Heidegger on a country path, 1966.

3,538 words

That whereof we cannot speak we must remain silent. — Last line of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The rest is silence. — Shakespeare, Hamlet

Berel Lang
Heidegger’s Silence
Ithaca, N. Y.: Cornell University Press, 2018

Martin Heidegger’s association with the Nazis is well documented. Having come to Hitler’s attention as Germany’s leading academic, the philosopher was elected to the position of Rector of Freiburg University on April 21, 1933. The appointment was so high-profile that it was far more than a simple principal’s job, however. Effectively, Heidegger became the Dean of all Deans, the head of all German universities, what the mafia call the capo di tutti capi: the boss of all the bosses. Heidegger was Hitler’s academic Don Corleone. The appointment would not last long, with Heidegger resigning almost exactly a year later, on April 23, 1934. One of Heidegger’s many biographers, Rüdiger Safranski, sees his resignation as a result of his disillusionment with the National Socialist ethos:

[Heidegger] discovered that National Socialism was itself the problem whose solution he had once thought it was. He saw the furor of the new age rampant in National Socialism: technological frenzy, government and organization — in other words, inauthenticity as total mobilization.

What we might call technophilia was a grave and major concern for Heidegger. In An Introduction to Metaphysics, he wrote that “Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man.” In The Question Concerning Technology, we find Heidegger lamenting a turn away from the Earth, the soil, and a concomitant turning of man into a “standing reserve.”

Although quitting the role in which Hitler had installed him (despite the fact that Heidegger never stopped being a Party member) was never going to be enough for the unofficial Jewish truth and reconciliation program after the war, a somewhat more covert affair than the denazification committee at Freiburg University in 1945. Criticism of Heidegger’s taking up the Freiburg appointment with Hitler’s direct endorsement, his supposed anti-Semitism, and speeches such as his “Blood and soil” oration are joined by another element of concern within Jewish academia. The problem lies with what Heidegger said about the Second World War and the Jewish Holocaust (as opposed to the other Holocaust, of which more later) after it had finished and the Germans were defeated. He said nothing. This quietism is the subject of a book by the late Professor Berel Lang, Heidegger’s Silence, published in 1996 by Cornell University Press. Professor Lang died last year at the ripe age of 91, and was a professor of philosophy much of whose work centered on the Jewish Holocaust.

The author takes what has become a standard Jewish line to Heidegger’s supposed guilt by omission:

The thesis I mean to defend is just this: that the omission to be noted is notable; indeed, that Heidegger’s silence on the Jewish Question is intended to speak — addressing and then denying this apparently narrow but, as becomes clear, broadly consequential issue in his thinking. Thus, his answer of silence to the Jewish Question becomes a reflection writ large (as small as absence, but not invisible) of the larger body of writing to which he openly set his name.

The Jewish mission with regard to Heidegger has been unwavering, its aim being to link what is seen as private anti-Semitism to his work as a whole. Tainting is very important to the Jews. If any link can be found between one supposedly anti-Semitic element of a writer’s life and his oeuvre, then it must and will be made. Jewry requires an ideological orthographics in writers and thinkers, one in which any trace element of anti-Semitism infects the whole. We will see this in the Jewish discussion of Heidegger’s private working notebooks, the so-called Black Notebooks, which were unreleased when the book under review was published. I have reviewed a collection of Jewish essays on the Black Notebooks here at The Occidental Observer, and Greg Johnson wrote on the notebooks back when they were released in 2014. The author’s approach on this occasion is to utilize what Heidegger did not say or write, rather than what he did. For Lang, “this silence remains more troubling than anything Heidegger did or said while the Nazis . . . were in power.” This is a familiar trope, the modern obligation to be aware of the Jewish Holocaust at all times, and to acknowledge it publicly if that is the voice you have. Hovering above the author’s mission is the necessity to link Heidegger’s philosophy with his everyday attitude to Jewry:

If [Heidegger’s] antisemitism was an expression only of personal taste, it would be distinguishable from his “serious” thinking; and if his antisemitism as a prejudice proved then to be tied to his political views more generally, that ensemble of public and personal dispositions would leave his professional — impersonal — thinking free of contamination from his personal dispositions even when that thinking took on the public face of politics.

Lang’s book is short and concise, and opens with a bifurcation, a division between the Jewish Question and the “Jewish Question.” It actually opens with a very funny joke, which may not work in the way the author intends, as he describes it as “obsolete.” No joke, however, is obsolete if it is funny:

An Englishman, a Frenchman, and a Jew were each asked to write an essay about elephants. The Englishman chose as his topic: “Hunting Elephants in the Raj”; the Frenchman settled on “How Elephants Make Love,” the Jew wrote about “The Elephant and the Jewish Question.”

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As with much successful humor, this is funny because it intersects with reality. The Jews are known for directing discourse toward the central problems surrounding Jewry (from their point of view), or at least not allowing political or moral discourse to stray too far from the path of victimhood. If you are gentile, you will mourn on command.

The Jewish Question is seen by Lang as being multi-faceted. From one angle, the question was solved in 1948 with the creation of the state of Israel. The formerly rootless and stateless tribe had a home at last. Heidegger, the author writes, remains untouched by this creation of a homeland; that was not his Jewish Question. From another angle, the “Jewish Question” refers to the Holocaust, “and the stop it put to the Jewish Question.” Except of course that it didn’t. The Jews are scarcely extinct today, despite the Jewish Holocaust erasing two-thirds of the Jewish population of Europe at the time. In that sense, the Jewish Holocaust was a failure. Although these two facets of the question synthesize into a third “Jewish Question” for the author:

My purpose in recalling the original Jewish Question here — as the “Jewish Question” — begins in an expansion of this chapter’s title to a thesis reflecting an unusual conjunction between the life of the mind and the body of history, which converge pointedly and ominously in the political persona and the philosophical work of Martin Heidegger.

Heidegger is being set up as the fall guy for Nazi overreach, and academic Jewry recognizes that the German was and is the twentieth-century philosopher who has generated the most secondary literature of any. Lang’s second chapter opens the attack on Heidegger proper with a double quotation. The first details a meeting with Rudolf Bultmann, who was the great demythologizer of Christianity. Bultmann jokingly suggested that it was time for Heidegger to make some sort of comment after the Second World War. The philosopher was unamused, and this is followed by a convenient snippet from Heidegger’s What is Called Thinking: “Man speaks by being silent.”

Professor Lang finds two quotations from the so-called Bremen lectures of 1949 in which Heidegger does allude to the Holocaust:

Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the manufacture of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockade and starvation of the countryside, the same as the production of the hydrogen bombs.

The above is from the second Bremen lecture, and is joined by the following from the third:

Hundreds of thousands die en masse. Do they die? They perish. They are cut down. They become items of material available for the manufacture of corpses. Do they die? Hardly noticed, they are liquidated in extermination camps. And even apart from that, in China millions now perish of hunger.

The first quotation will appear again, heavily amended, when the lecture is republished as “The Question Concerning Technology.”

Lang criticizes Heidegger for the “flagrant disproportion between the two forms of practice for which he claims essential likeness.” Well, seen through the lens of Jewish morality, yes. Quite why Heidegger is expected to look through the same lens is never qualified. Heidegger is philosophizing, not writing some Lutheran moral tract. Unless it is specifically moral philosophy, morality never does anything but harm to philosophy, and thought in general. We are starting to see the undertow present in Lang’s thesis:

Insofar as my thesis asserts Heidegger’s deliberate or thoughtful refusal to think (about) the Holocaust, the primary evidence for this ought to appear in his “thoughtful” work; that is, in the part of his writing ordinarily classified as philosophical rather than public or personal.

Why “ought”? As a necessary, Jew-imposed penance, perhaps.

At the beginning of 1948, Heidegger responded to a direct question put by Herbert Marcuse, who pointed out that Heidegger was “still identified with the Nazi regime [that killed millions of Jews because they were Jews].” Heidegger’s response gives context to the charge:

To the serious legitimate charges that you express “about a regime that murdered millions of Jews . . .” I can merely add that if instead of “Jews” you had written “East Germans,” then the same holds true for one of the allies, with the difference that everything that has occurred since 1945 has become public knowledge, while the bloody terror of the Nazis in point of fact had been kept a secret from the German people.

This reference to the “bloody terror of the Nazis” is, the author writes, “the strongest condemnation of the Nazi regime” to be found in Heidegger’s work, and it was never going to be enough. Nothing less than a full humiliation ritual is ever enough for the Germans, as anyone who has ever visited Berlin will attest. The raw data from the camps is displayed on signs in every square and train station. In the end, the criticism is that Heidegger never apologized for something in which he took no part, despite the spurious claims here that his philosophy and the extermination of six million Jews were somehow inescapably linked.

That Heidegger’s metaphysics underpins his Nazism and anti-Semitism is a central support of Lang’s book:

That Heidegger frequently invokes the idea of a spirit (Geist) or an essence (Wesen) — applicable to the idea of a Volk or the German Volk in particular . . . is a mark of the metaphysical ground on which those expressions rest.

Is it? Heidegger is expressing in-group preference of the type which a Jew really ought to be familiar with, but the bold claim that Heideggerian metaphysics is some sort of aria to an anti-Semitic opera is tenuous. Professor Lang will write later in the book of “Metaphysical Racism” another curious construction.

It is nevertheless the silence which continues to hold the author in its spell. “In maintaining the silence . . .” he writes, “[Heidegger] is obviously willing to risk the misunderstandings it may produce.” Jacques Derrida, a master metaphysician for whom I have great respect (and also a Jew), feels a compulsion to act: “[Heidegger’s silence] leaves us the commandment to think what he did not think.” If you are Jewish, I am sure it does. Although it is still unclear why the rest of us, Heidegger included, have to join history’s biggest struggle session. Anyone claiming we have some kind of “humanitarian” duty to keep Jew-slaughter at the front of each and every moral agenda will have to excuse my laughter.

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So, this is a book not about what Heidegger wrote or said, but what he did not write or say: “There is, quite simply, nothing at all in the way of direct reference to the Jews — not in the major works of Being and Time or The Basic Problems of Phenomenology or Contributions to Philosophy.”

Again, it is unclear why there should be. Do Jews have a different version of Dasein? Perhaps their phenomenological epoché (Husserlian bracketing) differs from that of the rest of us. Once again, contrition (or rather its lack) becomes an imprimatur of valid philosophizing.

Academia has many opinions on Heidegger’s post-war quietism. Derrida notes that “No one has ever been able to reduce Heidegger’s thought in its entirety to that of a Nazi ideology,” while for Adorno, Heidegger’s thought is “fascist right down to its innermost components.” Lyotard — one of the most fraudulent of thinkers, in my view — adds his usual asinine summation: “If a great thinker, then not a Nazi; If a Nazi, then not a great thinker.”

Heidegger’s love and reverence for home is another irritant for the Jewish academic. Heidegger’s attachment to Volk, soil, and local habitat is certain to irritate any Jew, whose only “home” was gifted them by the English. The third chapter here is prefaced by a passage in which Heidegger is told by a farmer friend, via a gentle shake of the head, not to leave for Berlin to take up a teaching appointment. Heidegger’s attachment to Todtnauberg is well known, but arouses suspicions in the naturally rootless Jewish sensibility.

One of the key lessons of this book is that one must be very careful when speaking of Jewry because the guiding assumption is that one is directly addressing all Jews. Thus, when Karl Jaspers recounts a conversation with Heidegger, he is surprised by his flippancy:

I referred to the “Jewish Question” . . . and the malicious nonsense about the sages of Zion. [Heidegger] replied: “There really is a dangerous international fraternity of Jews.”

Heidegger is making a perfectly valid point, and one which some of the dullard section of today’s “dissident Right” would do well to note the next time they are tempted to make a spittle-flecked rant about the validity of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is effectively a comic book for the hard-of-thinking, reflexive Jew-hater. There really is a dangerous international fraternity of Jews, a truth which is beginning to creep onto the political radar.

Heidegger’s silence on what was really just another appalling historical event becomes the brand of his philosophical untrustworthiness:

Heidegger’s silence is thus a silence preserved in the midst of a sea of words and sound which speaks as loudly as they do, denying the possibility of a presence to which a glance at history would have attested.

It is unlikely Heidegger did not make such a glance. There is a sense here that, whatever your attitude toward the Jews, ignoring them is not an option. The author notes that this extends to other peoples as well in Heidegger’s Völkisch writings, but they are of little concern. Self-importance is a Jewish trait as Völkisch as anything alluded to by Heidegger — or the Nazis, for that matter. There is an arrogant self-importance to the Jew which is understandable, in part. If you had to gas 100 Ashkenazi Jews, with an average IQ higher than any other at around 115, or 100 Somalis, whose median IQ is around 70 (three whole standard deviations beneath the Jew), what would you do? Although history is not events for the academic Jew as much as it is about what the good goyim say about the eternal suffering of the 12 tribes:

About the “Jewish Question,” the status of the Jews seen retrospectively through the Holocaust, there can be no doubt of [Heidegger’s] silence as a refusal, a denial; about the Jewish Question — the status of the Jews before the Holocaust — we have seen further evidence of exclusion or, more exactly, of preclusion: The Jews would not be permitted to pose, much less become, a question, since the conception of a Volk constituted their dismissal in prospect.

We have seen further evidence — meaning, the Jews have seen further evidence. Where Jewry is concerned, white Western philosophy will always and everywhere stand trial. And, like Kafka’s Josef K., the trial never ends:

Arguably there is no time when the question can be considered settled: philosophers in this respect seem closer to artists, who move in and out of the focus of public and professional interest, than to scientists, for whom the prospect of obsolescence is always a matter of when, not whether, it will take place.

Philosophy “not as armchair exercise or thought experiment, but as moral action,” holds Professor Lang’s attention. Wittgenstein and Sartre are the only serious competitors to Heidegger in this field, and “[m]y claim has been that Heidegger’s answer of silence is embedded in central themes and implications of his thinking: the status of Sein and Dasein, the nature and disclosure of Truth, the comportment of the individual in relation to the group.”

I find this untenable, and a further example of the Jewish need to have us all think in line with their tenets, backed as they are by the Holocaust, the unbeatable playing card at the poker table of morality.

You can buy Greg Johnson’s Graduate School with Heidegger here

I have deliberately avoided Heidegger’s philosophy in this piece for two reasons. Firstly, for the non-philosopher it can seem impenetrable and might put off any potential readers. Secondly, Counter-Currents is planning a symposium on Heidegger next year, which marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Being and Time, to my mind one of the greatest works of white Western philosophy along with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Derrida’s Of Grammatology. That symposium will surely give a far greater exposition of this most brilliant of philosophers far better than I ever could. Although the question of Heidegger and the Jews is understandable even if you have not read a word of the man from Messkirch. There is, however, one more thing to say on the subject of silence: Professor Lang’s on the subject Jews would rather not discuss. The “other Holocaust.”

For all Gutmenschen today, at least those who want to keep their day jobs, Hitler means the Holocaust. Jew-led as it is, contemporary thought allows only one direction of travel. Any mention of the “other Holocaust,” for example, will enrage Jewish commentators on social media, despite an equivalent number of unfortunates being clinically expunged. The Roma gypsies the Nazis deleted are conveniently ignored, which is curious for a Left that can’t do enough for them today in Ireland. Cripples and homosexuals who went to the gas are similarly overlooked, again, in a world which the new elites have attempted to homosexualize. Cripples are now lionized, and any criticism or omission of their minimal presence deemed “ableist.” Hitler also hated secret societies, and so had many Freemasons executed. The problem is an obvious one. Although there were two Holocausts, you are only supposed to look at one. Nothing to see over there. As always, the main problem is that Hitler, the Nazis, and the Holocaust are viewed through the lens of morality, a seeing-glass so scratched and imperfect it would have been rejected by any competent lens-grinder as far back as Baruch de Spinoza.

On the subject of silence, there is scarcely a word in Lang’s book about this “other” Holocaust. Numbers are surprisingly difficult to come by, even with the internet, and most sources simply say that “millions” of non-Jews were also sent to the camps. A website called Statista is the most recent source I could find, and these figures were published last year:

Soviet Civilians: 5,700,000

Soviet Prisoners of War: 2,950,000

Non-Jewish Poles: 1,800,000

Roma Gypsies: 375,000

Serb Civilians: 312,000

Disabled Persons: 250,000

Criminals and “Asocials”: 70,000

Jehovah’s Witnesses: 1,900

So, more Soviets went to the gas than Jews, but I have never heard of a Holocaust Memorial Day for them. Perhaps I am wrong, but if there is such a thing, it is not advertised in the way that the Jewish Holocaust is marked. Jews, it seems, must have a monopoly on suffering. The Holocaust was one massacre among many to be found in history. Quite why it should be an exercise in contrite hand-wringing is not clear. In passing, and in brackets, Lang refers to “other exterminations” in Chapter Two, but these victims are not dignified by being given an identity. There is only one victim identity which counts here. Similarly, when “millions of non-Jewish Germans” are cited, there is no specification.

There is no compulsion to speak or write about any historical event, no matter how many accusatory Jews are sitting on the judicial and juridical bench. Nor does a writer’s attitude to such an event in any way invalidate his work. I have no children, but if I had a daughter who was raped and murdered by a maniac who also happened to have written a work of philosophy on a par with Being and Time, it would not alter my admiration for the man’s work by one iota. Professor Lang’s book is well argued, but the argument brooks no counterpoint. “The answer Heidegger proposed . . . was silence”, he writes. Why this is an invalid response to history is quite beyond me.