At least other apologists have come up with more subtle face-saving devices. Derrida, it will be remembered, discovered in the absence of quotation marks around the word “Geist” in the infamous rector’s speech (May, 1933) the return of a spiritual, non-biological, non-racist, anti-totalitarian discourse. Heidegger’s mistake was not joining the Nazi party, but falling prey to spiritual metaphysics!

As a third variant of the current trivialization of Heidegger’s embrace of Nazism, Herbert Dreyfus and his students in philosophy departments across the United States offer us Heidegger as a new age guru for unlocking human potential, and making a profit too! (some of Dreyfus’s graduate students have found jobs as consultants in big corporations, paid to figure out the “mood” of the company). Charles Guignon tells us that Dasein lives in a horizon of multiple traditions and pasts, and takes a stand on the future, moving into a plethora of possibilities. A Heideggerian in 1933 might become a Nazi, but she was not philosophically predestined to do so. Today, she might work with the homeless and join the Greens. Or a large corporation.

Partly in reaction to the continuing appeal of Heidegger’s ideas, a considerable body of work has been published since the 1980s that amounts to a strong condemnation of both the man and the philosophy. The archival research carried out by Victor Farias and Hugo Ott, and the interpretive scholarship of Otto Pöggeler, Hans Sluga, Richard Wolin, Tom Rockmore, and others have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that Heidegger’s involvement with Nazism was anything but a fleeting mistake. He engaged himself with unbounded energy in coordinating the University of Freiburg according to Nazi educational policies, he supported the laws that removed Jews from tenured positions, and he remained a Nazi party member until 1945. The only recourse that Heidegger’s apologists have, therefore, is to continue to argue that all this activity was inessential to the lasting value of Heidegger’s philosophical accomplishments. They argue that it would be analogous to discounting Plato and Platonism because of his ill-fated attempt to put his philosophy into practice at the court of the tyrant Dionysus of Syracuse.

Most of Heidegger’s critics have focused on his actions – his eccentric relationship to his students, whom he took skiing and hiking in the Black Forest, his bizarre peasant attire, his fractured relationship with Jewish students and colleagues, his decisions made as rector of the university, his policies about “labor, knowledge, and military service,” etc. But what about the connection between his philosophy and these actions? The problems associated with the content and style of the philosophy already were articulated in Karl Jasper’s report to the university commission established in the fall of 1945 to evaluate Heidegger’s fitness as a future teacher. Jasper knew Heidegger very well as a colleague and friend. He reported to the commission that Heidegger appeared to him to be a “nihilist and the mystagogue-cum-sorcerer,” and that his philosophy was “fundamentally unfree, dictatorial and uncommunicative.” Similarly, after hearing the rector’s speech, Hans Jonas reported having no doubt that Heidegger had thrown himself into the “new destiny” of National Socialism, based exactly on the concept of resolve (Entschlossenheit) contained in Being and Time.

Thus it would be inaccurate to say that critics have never clearly seen the link between Heidegger’s philosophy and his actions in 1933–34, but Johannes Fritsche’s book goes much further. It is arguably the most important analysis of the deep linguistic connections between Being and Time and the decision to support Nazism, as well as of the conscious political choices that Heidegger made, using language borrowed (though often in improved form) from the arsenal of radical conservative ideas prevalent during the Weimar republic. Heidegger made the impression on his young students at Freiburg that he was about to free German philosophy from the fetters of neo-Kantianism and other encrusted vestiges of German Idealism. His famous debate with Ernst Cassirer in 1929 cemented his reputation as a philosophical radical. Fritsche’s book enables us to solve the seeming contradiction that Heidegger saw himself as making a radical break in philosophical terms, but could throw in his lot with a deeply reactionary regime.

To do so, Fritsche focuses our attention on some central terms in Heidegger’s vocabulary: anticipation, resoluteness, repetition, response, disavowal, fate, community, society. In contrast to Heidegger’s own, often idiosyncratic etymological exercises, by means of which he seems to be recapturing the pre-Socratic way of thinking, Fritsche situates Heidegger’s squarely in the political dialogue of contemporary Germany. Take for example the famous passage from section 74 of Being and Time. There Heidegger writes:

But if fateful Dasein, as Being-in-the-World, exists essentially in Being with Others, its historicizing is a co-historicizing and is determinative for it as destiny. This is how we designate the historicizing of the community (Gemeinschaft), of the people (Volkes). Destiny is not something that puts itself together out of individual fates, any more than Being-with-one-another can be conceived as the occurring together of several Subjects. Our fates have already been guided in advance, in our Being with one another in the same world and in our resoluteness for definite possibilities. Only in communicating and in struggling does the power of destiny become free.

In this rich and revealing passage, a number of crucial political ideas flow together in a powerful statement about Germany’s world-historical situation, as seen by Heidegger in 1927. As Fritsche points out, the meaning of the words fate, destiny, community, Volk, and determination (or providence) were known by everyone in the 1910s and 1920s to belong to the politically equivocal vocabulary of the political right-wing assault on liberalism and socialism. Both liberals and socialists affirmed capitalism. Liberals argued that capitalism was based on enlightened self-interest and would eventually guarantee a free society and rising standards of living. Socialists affirmed capitalism as a doomed stage in the history of productive forces that would eventually be superseded by a socialist economy. Against both these visions – or a third variant, capitalism with a strong welfare state component – rightists argued that history is determined neither by reason nor by class conflict, but rather by the cultural history of a community thrown together by fate with a common past and future. Capitalism and modern technology are planetary forces that destroy individual cultures and thus constitute a measure of decline. Philosophy’s role is to “communicate and struggle,” that is, change the attitudes and mentality of modern decadent, atomized individuals, open to them the reality of the cultural traditions of the people, so they will abandon faceless, bureaucratic “society” and return, collectively, to the “freedom” of community.

Fritsche stresses the importance of a number of key terms that Heidegger used to buttress his ideological attack on the seeming chaos of modern society and to support his call for a return to the Volk community. The word “Entschlossenheit,” for example, which is at the root of an entire discourse about decisionism as a political philosophy in the Weimar republic, does not just mean determination, or resoluteness, in its active form, but also contains the idea of “opening up,” the opposite of “schliessen,” to close, in its passive form (entschlossen). In the same sense that a Christian may be open to the idea of grace, some right-wing thinkers in Weimar thought they best could hear the “voice of the people,” and a young philosophy student reading Heidegger in 1927 could be resolved to break out of bourgeois subjectivity (note the derisive use of the term “Subjects” in the passage above) and open herself up the Volk community. Similarly the verb “erwidern” means to “respond to” something, but in German there is a difference whether one uses the accusative or the dative as the object of the sentence. In Being and Time, Dasein responds to the possibilities of the past by projecting itself authentically into the future with resoluteness. Some critics have taken this to mean that authentic Dasein possesses an infinite number of ways of being in the world, of responding to the various cultures, models, and traditions of the past. This would be the dative sense of respond – one makes a rejoinder to the past, choosing among its various models and possibilities. But Fritsche shows quite convincingly that when Heidegger writes “Dasein erwidert die Möglichkeiten,” using the accusative, he clearly meant that Dasein responds to the possibilities posed by history in an antagonistic way, the way an army counterattacks or an athlete responds to the opponent. One has to choose between possibilities, some to be defended, some to be eliminated.

Fritsche applies the philological knife to a number of other Heideggerian terms, including Auslesen, Aufrufen, Widerruf, Destruktion, Ursprung, Entspringen, Erbschaft, every one of which can be located in a radical conservative discourse decrying the plunging fall of Dasein out of authentic Gemeinschaft into the anonymous, false, and dangerous Gesellschaft. If Fritsche had contented himself with these clever grammar lessons on the German language, the book would help us understand Heidegger’s vocabulary better, but some would argue he had merely used Heidegger’s own philological techniques against the master, thus validating the philosophy in spite of the critic’s intentions. But Fritsche does much more than this, carrying out a number of fascinating comparisons to the works of three Weimar thinkers and a politician, Adolf Hitler.

The comparison of Being and Time to Hitler’s Mein Kampf may seem like a cheap shot, but in fact results in some of the most compelling pages in this book. Fritsche is very good at focusing on specific questions when comparing two texts and thus avoids grand generalizations which could easily be invalidated through counter-examples. In this case, he asks about the way Hitler understood his “destiny” in the struggle to understand his mission to save the German nation. Fritsche interprets Mein Kampf as a kind of Bildungsroman, noting that Hitler consciously entitled the second chapter of the book “Wiener Lehr- und Leidensjahre” (Years of Studying and Suffering in Vienna) in an obvious allusion to Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. But in contrast to the eighteenth-century Bildungsroman, in which the protagonist transcends the abstract freedom of individuality and finds ethical life in the greater community, Hitler viewed the communities of his time as under siege and the ethical models presented by society as degenerate. He thanks fate for being born in a small town, where he knew healthy communal life, already under threat from Slavic influences, and then for the opportunity to experience the big city of Vienna, where he came to understand nation, race, people, and the state, and eventually the huge threat to the German Gemeinschaft posed by the Jews. In becoming a revolutionary, Hitler constantly alludes to examples from past German history that he learned as a schoolboy, and how in discovering what fate had set in store for him, he realized the relevance of the past for escaping from a bad present and molding a vibrant future for the German people. The reaction of the German people to the call of fate is crucial for Hitler, because in that “turning point” those who listen to the call will understand the need to restore the purity of the German race. The “turning point,” in Hitler’s understanding is almost identical to Heidegger’s concept of historicality, in which Dasein responds to the call of fate to call up forgotten ways of being and push aside the unauthentic everydayness of the “they” (das Man).

Fritsche establishes an interesting matrix of left, liberal, and right-wing thought in a series of comparisons between Heidegger and three other Weimar intellectuals, Paul Tillich, Max Scheler, and Georg Lukács. The case of Scheler is particularly enlightening, because his espousal, during World War I, of a return to the “love-community” of early Christianity and a rejection of the commercial ethos of capitalism and individualism, echoed Heidegger’s decisonist motif in Being and Time – bourgeois subjects take a militant, anti-Western stand on the crisis confronting German society. But when National Socialism emerged in the 1920s as a viable political force, Scheler changed course and moved ideologically closer to the Christian Socialism of Tillich, viewing Nazism as a threat to religious and existentialist values. Scheler’s intellectual development puts into sharp relief the conscious choice Heidegger made by employing right-wing vocabulary.

Lukács and Heidegger also shared, on the surface, some philosophical similarities. In his polemics against Social Democracy, Lukács fought against modern socialists whose reified consciousness accepted the evolution of capitalism as a natural order, and hoped to reform it, rather than take an existentialist stand for the proletariat, and overthrow the existing order, by violence if necessary. The terms crisis, decision, and even fate show up in Lukács’s writings, but Fritsche argues that Lukács’s concept of historicality was opposite to Heidegger’s: the proletariat leads the way into a new order of society, not to a repetition of the past.

A number of objections might be raised about the general argument of the book. Fritsche tends to homogenize “right-wing thought” as if all the radical conservative thinkers of the Weimar period thought of themselves as united by common assumptions and traditions. Just comparing the Prussian socialism of, say, Oswald Spengler or the more extreme National Bolshevism of Ernst Niekisch to the militant Catholic Hobbesianism of Carl Schmitt will disabuse anyone of such a generalization. Fritsche’s own political predilections run like a red thread throughout the text, especially in the uncritical assumption that all socialist thinkers were necessarily progressive. Fritsche needs to distinguish more sharply between liberal social thinkers, who were extremely rare in Germany before 1945, and Messianic Marxists who often shared with the right wing the position that bourgeois civilization was cracking and just needed the right kind of push to bring the entire edifice to the ground so that something new could be built.

But in most cases Fritsche’s philosophical and political judgments are sharp and nuanced. The most impressive aspect of the book is the original combination of a subtle philosophical analysis with a deep historical understanding of the intellectual environment in which Heidegger’s ideas matured. Many defenders of Heidegger today point to the groundbreaking achievement that he turned Husserl’s rather static phenomenological examination of the “facts” of consciousness into a rich exploration of the multiple worlds of meaning that show up for human beings in everyday interaction, with each other, and with nature. But Fristche shows that thinkers like Scheler were onto the same theoretical expansion of phenomenology, without the dubious political overtones. It will be remembered that Habermas makes a similar point in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, where he includes American pragmatists like Mead and Pierce, as well as Wittgenstein and Austin, as examples of a hermeneutical critique of metaphysics that renders Heidegger’s approach much less original than the Heideggerians want to claim. No one will be able to read Fritsche’s book and remain complacent about Heidegger’s politics. As many have suspected, but only a few have been able to show with such acumen, the phenomenology in Being and Time can scarcely be saved by screening the nuggets of gold and throwing away the dirt. Heidegger’s famous “turn” came about not only because he thought Dasein was still too trapped in a philosophy of subjectivity, but also because he may have come to realize how deeply he had been fooled by National Socialism. That he never properly admitted this was a great human failing, but how much did Heidegger’s politics really change? At least his personal crisis, including a nervous breakdown in 1946, led to the more fruitful linguistic turn that had such an enormous impact on twentieth-century philosophy. Now one can only wish that Fritsche, or someone with similar exigetical talents, will examine the writings of the late Heidegger, in particular his essays on technology, art, and the World Picture, the Nietzsche and Hölderlin lectures, and his final refuge in poetry, and flesh out the connections to postmodern cultural permission and our current age.