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Heidegger's National Socialism Charles Bambach. Heidegger's Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism, and the Greeks. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. xxvi + 350 pp. $45.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-8014-4072-4. Reviewed by Roderick Stackelberg Published on H-German (October, 2004) Charles Bambach has added an important Krieck, Nazi philosophers Hans Heyse, Kurt Hilde‐ contribution to the growing literature on Heideg‐ brandt, and Franz Boehm, as well as a host of mi‐ ger's involvement with and relationship to Na‐ nor fgures, such as Hans Haertle, a leading func‐ tional Socialism.[1] Following up on an earlier tionary of the Amt Rosenberg, or Richard and book that placed Heidegger's thought in the Ger‐ Max Oehler, Elisabeth Foerster-Nietzsche's official man historicist tradition, Bambach offers a close heirs as the administrators of the nazified Niet‐ reading of Heidegger's texts both in the immedi‐ zsche Archive in Weimar. Despite their many dif‐ ate historical and political context of the years in ferences, Heidegger shared with his voelkisch which they were written and in the context of contemporaries the conviction that only a Volk Heidegger's overall project of deconstructing the rooted in its own earth "can summon the histori‐ Western metaphysical tradition of calculative cal energy necessary for embracing and trans‐ thinking that objectifies beings and transforms all forming its own destiny" (p. xx). Denying that Hei‐ forms of existence into resources to gain mastery degger's philosophy and politics can be easily sep‐ over the earth.[2] Avoiding both a prosecutorial arated (thereby contradicting not only Heideg‐ or an apologetic approach, Bambach suggests that ger's own efforts to portray his advocacy of Na‐ the question that needs to be answered is not, tional Socialism in 1933-1934 as the temporary "was Heidegger a Nazi?" but rather, "what kind of aberration of an apolitical thinker but also the ef‐ National Socialism did he aspire to establish?" (p. forts of others to portray him as an opportunist xv). As Hans Sluga had already done to a more who joined the party out of expediency, not con‐ limited extent in Heidegger's Crisis (1993), Bam‐ viction), Bambach identifies "an enduring struc‐ bach reads Heidegger in the context of his "dia‐ ture within Heidegger's work that can provide a logues" and "conversations" with many of his meaningful historical context within and against voelkisch contemporaries, including, most promi‐ which to read Heidegger's texts, a context provid‐ nently, the Nietzschean philosopher Alfred ed by 'roots' and 'autochthony'" (p. 333). Bambach Baeumler, the anti-Nietzschean educator Ernst makes a persuasive case that Heidegger's writings H-Net Reviews between 1933 and 1945 constituted "a philosophi‐ his "belief in rootedness as the indispensable cal attempt at geo-politics, a grand metaphysical source of our genuine relation to being" (p. 135). vision of German destiny based on the notion of a His political commitments to Bodenstaendigkeit, singularly German form of autochthony or root‐ Germany's spiritual Sonderweg, and National So‐ edness in the earth" (p. xix). To be sure, Heideg‐ cialism as he conceived it were always basic to ger's philosophical turn that eventually culminat‐ and part of his anti-Cartesian philosophy of being. ed in his idyllic and quiescent post-war philoso‐ Bambach begins by situating Heidegger's phy, his critique of the "will to will" and the seemingly apolitical philosophical work of the world-wide reign of techne, and his rethinking of 1920s and early 1930s, including Being and Time Seinsgeschichte was shaped by "deep and abiding (which he reads as Heidegger's challenge to the confrontations with National Socialism" as he be‐ ideological "worldview thinking" of both Soviet came increasingly critical of the Nazi Party, its re‐ communism and Western democratic liberalism, pressive and imperialistic policies, and its racial- "isms" allegedly unable to experience time in an biological doctrines (p. xxiv). But the underlying ontological context), in the climate of cultural cri‐ connection between the militantly geo-political vi‐ sis, national mourning, and ferce political confict sion of German nationalism and Heidegger's later that followed the Great War. The war and the eco-poetic, pastoral language of Heimat, Gelassen‐ post-war crisis provoked Heidegger's lifelong heit, and man as the "shepherd of being" was nev‐ project of rethinking and reevaluating the history er broken. of Western metaphysics as the history of being. As Although Heidegger changed his interpreta‐ so many German philosophers and poets before tion of the "ontological myth of autochthonic root‐ him, Heidegger believed that Germany's (and Eu‐ edness" (p. 302) over the years to conform to the rope's) spiritual and intellectual salvation lay in political realities of the day, he never abandoned recovering the special relationship that linked it. "There are not 'two' Heideggers (shepherd/ Germans to the ancient Greeks through language Fuehrer) that need to be reconciled," Bambach and the concept of autochthony, which Bambach concludes. "Rather ... both incarnations are roles describes not simply as rootedness in the soil, in that Heidegger plays upon the different stages of the past, or in tradition, but rather as signifying German history" (p. 333). As his disenchantment "something concealed, mysterious, and chthonic with Nazism grew (and as the war went bad), po‐ whose meaning lies hidden beneath the surface of litical autochthony increasingly receded in favor the earth, or rather whose meaning needs to be of ontological autochthony, and a self-serving in‐ worked out in confrontation (Aus-einander-set‐ ternationalism displaced the aggressive national‐ zung) with this concealment in order to grant one ism of 1933-34, a strategic and rhetorical shift that an authentic identity" (p. 19). But whereas the Heidegger continued in his post-war writings. But voelkisch intellectuals of the Conservative Revolu‐ his own understanding of the "essential truth and tion appropriated philosophy to carry out a politi‐ greatness" of the National Socialist movement as cal revolution, Heidegger saw a political revolu‐ the authentically German response to the histori‐ tion as merely the occasion for a far more radical cal crisis of Europe and modernity--his own sense philosophical revolution "to win back or recuper‐ of Germany's special world mission--never ate from the ingrained habits of centuries-long changed, even when his relationship to the actual philosophical practice the sense of original won‐ movement soured, and even after the Nazi state derment that pervaded early Greek theoria" (p. was destroyed by catastrophic defeat in the Sec‐ 23). Heidegger joined the Nazis not, as he and ond World War. Long after he had lost faith in the some apologists have claimed, because he saw no Nazis, he retained his faith in the "homeland" and other alternative to communism,[3] but because 2 H-Net Reviews he saw the Nazi Aufbruch as the historical mo‐ bulwark against the forces of nihilism and ment for a radical transformation to combat not reawaken the power of philosophy. But Heideg‐ only the rootlessness of Weimar culture but the ger's ambitious goal was not shared by Nazi offi‐ rootlessness and "forgetfulness of being" inherent cialdom, with whom he frequently clashed after in the entire Western metaphysical tradition. "In 1934, not least in his capacity as a member of the this program of ontological politics, a politics that commission overseeing the Historisch-Kritische seeks its roots both in the geographical-cultural Ausgabe of Nietzsche's works. As Heidegger be‐ soil of the homeland and in the philosophical- came increasingly disenchanted with the Nazis in mythic arche of the Greek dawn, Heidegger will the mid-1930s, he again turned to Nietzsche for attempt his coup as the philosophical prince of a inspiration in his efforts to bring about the more conservative revolution" (p. 23). His embrace of profound spiritual and metaphysical revolution National Socialism was motivated by his convic‐ that he had hoped for and expected. Until 1938 tion that this revolutionary political transforma‐ Heidegger read Nietzsche as a comrade in arms tion would lead to the philosophical retrieval of against the Nazis for a more authentic form of Na‐ the Western beginnings in pre-Socratic thought tional Socialism; thereafter, he saw him as "mere‐ and awareness, a task for which Germany was ly a forerunner of the fallen and inessential ver‐ uniquely suited and the university was the ideal sions of National Socialism" put forward by the site. Despite the changing fortunes of the Third Party and its subservient intellectuals (p. 266). Ni‐ Reich and his changed attitude toward the Nazi etzsche's diagnosis of the modern crisis remained regime, Heidegger never gave up on this task. valid, but his prescribed cure no longer promised At the heart of this book is Heidegger's a way out. If Nietzschean will to power had previ‐ (mis)reading of Nietzsche in his Nietzsche lectures ously appeared to Heidegger as the appropriate from 1936 to 1943, later published in two massive formula to reverse the course of modern degener‐ volumes in 1961.[4] His encounter with Nietzsche ation, it now seemed hopelessly entangled in the had been decisive for Heidegger's philosophical very degeneration it was meant to combat. He turn toward rethinking the essence of truth in now came to see Nietzsche not as the herald of the 1929-30 (by recovering the originary pre-Socratic, future who had decisively broken with the Platon‐ pre-rational experience of truth as disclosure or ic tradition, but as the last metaphysician whose unconcealment of being, not as logical certainty doctrine of will to power had merely brought the or correspondence with reality) as well as for his Western tradition of nihilism (the metaphysical political commitment to National Socialism in legacy of Seinsvergessenheit) to a catastrophic 1933.
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