Heidegger's Endless Trial

Towards the end of the war the German thinker Martin Heidegger and the rest of the Philosophy Faculty of Freiburg were evacuated and went to live in the Upper Danube valley near Wildenstein Castle where they continued to hold classes until June 1945 when Heidegger delivered a last lecture on Hölderlin and the Greeks. As Germany yielded to the Allied advance, Freiburg was occupied by French forces, who began a de-Nazification process. Heidegger was charged with being a Nazi and engaging in Nazi propaganda, accused of introducing the Führerprinzip, and inciting students against professors not favorable to the regime. Heidegger wrote a self-serving account of his life during the Nazi years claiming he had been investigated by the Nazis and prohibited from traveling abroad. He also claimed he never wore the Nazi insignia nor commenced his lectures with the Nazi salute. The Denazification Committee of Freiburg University was well-disposed toward Heidegger, and little physical evidence was produced.¹ The philosopher received what amounted to a slap on the wrist, and a leave of absence not unlike an extended teaching sabbatical, during which he orchestrated a triumphant return to intellectual prominence and respectability.

These maneuvers were so successful that they have in return triggered an outrage that promotes the impulse to replay the original trial of Heidegger. Indeed, despite Heidegger's meteoric rise as one of the central philosophical figures of the century, the de-nazification process remains, as it were, psychically incomplete, even though waves of scholarship on Heidegger and the Nazis have washed over every shore. These waves are by now quite familiar and have nearly settled into their own established scholarly field. The tensions between ontological analysis and the possibilities for authentic life had already been noticed by early reviewers of Being and Time, such as Plessner and Misch. Löwith, Arendt, and Marcuse were early diagnosticians of the dangers in Heidegger's political thinking. Between 1945 and 1948, the Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and de Beauvoir-edited Les Temps Modernes was preoccupied by the relation between Heidegger's thought and the advent of Nazism. And then a few years later, the French journal Critique dwelt upon the same question. Each subsequent postwar decade saw its own unique Heidegger controversy. When Heidegger's 1935 lecture course Introduction to Metaphysics was republished in 1953, including the reference to the "innere Wahrkeit und Gröβe" of the National Socialist movement, without any accompanying apology or explanation, Habermas' review in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung declared it to be deeply disturbing. In the 1960's the English translations of Adorno's condemnation of Heidegger's thought as a Jargon of Authenticity made waves. Heidegger's death brought with it the publication of his long-withheld interview in Der Spiegel in which he sought to explain his political affiliations. The controversies were given new impetus in Germany and France in the late 1980's with the publication of Farias's work which led to an enormous amount of intellectual commentary, and became a national public issue with Le Monde dedicating several pages to it. French figures from Derrida and Lyotard to Levinas and German philosophers and historians, including Gadamer and Ott and Pöggeler, all sought to put Heidegger's political actions in perspective and in particular question the effect of his political decisions on his philosophy.² Emmanuel Faye's work, armed with renewed zeal and access to further materials, is this decade's 'do-over' of Heidegger's de-nazification hearings, only this time with the case better prepared, the archival evidence more thoroughly assembled and understood, the timelines reconstructed and intact, and the prosecution contemptuous of the philosophical aura surrounding the central figure.

De-nazification is the theme of a good deal of French and German postwar intellectual consciousness, and on some levels Faye's book can be understood as consistent with the long trajectory of multifaceted discourses seeking to come to terms with, represent...