At the Existentialist Café (14 page)

He and Jaspers both felt that philosophy needed a
revolution, but they disagreed on what form it should take. They also disagreed about style. Heidegger thought Jaspers’ mania for lists and columns in his work was boring, while Jaspers read drafts of
Being and Time
and found them opaque. There were other early signs of disharmony. Once, Jaspers was told that Heidegger had spoken badly of him behind his back, so he confronted him. Heidegger denied it, and added in a shocked tone, ‘I have never experienced anything like this before.’ That left Jaspers puzzled too. The challenge ended with both of them disoriented and affronted, but Jaspers let the matter go.

The confusion increased. With the rise of the Nazis, something
‘estranging’ entered their relationship, as Jaspers put it in private notes about Heidegger written years later. Jaspers had reason to feel estranged from his friend: he was not Jewish himself, but Gertrud was. Like many others, the couple tended to be dismissive about the Nazi threat at first. They weighed the usual considerations: surely these barbarians could not stay in power long? Even for an eminent professor, it would be hard to flee the country and start again elsewhere, separated from everything that had given context to his life. Besides, leaving always meant paying punitive ‘Reich Flight’ taxes, and obtaining visas. From 1933 on, Karl and Gertrud regularly considered the possibility of escaping, but did not do it.

An awkward moment occurred when Heidegger visited Jaspers in March 1933, just before beginning the rectorship. The subject of National Socialism came up, and Heidegger said, ‘
One must get in step.’ Jaspers was too shocked to speak, and did not push him, not wanting to hear what more he might say. That June, Heidegger stayed with Jaspers again while in Heidelberg to give a rerun of his speech
on the new regime and universities. In the audience, Jaspers was struck by the ‘thunderous applause’ with which students greeted Heidegger’s words. As for himself, he wrote, ‘I sat in front at the periphery with my legs stretched out before me, my hands in my pockets, and did not budge.’ The long legs that made such an impression on Arendt now provided their own commentary on Heidegger’s speech.

Afterwards, at his home, Jaspers began to remark to Heidegger, ‘
It is just like 1914 …’, intending to go on to say, ‘once again this deceitful mass intoxication’. But Heidegger agreed so enthusiastically to the first few words that Jaspers left the sentence in mid-air. Over dinner a little later, the topic of Hitler and his lack of education came up, and this time Heidegger said, bizarrely, ‘Education is completely irrelevant, just look at his wonderful hands!’ Coming from anyone else, this would sound purely eccentric. From Heidegger, with his emphasis on handiwork and the wielding of tools, it was significant. He seemed to be attracted less by Nazi ideology than by the idea of Hitler dextrously and firmly moulding the country into a new form.

Gertrud Jaspers had been dreading Heidegger’s visit, but she tried to welcome him for her husband’s sake. Before his arrival, she wrote to her parents: ‘
Now I must say to myself: you are a lady from the Orient, they know how to cultivate hospitality! And I must simply be kind and keep quiet!’ She did just that, but Heidegger was rude to her on leaving: ‘he hardly said good-bye at all’, wrote Jaspers to Arendt later. For this, above all, Jaspers could not forgive him. Years later, Heidegger would claim he had done it because he was
‘ashamed’, meaning presumably that he was embarrassed about his Nazi episode, but Jaspers was sceptical about this explanation. Their correspondence dried up for a long time, and Heidegger never came to the Jaspers house again.

Jaspers later thought he might have erred in treating Heidegger too delicately. When Heidegger sent him a printed version of his rectorial address in 1933, Jaspers’ reply was supremely diplomatic: ‘
It was nice to see it in its authentic version after reading about it in the paper.’ Should he have been more critical, he wondered later? Perhaps he had
failed ‘this intoxicated and enthused
Heidegger’. Heidegger perhaps needed what a later generation would call an ‘intervention’, to save him from himself. It was, Jaspers implied, a failure of engagement on his own part — and he linked this to a more general failure of tolerant, educated Germans to face up to the challenge of the time.

Of course, it is relatively easy for later generations (or for the same people later in life) to see what challenges a particular ‘border situation’ presented; no such retrospective view was available to those living through it. A natural human tendency is to try to
continue with as ordinary and civilised a life as possible, for as long as one can. Bruno Bettelheim later observed that, under Nazism, only a few people realised at once that life
could not
continue unaltered: these were the ones who got away quickly. Bettelheim himself was not among them. Caught in Austria when Hitler annexed it, he was sent first to Dachau and then to Buchenwald, but was then released in a mass amnesty to celebrate Hitler’s birthday in 1939 — an extraordinary reprieve, after which he left at once for America.

The importance of remaining open to events and seeing instantly when a decision is required was a theme also explored that year by another existentialist philosopher, this time a French one: Gabriel Marcel. A Christian thinker who made his name as a playwright, and who communicated his ideas mainly through essays or through get-togethers with students and friends in his Paris flat, Marcel developed a strongly theological branch of existentialism. His faith distanced him from both Sartre and Heidegger, but he shared a sense of how history makes demands on individuals.

In his essay ‘
On the Ontological Mystery’, written in 1932 and published in the fateful year of 1933, Marcel wrote of the human tendency to become stuck in habits, received ideas, and a narrow-minded attachment to possessions and familiar scenes. Instead, he urged his readers to develop a capacity for remaining ‘available’ to situations as they arise. Similar ideas of
disponibilité
or availability had been explored by other writers, notably André Gide, but Marcel made it his central existential imperative. He was aware of how rare and difficult it was. Most people fall into what he calls ‘crispation’: a tensed,
encrusted shape in life — ‘as though each one of us secreted a kind of shell which gradually hardened and imprisoned him’.

Marcel’s ‘shell’ recalls Husserl’s notion of the accumulated and inflexible preconceptions that one should set aside in the
epoché
, so as to open up access to the ‘things themselves’. In both cases, what is rigid is cleared away, and the trembling freshness of what is underneath bcomes the object of the philosopher’s attention. For Marcel, learning to stay open to reality in this way is the philosopher’s prime job. Everyone can do it, but the philosopher is the one who is called on above all to stay
awake, so as to be the first to sound the alarm if something seems wrong.

Heidegger believed in vigilance too: he was determined to shock people out of their forgetfulness. But for him, vigilance did not mean calling attention to Nazi violence, to the intrusion of state surveillance, or to the physical threats to his fellow humans. It meant being decisive and resolute in carrying through the demands history was making upon Germany, with its distinctive Being and destiny. It meant getting in step with the chosen hero.

For Heidegger in the early 1930s, it really
was
all about the Germans.

This aspect of his work is easy for us to forget; we are used to reading philosophy as offering a universal message for all times and places — or at least as aiming to do so. But Heidegger disliked the notion of universal truths or universal humanity, which he considered a fantasy. For him, Dasein is not defined by shared faculties of reason and understanding, as the Enlightenment philosophers thought. Still less is it defined by any kind of transcendent eternal soul, as in religious tradition. We do not exist on a higher, eternal plane at all. Dasein’s Being is local: it has a historical situation, and is constituted in time and place.

At the very beginning of
Being and Time
, Heidegger promises that the book will take us to a grand finale in which he will make this ultimate point: that
the meaning of Dasein’s Being is Time
. He never did this because he never finished the book: what we have is just the first part. But he showed clearly which way he was planning to go.
If we are temporal beings by our very nature, then authentic existence means accepting, first, that we are finite and mortal. We will die: this all-important realisation is what Heidegger calls authentic ‘
Being-towards-Death’, and it is fundamental to his philosophy.

Second, it also means understanding that we are historical beings, and grasping the demands our particular historical situation is making on us. In what Heidegger calls
‘anticipatory resoluteness’, Dasein discovers ‘that its uttermost possibility lies in giving itself up’. At that moment, through Being-towards-death and resoluteness in facing up to one’s time, one is freed from the they-self and attains one’s true, authentic self.

These are the pages of
Being and Time
in which Heidegger sounds most fascistic. There can be little doubt that he was thinking in political terms when he wrote his passages on death and resoluteness. Yet, even here, Heidegger’s basic concepts
could
have led to quite a different intepretation. Just as his ideas of the ‘they’ and authenticity could have led him to a case for resisting totalitarian brainwashing, so his ideas of resoluteness and the acceptance of mortality could have formed a framework for courageous
resistance
to the regime and its intimidation techniques. It could have been a manifesto for anti-totalitarian heroism. Instead, it is apparent that Heidegger intended a mass of highly charged political meanings to be visible in this text — though perhaps only to those who were already inclined to be sympathetic.

Hans
Jonas, one of Heidegger’s former students, remembered how such coded terms were present even in earlier lectures, although Jonas himself was oblivious to them at the time. He did not see them because he was not attuned that way, but in retrospect — he told an interviewer — he recognised the ‘Blood-and-Soil’ language of the lectures, and the ‘(how should I say it?) primitive nationalism’ in Heidegger’s talk of resoluteness and history, together with his occasional anti-French political asides and his emphasis on Black Forest rusticism. At the time, it seemed a mere eccentricity. Only after Jonas was told of Heidegger’s rectorial address in 1933 did he re-evaluate his whole memory of the long-ago seminars he had taken. ‘That was
when I realised, for the first time, certain traits in Heidegger’s thinking and I hit myself on the forehead and said: “Yes, I missed something there before.” ’

By Christmas of 1933, however, Heidegger was feeling less at home in the role of public National Socialist philosopher than he had expected to be. According to his own account, he spent that winter break coming to a decision: he would
resign the rectorship at the end of the next semester. He did just that, dating his letter of resignation 14 April 1934. After this, he later claimed, he had nothing more to do with Nazism. He even ventured a small rebellion by putting the original
dedication to Husserl back into the 1935 edition of
Being and Time
. The new stance came at a significant cost to himself, he asserted, because he was harassed and spied on by party functionaries from then until the end of the war.

Heidegger hated talking about this period, and none of his own explanations of what happened in 1933 were ever satisfactory. In 1945, he wrote just one short piece dealing with the matter, entitled ‘
The Rectorate 1933/34: facts and thoughts’. There he admitted that he briefly saw the party as offering ‘the possibility of an inner self-collection and of a renewal of the people, and a path toward the discovery of its historical-Western purpose’. But then, he said, he saw his mistake and extricated himself. The message of the essay can be summed up as ‘oops, I didn’t mean to be a Nazi’. It suited Heidegger to make himself sound this naive. When, also in 1945, the French writer Frédéric de Towarnicki weakened Heidegger’s defences with a bottle of good wine before asking him ‘why?’, Heidegger responded by leaning forward and saying, in the tone of someone solemnly confiding a secret,
‘Dummheit.’
He repeated the word again, with emphasis.
‘Dummheit.’
Stupidity. The implication was that his worst failing was unworldliness. He even convinced the ever-generous Jaspers, who after the war referred to the Heidegger of 1933 as a
‘dreaming boy’ — a child caught up in events too difficult for him to understand.

The truth is rather different. For one thing, Heidegger clearly retained Nazi sympathies long after his resignation. In August 1934,
he submitted plans to the Ministry for Science and Education for their proposed philosophical academy in
Berlin, a kind of urban version of the Todtnauberg camps in which teachers and students would live together and pursue ‘scientific work, recreation, concentration, martial games, physical work, walks, sport, and celebrations’, under the guidance of a director and professors who were ‘politically safe’ National Socialists. Heidegger’s submission was rejected, but not for any lack of enthusiasm in his way of presenting it. Two years later, when he travelled to
Rome in 1936 to give a lecture on the poet Friedrich Hölderlin, he still wore a Nazi pin on his lapel, and he kept it there even when he and his part-Jewish former student Karl Löwith took a day off to go sightseeing with their families. Löwith was disgusted: regardless of Heidegger’s views, it would have been easy for him to remove the badge if only to make his friends feel comfortable.

That was not the only time Heidegger showed a rigid shell — an extreme form of Gabriel Marcel’s ‘crispation’ — in dealing with people. The philosopher Max
Müller, who studied with Heidegger and worked as his assistant, found himself in trouble with the regime in 1937 for writing political articles and working for a Catholic youth group. Freiburg’s vice rector, Theodor Maunz, told Müller that Heidegger had been approached for a report on his student’s politics, and had given him a generally good assessment ‘as a human being, educator, and philosopher’. On the other hand, he had included an observation that Müller had a negative opinion of the state. A single sentence like that meant doom. ‘Go to him,’ Maunz told Müller. ‘Everything else will be fine if he crosses out that sentence.’