希特勒的哲学家
GEORGE STEINER
How private a Nazi?
Published: 22 February 2013
Yvonne Sherratt HITLER'S PHILOSOPHERS 302pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $35).
From the outset, in Plato's Syracuse, relations between political power and the philosophical enterprise have been charged with duplicities and opportunism. Whether despotic or populist, political rulers have sought to conscript philosophical voices in order to claim ideological validation, solicit prestige or adorn propaganda. Reciprocally, academic mandarins, speculative thinkers and intellectual publicists have felt drawn to charismatic leaders. In the sensibility of abstraction, in the solitudes and material deprivations which so often attach to the life of the mind there may inhere not only a thirst for public honours and rewards but a deeply entrenched nostalgia for enactment, for the realization of otherwise inert doctrines and proposals, the translation of word into deed. Aspirations to performative fulfilment haunt the thinker; the plaudits of the sage flatter the tyrant. Seneca is close to Nero; Machiavelli is fascinated by Cesare Borgia; Sartre is an apologist for the barbarism of Mao.
In German history such alliances play a distinctive role. Political provinciality and fragmentation, together with an evolving high literacy and a bias towards pedagogic authority, provided German intellectuals with unrivalled status. Arcane theological and epistemological disputes, the exposition of philosophical systems with claims to totality - the world-view or Weltanschauung - elicited a degree of public interest, a dissemination of magisterial pronouncements unrivalled elsewhere. The manifestly suspect intimation that German shares with ancient Greek an elective affinity, a Wahlverwandschaft, with philosophical discourse, astringent in Kant, entranced in Hölderlin and Nietzsche, is not easy to dismiss. What other society bestowed on classical philologists, theologians, metaphysicians and even formal logicians the title of privy councillors? Officious encomia had it that Adolf Hitler read voraciously during his brief incarceration in Landsberg. Following on from her predecessors, Yvonne Sherratt suggests that he in fact only skimmed numerous volumes. These may have included a smattering of Schiller, Kant, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Nietzsche and Wagner. Nietzsche, as falsified by his sister, obviously made a mark. As did the racist, mythological, astrological, "runic" trash abundant in Austro-German and "Teutonic" tracts. Hitler's capacities for rapid, strategic absorption were clearly considerable. Paul de Lagarde, Houston Chamberlain and possibly Oswald Spengler entered into the witches' cauldron and the pretentions of Mein Kampf, which Hitler was dictating at the time. To his acolytes he was now the "philosophic leader". When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, such professorial thugs as Ernest Krieck and Alfred Baumler, together with the charlatan guru Alfred Rosenberg rapidly pulped what had been the most creative and distinguished philosophical construct in the West. Jewish teachers were hounded into often precarious exile. Anyone considered to be disloyal to the regime was ostracized or worse. Journals were purged and books burnt. Often told, the story remains demeaning.
The more so, as Dr Sherratt rightly points out in Hitler's Philosophers, in that the great majority of German academics exhibited either indifference or eager support. There were so many suddenly vacant chairs to be filled. A good many of the most servile and brutal profiteers retained or returned to their functions after the summary, often corrupt denazification measures of 1945-8. Certain chapters, such as Hans-Georg Gadamer's early career and subsequent immunity, remain opaque to this day. What matters, of course, is the Heidegger problem.
Martin Heidegger towers. Without him, no existentialism, no deconstruction, no poststructuralism as we know them. To many, he ranks with Plato and Hegel. Others regard him as the begetter of repetitive, impenetrable verbiage. The (editorially flawed) publication of his leviathan output - more than eighty volumes - is still in progress. But already the secondary literature - books, monographs, articles - runs into the many hundreds. Over recent years the number of dissertations on Heidegger exceeds that on Plato and on Aristotle. Every aspect of his engagement with Nazism, of his temporary infatuation with Hitler, has been debated, often acrimoniously. The notorious Rector's Address at Freiburg University continues to be the object of word-by-word hermeneutic study (notably in France).
To the Nazi hierarchy, Heidegger was "a private Nazi", useless because of his seeming indifference to racial dogma. Hans Jonas, a scrupulous witness, found no anti-Semitism in the master. Many of his most brilliant doctoral students - Herbert Marcuse, Karl Löwith, Hannah Arendt among them - were Jews. Yet others detect an entrenched if often covert Jew-hatred in Heidegger's career. His treatment of Edmund Husserl, his loyal patron, was abominable (though Sherratt's flat assertion that he denied Husserl access to the Freiburg University Library remains in dispute). What is nauseating are Heidegger's adroit mendacities, evasions and silences post-1945, his tenacious refusal to confront the Holocaust. This strategy was aided and abetted by his lover Hannah Arendt.
The fundamental issue is this: did Heidegger's proto-Nazism and involvement with "the grandeur" of Nazi ideals, a judgement he never revoked, infect Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), the writings on Kant and Nietzsche, the readings of Hölderlin and Sophocles, the critique of metaphysics and classical ontology? Can we, must we relate the genesis of Heidegger's teachings and his repellent oratory during 1933 and 1934 to his major philosophical texts? Or should we qualify, even negate any such direct relation, as do Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and a coven of distinguished exegetes? Can we ascribe a pivotal inhumanity to Heidegger's cult of Being? In what ways do his philosophical challenges remain "incomparable" (Leo Strauss)? This dilemma is crystallized in Heidegger's encounters and "non-encounters" with Paul Celan, who read and annotated him avidly. The question is virtually intractable. Even to pose it responsibly is immensely difficult. Sherratt throws no light on it.
The second half of her book hardly bears out its title: it surveys the fate of some of Hitler's intellectual, academic victims and adversaries, who include Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno (there are now German squares and streets which bear Adorno's name). The chapter on Arendt is hagiography.
Ernst Bloch, the great messianic thinker and historian of philosophy, is only referred to in passing. Does his Marxism offend? In contrast, there is a moving account of Kurt Huber, mentor to the White Rose resistance movement, done to death as were its young leaders.
Sherratt defines her method as "docudrama" intended for the layman, for readers who have to be informed three times that Thomas Mann was a Nobel laureate. Does this approach legitimize downmarket flourishes: Nietzsche's "infamous work Zarathustra"; Fichte "outgunned by a new philosopher"? There are passages which an illustrious university press should not have licensed: because of Frege's fitful racism and nationalism Western analytic philosophy "is tainted by association with Hitler". Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche "wheeled the now semi-paralyzed philosopher in his wheelchair for money".
The deployment of ultimate sadism and obscurantism from within the very heartland of Western philosophical-humanist ideals and practices, the symbolic contiguities between Goethe's garden and Buchenwald, raise questions of uttermost complexity and consequence. Any notion of "culture" persists in their shadow. They demand unsparing care, a sense of the provisional, and spiritual tact. Unfortunately these are not manifest in Yvonne Sherratt's book.
Sunset at Fossoli I know what it means not to return.
Through barbed wire I have seen The sun go down and die, And have felt my flesh torn By an old poet's words: "The sun may set and rise, But we, contrariwise, Sleep after our short light One everlasting night."
February 7, 1946 PRIMO LEVI Translated by Marco Sonzogni and Harry Thomas Note: At Fossoli, near Modena, there was a detention and selection camp for prisoners destined for deportation. Lines 6-9 are Walter Raleigh's translation of Catullus, Catulli liber, 5,4.
How private a Nazi?
Published: 22 February 2013
Yvonne Sherratt HITLER'S PHILOSOPHERS 302pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US $35).
From the outset, in Plato's Syracuse, relations between political power and the philosophical enterprise have been charged with duplicities and opportunism. Whether despotic or populist, political rulers have sought to conscript philosophical voices in order to claim ideological validation, solicit prestige or adorn propaganda. Reciprocally, academic mandarins, speculative thinkers and intellectual publicists have felt drawn to charismatic leaders. In the sensibility of abstraction, in the solitudes and material deprivations which so often attach to the life of the mind there may inhere not only a thirst for public honours and rewards but a deeply entrenched nostalgia for enactment, for the realization of otherwise inert doctrines and proposals, the translation of word into deed. Aspirations to performative fulfilment haunt the thinker; the plaudits of the sage flatter the tyrant. Seneca is close to Nero; Machiavelli is fascinated by Cesare Borgia; Sartre is an apologist for the barbarism of Mao.
In German history such alliances play a distinctive role. Political provinciality and fragmentation, together with an evolving high literacy and a bias towards pedagogic authority, provided German intellectuals with unrivalled status. Arcane theological and epistemological disputes, the exposition of philosophical systems with claims to totality - the world-view or Weltanschauung - elicited a degree of public interest, a dissemination of magisterial pronouncements unrivalled elsewhere. The manifestly suspect intimation that German shares with ancient Greek an elective affinity, a Wahlverwandschaft, with philosophical discourse, astringent in Kant, entranced in Hölderlin and Nietzsche, is not easy to dismiss. What other society bestowed on classical philologists, theologians, metaphysicians and even formal logicians the title of privy councillors? Officious encomia had it that Adolf Hitler read voraciously during his brief incarceration in Landsberg. Following on from her predecessors, Yvonne Sherratt suggests that he in fact only skimmed numerous volumes. These may have included a smattering of Schiller, Kant, Fichte, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach, Nietzsche and Wagner. Nietzsche, as falsified by his sister, obviously made a mark. As did the racist, mythological, astrological, "runic" trash abundant in Austro-German and "Teutonic" tracts. Hitler's capacities for rapid, strategic absorption were clearly considerable. Paul de Lagarde, Houston Chamberlain and possibly Oswald Spengler entered into the witches' cauldron and the pretentions of Mein Kampf, which Hitler was dictating at the time. To his acolytes he was now the "philosophic leader". When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, such professorial thugs as Ernest Krieck and Alfred Baumler, together with the charlatan guru Alfred Rosenberg rapidly pulped what had been the most creative and distinguished philosophical construct in the West. Jewish teachers were hounded into often precarious exile. Anyone considered to be disloyal to the regime was ostracized or worse. Journals were purged and books burnt. Often told, the story remains demeaning.
The more so, as Dr Sherratt rightly points out in Hitler's Philosophers, in that the great majority of German academics exhibited either indifference or eager support. There were so many suddenly vacant chairs to be filled. A good many of the most servile and brutal profiteers retained or returned to their functions after the summary, often corrupt denazification measures of 1945-8. Certain chapters, such as Hans-Georg Gadamer's early career and subsequent immunity, remain opaque to this day. What matters, of course, is the Heidegger problem.
Martin Heidegger towers. Without him, no existentialism, no deconstruction, no poststructuralism as we know them. To many, he ranks with Plato and Hegel. Others regard him as the begetter of repetitive, impenetrable verbiage. The (editorially flawed) publication of his leviathan output - more than eighty volumes - is still in progress. But already the secondary literature - books, monographs, articles - runs into the many hundreds. Over recent years the number of dissertations on Heidegger exceeds that on Plato and on Aristotle. Every aspect of his engagement with Nazism, of his temporary infatuation with Hitler, has been debated, often acrimoniously. The notorious Rector's Address at Freiburg University continues to be the object of word-by-word hermeneutic study (notably in France).
To the Nazi hierarchy, Heidegger was "a private Nazi", useless because of his seeming indifference to racial dogma. Hans Jonas, a scrupulous witness, found no anti-Semitism in the master. Many of his most brilliant doctoral students - Herbert Marcuse, Karl Löwith, Hannah Arendt among them - were Jews. Yet others detect an entrenched if often covert Jew-hatred in Heidegger's career. His treatment of Edmund Husserl, his loyal patron, was abominable (though Sherratt's flat assertion that he denied Husserl access to the Freiburg University Library remains in dispute). What is nauseating are Heidegger's adroit mendacities, evasions and silences post-1945, his tenacious refusal to confront the Holocaust. This strategy was aided and abetted by his lover Hannah Arendt.
The fundamental issue is this: did Heidegger's proto-Nazism and involvement with "the grandeur" of Nazi ideals, a judgement he never revoked, infect Sein und Zeit (Being and Time), the writings on Kant and Nietzsche, the readings of Hölderlin and Sophocles, the critique of metaphysics and classical ontology? Can we, must we relate the genesis of Heidegger's teachings and his repellent oratory during 1933 and 1934 to his major philosophical texts? Or should we qualify, even negate any such direct relation, as do Maurice Blanchot, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and a coven of distinguished exegetes? Can we ascribe a pivotal inhumanity to Heidegger's cult of Being? In what ways do his philosophical challenges remain "incomparable" (Leo Strauss)? This dilemma is crystallized in Heidegger's encounters and "non-encounters" with Paul Celan, who read and annotated him avidly. The question is virtually intractable. Even to pose it responsibly is immensely difficult. Sherratt throws no light on it.
The second half of her book hardly bears out its title: it surveys the fate of some of Hitler's intellectual, academic victims and adversaries, who include Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno (there are now German squares and streets which bear Adorno's name). The chapter on Arendt is hagiography.
Ernst Bloch, the great messianic thinker and historian of philosophy, is only referred to in passing. Does his Marxism offend? In contrast, there is a moving account of Kurt Huber, mentor to the White Rose resistance movement, done to death as were its young leaders.
Sherratt defines her method as "docudrama" intended for the layman, for readers who have to be informed three times that Thomas Mann was a Nobel laureate. Does this approach legitimize downmarket flourishes: Nietzsche's "infamous work Zarathustra"; Fichte "outgunned by a new philosopher"? There are passages which an illustrious university press should not have licensed: because of Frege's fitful racism and nationalism Western analytic philosophy "is tainted by association with Hitler". Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche "wheeled the now semi-paralyzed philosopher in his wheelchair for money".
The deployment of ultimate sadism and obscurantism from within the very heartland of Western philosophical-humanist ideals and practices, the symbolic contiguities between Goethe's garden and Buchenwald, raise questions of uttermost complexity and consequence. Any notion of "culture" persists in their shadow. They demand unsparing care, a sense of the provisional, and spiritual tact. Unfortunately these are not manifest in Yvonne Sherratt's book.
Sunset at Fossoli I know what it means not to return.
Through barbed wire I have seen The sun go down and die, And have felt my flesh torn By an old poet's words: "The sun may set and rise, But we, contrariwise, Sleep after our short light One everlasting night."
February 7, 1946 PRIMO LEVI Translated by Marco Sonzogni and Harry Thomas Note: At Fossoli, near Modena, there was a detention and selection camp for prisoners destined for deportation. Lines 6-9 are Walter Raleigh's translation of Catullus, Catulli liber, 5,4.
