger's Being and Time and the Wannsee Conference can still be inhabited.
To denounce Heidegger cleanly would have been to accept that thinking and judging are reliably linked — that the philosopher, by virtue of his philosophizing, will recognize the death camp when it appears. Arendt knew this was false, because Heidegger had proved it false. To excuse him cleanly would have been to accept that thinking is morally weightless — a mere technical capacity, like good handwriting, that has no bearing on how its possessor acts in the world. Arendt knew this was false too, because Eichmann in Jerusalem had shown that the inability to think is precisely what makes ordinary people into instruments of genocide.
Heidegger was the impossible case — the man who proved both propositions false simultaneously. To hold onto him was to hold onto the contradiction. And Arendt's entire late philosophy, from the unfinished volumes of The Life of the Mind to her seminars on Kant's third critique, was an attempt to think inside that contradiction rather than escape it.
The Inheritance We Refuse to Open
Half a century after Arendt's death and a decade after the publication of the Black Notebooks, the question she refused to close is still open, and it has migrated. It now asks itself in the universities that train artificial intelligence engineers in ethics modules they take for one semester. It asks itself in corporate boardrooms where brilliant strategists design platforms whose downstream effects they decline to consider. It asks itself every time we discover that some highly cultivated person — a celebrated novelist, a tenured scientist, an admired statesman — has spent decades enabling a cruelty they were certainly intelligent enough to see.
We would like to believe that intelligence is a kind of moral insurance. Arendt's refusal to let Heidegger go is the refusal of that consolation. She kept reading him because she knew the alternative — declaring that the thinking did not really happen, or that the betrayal did not really matter — would be a worse lie than the one Heidegger himself told the denazification committee in 1945.
To inherit Arendt is not to inherit a verdict on Heidegger. It is to inherit her unwillingness to settle for a verdict. The Black Notebooks are open now. The letters between teacher and student, lover and refugee, have been published. The archive is no longer a secret. What remains hidden is whether any of us, having read what is now readable, can still think with the seriousness that Heidegger demanded and the moral attention he himself failed to bring.
She knocked on his door in 1950, and she kept knocking, in essays and silences and parables, until 1975. The door never quite opened, and she never quite walked away. Perhaps that, more than any tidier conclusion, is what it looks like to think honestly after a catastrophe. The reader who closes this page and turns toward the library, or the news feed, or the philosopher whose work they admire despite themselves, is now standing on the same threshold where Arendt stood. The question is no longer hers. It has always been ours.
Post a Comment