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124 Chapter 6 The Situation of Germany HEGEL DESCRIBES A POLITICS and a philosophy of becoming: even more than this, Hegel describes a metaphysics of becoming that is at the same time a material becoming. The metaphysics of becoming is the politics of becoming. Heidegger himself noted that in 1818 Hegel ceased to be a professor of philosophy in Heidelberg, and went to Berlin. Quoting a letter of Hegel’s on the occasion of his departure, Heidegger notes that Hegel himself says “that he is not going to Berlin with philosophical purposes , but political ones: his state-philosophy was completed.”1 Heidegger concludes that “his philosophy achieved a most remarkable influence on the attitude of the state.”2 The centrality of Hegel, and of Germany for the description of an understanding of the state and a material, political, metaphysics that is yet to come, is a theme not only of Heidegger’s but also of Marx’s. Germany’s emerging preeminence in the nineteenth century—politically, industrially, intellectually—is not simply a matter of Heidegger’s nationalism or Marx’s understanding of historical materialism. Throughout Europe there was a sense—for some a highest hope, for others a source of fear, either of competition (in trade and development), or worse—that something is to be decided. That Heidegger, or anyone else, could claim that “we [Germans] are a people that still has a fate” speaks not just from the “revolution” of 1933, but of the whole thrust of the events of the nineteenth century.3 The reunification of Germany in 1989 raised again the specter of that fatedness, 1. Martin Heidegger, Sein und Wahrheit (GA36/37), 18. “Daß er nicht in philosophischen Absichten nach Berlin gehe, sondern in politischen: die Staatsphilosophie sei fertig.” In drawing attention to this letter, Heidegger cannot have been unaware of parallels in his own situation —in September 1933 he was formally offered a chair in philosophy in Berlin (and, at the same time, in Munich). These lectures, when this remark will have been made, will have begun much earlier than that, but there is every likelihood negotiations had already opened, or at least overtures begun, by the opening of the summer semester of 1933. 2. Ibid., 18. “Seine Philosophie gewann einen höchst merkwürdigen Einfluß auf die Staatsgesinnung .” 3. Ibid., 80. “Wir sind ein Volk, das noch ein Schicksal hat” (Heidegger’s emphasis). ...

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