From Weimar Culture (Peter Gay, 2001) pp80-4
The leaders of the youth movements did not need to generate their own ideas; if anything, Weimar enjoyed too many ideas, variegated, mutually (and sometimes internally) contradictory, unanalysed and often unanalyzable. It was swamped with polemics designed to expose the inferiority of republican culture to the imaginary glories of the First and Second Empire, or the imagined glories of the Third Empire to come. And for those who confined their reading to book jackets, authors provided slogan-like titles. Werner Sombart’s indictment of the commercial mentality confronted, in its winning title, Handler and Helden, traders (the West) with heroes (the Germans); it was a characteristic product of the war, but kept its public during the 1920s. Even more remarkable, Ferdinand Tonnies’ classic in sociology, Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, first published as far back as 1887, made its fortune in the Weimar Republic, with its invidious contrast, between the authentic, organic harmony of community and the materialistic fragmentation of business society. Hans Grimm’s novel of 1926, Volk ohne Raum, which was a long-lived best-seller, expressed in its very title a prevailing sense of claustrophobia, an anxiety felt and played upon by right-wing politicians, over “inadequate living space,” and the “encirclement” of Germany by its hostile, vengeful neighbors. In 1931 the volkische author Hans Freyer called, ecstatically, for a revolt against liberal ideas in his Revolution von Rechtsn thus offering another striking novelty, the idea of a revolution not from its usual point of departure, the left, but from the right. Perhaps most effective was the pairing offered in the title of a three-volume work by the anti-Semite Ludwig Klages, who had in early years belonged to the George circle: his Der Geirt als Widersacher der Seelé pitted mind against soul, and assailed the intellect in the name of irrationalism. These fabricators of titles thought themselves aristocrats, but they did not disdain, in fact enjoyed coining, popular clichés.
Books spawned movements, which generally paraded before the public covered in deliberately incongruous labels — Conservative Revolution, Young Conservatism, National Bolshevism, Prussian Socialism — ostensibly responsible attempts to get away from traditional political terminology, actually testimony to a perverse pleasure in paradox and a deliberate, deadly assault on reason. It was strange: the pundits who proudly proclaimed that they had outgrown or — a favorite word — ”overcome” the traditional labels of liberal politics, “left” and “right,” generally ended up on the right. Meinecke saw it precisely in 1924: “The deep yearning for the inner unity and harmony of all laws of life and events in life remains a powerful force in the German spirit.”
The spokesmen for this yearning were as varied, and as incongruous, as the ideas they proclaimed: Martin Heidegger was a difficult, it would seem deliberately esoteric, philosopher who clothed the revolt against reason in a new language of his own; Hugo von Hofmannsthal was an exquisitely cultivated Literat, who sought to hold high the flag of civilization in a time of decay; Ernst Junger translated his experiences of adventure and war service — that half-authentic, half-mythical Kriegserlebnir — into a nihilistic celebration of action and death; the industrialist, economist, and Utopian Walther Rathenau turned on the industry on which his fortune rested by constructing elaborate and ambitious indictments of machine civilization and forecasting a new life; Oswald Spengler impressed the impressionable with his display of erudition, his unhesitating prophecies, and his coarse arrogance.
Among these prophets, Heidegger was perhaps the most unlikely candidate to influence. But his influence was far-reaching, far wider than his philosophical seminar at the University of Marburg, far wider than might seem possible in light of his inordinately obscure book, Sein und Zeit of 1927, far wider than Heidegger himself, with his carefully cultivated solitude and unconcealed contempt for other philosophers, appeared to wish. Yet, as one of Heidegger’s most perceptive critics, Paul Hiihnerfeld, has said: “These books, whose meaning was barely decipherable when they appeared, were devoured. And the young German soldiers in the Second World War who died somewhere in Russia or Africa with the writings of Holderlin and Heidegger in their knapsacks can never be counted. The key terms of Heidegger’s philosophy were, after all, anything but remote; more than one critic has noted that words like “Angst,” “care,” “nothingness,” “existence,” “decision,” and (perhaps most weighty) “death” were terms that the Expressionist poets and playwrights had made thoroughly familiar even to those who had never read a line of Kierkegaard. What Heidegger did was to give philosophical seriousness, professorial respectability, to the love affair with unreason and death that dominated so many Germans in this hard time. Thus Heidegger aroused in his readers obscure feelings of assent, of rightness; the technical meaning Heidegger gave his terms, and the abstract questions he was asking, disappeared before the resonances they awakened. Their general purport seemed plain enough: man is thrown into the world, lost and afraid; he must learn to face nothingness and death. Reason and intellect are hopelessly inadequate guides to the secret of being; had Heidegger not said that thinking is the mortal enemy of understanding? The situation in which men found themselves in the time of the Republic was what Heidegger called an “Umsturzsituation,” a revolutionary situation in which men must act; whether construction or utter destruction followed mattered not at all. And Heidegger’s life — his isolation, his peasant-like appearance, his deliberate provincialism, his hatred of the city—seemed to confirm his philosophy, which was a disdainful rejection of modern urban rationalist civilization, an eruptive nihilism. Whatever the precise philosophical import of Sein und Zeit and of the writings that surrounded it, Heidegger’s work amounted to a denigration of Weimar, that creature of reason, and an exaltation of movements like that of the Nazis, who thought with their blood, worshiped the charismatic leader, praised and practiced murder, and hoped to stamp out reason – forever — in the drunken embrace of that life which is death. By no means all who read Heidegger were Nazis, or became Nazis be cause they read him; Christian existentialists or philosophers concerned with the supreme question of Being found him interesting and sometimes important. But Heidegger gave no one reasons not to be a Nazi, and good reasons for being one. “It is not without some justification,” Paul Tillich has cautiously said, that the names of Nietzsche and Heidegger “are connected with the antimoral movements of fascism or national socialism.“ and of these two Nietzsche was certainly far more remote from modern barbarism, both in time and in thought, than Heidegger.
I am not offering this scanty paragraph as an adequate summary of Heidegger’s philosophy; I am suggesting, rather, that this is what Heidegger’s readers thought, by and large, they were reading in him — and not without justice. When the Nazis came to power, Heidegger displayed what many have since thought unfitting servility to his new masters — did he not omit from printings of Sein and Zeit appearing in the Nazi era his dedication to the philosopher Husserl, to whom he owed so much but who was, inconveniently enough, a Jew? But the notorious address of May 27, 1933, with which Heidegger inaugurated his rectorate at the University of Freiburg, was not simply servility; it was a logical outgrowth of his philosophy, with its appeal to the Fuhrer and the Volk, the abuse of words like “self—determination,” the attack on objective science, the fervent proclamation of the powers of blood and soil, the call for an end to academic freedom in the name of higher things. The essence of the German university, he said, “arrives at clarity, rank, and power only when, above all, and at all times, the leaders themselves are the led — led by the inexorability of that spiritual mandate which forces the destiny of the German people into the stamp of its history.” The mandate consists of three kinds of service: “Labor service, military service, and knowledge service — they are equally necessary and of equal rank.” The will of the students and the will of the Volk together, mutually, must be ready for the struggle. “All powers of will and thought, all the forces of the heart and all the capacities of the body, must be unfolded through struggle, elevated in struggle, and preserved as struggle.” No question: “We want our Volk to fulfill its historical mission. We want ourselves. For the young and youngest power of the Volk, which already grasps beyond us, has already decided that?” The words may be a little obscure — though they are, with their reminiscences of editorials in the Vo’lkische Beobachter and speeches by Goebbels, rather less obscure than Heidegger’s normal style — but the message is plain enough.
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