Martin Heidegger: An Intellectual and Political Portrait

Martin Heidegger's Being and Time, one of the most influential philosophical works of the twentieth century, was published in 1927, the same year as the second volume of Hitler's Mein Kampf. The coincidence is appropriate: although Heidegger's is a conspicuously abstract philosophy, delivered in a language whose enigmas often defeat interpretation, it is firmly 'grounded' (one of Heidegger's favourite terms) in its time and circumstances.
Heidegger was a private supporter of Nazism from its inception, and in the 1930s made public his personal belief, pronouncing his support for Hitler. But Heidegger was not only a Nazi in his political affiliation: he believed his philosophy to be the spiritual parallel to Hitler's leadership. In 1933 he was made Rektor of Freiburg University, a position which he hoped would enable him to put into practice his political and social views. He became one of the main instigators of the Nazification of German universities, encouraging students to participate in paramilitary exercises, and to salute him as if he were himself the Fuhrer. This was an aspect of the self-mythology to which he was prone: Hannah Arendt, his one-time pupil and lover, said his involvement with Nazism could be attributed 'partly to the delusion of genius, partly to desperation'. His political beliefs also deeply affected his closest personal and intellectual relationships. In the name of the Reich, he turned Gestapo informer, blackening 'un-German' professors as 'political unreliables', and, in an act of betrayal, he stood by as the regime expelled from Freiburg his mentor and friend, Edmund Husserl.
A profound influence on Sartre and other existentialists, acknowledged as a guiding inspiration by Foucault, defended by Derrida, Heidegger, since his death, has been and still is a major source of philosophical ideas for intellectuals both in Europe and in America. Hugo Ott's purpose in this scrupulously detailed and balanced biography is not to give his own explication of Heidegger's philosophy but to show that it is no longer possible to read it without considering the politics of its creator. In doing so Ott draws upon letters, archival material and the private papers of Heidegger, his friends, family and colleagues, in many cases for the first time, thereby fundamentally altering our understanding of him. In addition to its elucidation of the complicated but undeniable connections between Heidegger's life and thought, Ott's account is to be valued for the profound questions it raises about the responsibilities of intellectuals in the twentieth century.

An exhaustive, fascinating examination of the controversial role played by Heidegger in the early years of the Nazi regime. Heidegger (1889-1976) has been regarded as one of the greatest German philosophers of the century--but controversy has swirled around his role in the betrayal of the German universities, particularly in 1933, when he was rector of the University of Freiburg (where author Ott teaches economic and social history). Ott's careful dissection of the archival evidence leaves little doubt that the philosopher aspired to transform the universities into Nazi institutions that he would then lead. Heidegger's writing, as well as his actions in a number of hitherto obscure episodes, suggests the degree of his commitment to Nazism: ``The Fhrer himself and he alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law...Heil Hitler!'' So Heidegger said at Hitler's inauguration--but the Nazi Party, ready to use celebrities such as Heidegger but not willing to entrust them with any power, gave the leadership of the universities to reliable party mediocrities. With that rebuff, the philosopher's enthusiasm for Nazism seems to have ebbed, although, in the latter part of WW II, he was still telling a pupil that the only worthy life for a German was a life at the front. Ott admits that the view of Heidegger as Nazi hasn't gone unchallenged: Gerhard Ritter, a member of the 1944 bomb plot to kill Hitler, testified that the philosopher ``was secretly fiercely opposed to National Socialism after 30 June 1934....'' Such testimony, plus a number of passionate adherents helped to rescue Heidegger from the humiliations of the immediate postwar period, after which his reputation reached new heights. A curious combination of scholarship, exactness, and disorganization: a difficult but rewarding read for those not students of the period. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

This meticulously detailed, important study demolishes the notion that famed German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), who joined the Nazi party, was a politically naive intellectual caught up against his will in a movement he did not understand. According to German social historian Ott, Heidegger, who made many pronouncements acclaiming Adolf Hitler as the Fuhrer, was waiting for the promised National Socialist revolution and saw himself as the true apostle of the movement's quasi-mystical essence. Ott establishes that Heidegger assumed the rectorship of the University of Freiburg (a position from which the philosopher later resigned) as the trusted agent of a small circle of Nazi professors who wanted him to undertake a reform of the university in line with the dictates of Hitler's program. Ott, a professor at the University of Freiburg, also refutes Heidegger's postwar attempt to justify his links to Nazism and to minimize their importance.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.