Booknotes

Heidegger was certainly a Nazi. He joined the NSDAP on May 1st, 1933, having already committed himself to Hitler in 1932 or even 1931. While Rector of Freiburg University he was an enthusiastic enforcer of the Party line. In 1933 he declared to his students that ‘the Föhrer himself and alone is present-day German reality and its law’. Even when he had fallen out with the Party leadership in 1934 or 1935, he continued to speak of ‘the inner strength and greatness of the movement’ and its ‘historical uniqueness’. He never formally left the Party. In life, Heidegger's attachment to the cause clearly went beyond the comparatively mild careerism of a Karajan, despite postwar attempts to bowdlerise key documents and passages in his writings.