heidegger's being and time and national socialism - Philosophy ...

sary for arriving at home, the fallen German soldiers
of World Wars I and II—without mentioning
the Jews. 169 Under the reign of enframing,
whatever happens in modernity—“it is all the
same.” Still, the deeds of the National Socialists
had gone by while the nuclear bombs and energy
plants produced by the USA and the empire of
the Soviet Union represented an enduring threat.
Thus, in the talks, between 1949 and 1953, that
became The Question concerning Technology
and related texts, he encouraged the Germans to
focus on the reconstruction of their economy and
the dangers posed by the USA and the Soviet Union,
and he tried “to silence Auschwitz silently.”
170
“Anticipation of Death” after Hitler’s
“Seizure of Power”
His penchant for the dead German soldiers
goes back to the time between the two wars. As to
resoluteness, I pointed out already in Historical
Destiny and National Socialism in Heidegger’s
Being and Time that the translators render as “anticipation
of death” Heidegger’s expression
Vorlaufen in den Tod, literally translated “running
forward into death”; that the English translation
takes out the gist—the peculiar temporal
and spatial “choreography”—of the German expression;
that when reading “Vorlaufen in den
Tod” German readers of Being and Time in the
1920s could not but think of the so-called “heroes
of Langemarck”; and that one could take these
heroes as the methodological ideal type to interpret
Heidegger’s concept of resoluteness. 171
World War I was the first war characterized
largely by trench warfare. The front lines hardened
quickly. Entrenched, the armies lay opposite
each other, and this situation could have gone
on for years and years. According to the legend,
however, already in October 1914 the “heroes of
Langemarck”—young German students, most of
them volunteers—had stepped out of the
trenches into the open and, with the German national
anthem on their lips, had run toward the
French trenches. In terms of military strategy,
this was sheer suicide and completely counterproductive.
Nonetheless, or precisely because of
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this, they became the shibboleth of the rightwing
foes of the Weimar Republic, the shining
example of the unsurpassable sense of duty, sacrifice,
and community characteristic of a “true
German.” The Weimar Republic had to be destroyed
to make good on the promise of these
brave German soldiers betrayed by the liberals,
the social democrats, and the Jews. 172
In his speech as rector of the university at the
matriculation ceremony on November 25, 1933,
Heidegger pointed to the “irresistible process of
the arrival of a new German reality” and said that
this fact “causes the German student to line up for
a new, though bloodless, march of sacrifice. We
will therefore devote today and in the future this
celebration to the actuality of Langemarck and
conduct it under the symbol of Langemarck.” 173
Most probably, it was his own idea to make the
students repetitions of the German soldiers at
Langemarck. He definitely did not follow any
state order when, in the lecture course on
Hölderlin in winter 1934–35, he used again the
notion of sacrifice for the German soldiers. He
quotes a subordinate clause of an unfinished
poem by Hölderlin that runs, literally translated,
thus: “Since we have become a conversation and
are able to hear from / of each other.” 174 He adds
to Hölderlin’s subordinate clause a main clause,
and comments as follows:
Since we are a conversation, we are placed into,
and at the mercy of, the being as it reveals itself; it
is only since then that the Being of the being as
such can encounter and determine us. The fact,
however, that the being as to its Being is unconcealed
in advance for each of us, is the presupposition
for being able to hear from the other something;
that is, something about some being,
whether this being is what we are not—that is, nature—or
whether it is what we ourselves are—that
is, history. 175
In the next paragraph, Heidegger adduces the notions
of community and society:
The ability to hear by no means produces the relation
of the one to the other, that is, the community
[Gemeinschaft]. Rather, the ability to hear presupposes
the community. This primordial community
by no means originates through entering into a re-