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

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tence in §74 in Sein und Zeit (“Die Wiederholung
erwidert vielmehr die Möglichkeit der dagewesenen
Existenz,”[Sein und Zeit, 386]) has been mistranslated
in English, namely, as an act of distancing (oneself
from a command, request, norm etc. issued by
someone else toward oneself; i.e., as an act of not
complying with a command, etc.) and not as an act of
submission (to a command etc.) (on “The repetition
makes a reciprocative rejoinder to the possibility of
that existence which-has-been-there” [Heidegger,
Being and Time, 438] see Fritsche, Historical Destiny
and National Socialism, 10–28 and passim; on
Stambaugh’s translation [Being and Time: A Translation,
352–53], see Fritsche, Historical Destiny and
National Socialism, 335–36). I point out, already in
the preface (ibid., ix–x), the importance of this passage
and discuss erwidern in the dative (ibid., 7–11)
and in the sense of a counterattack or even, as not
only Peg Birmingham interprets it, complete rupture
(as the most intensive form of distancing) (ibid.,
11–2). Immediately thereafter, I introduce, as a further
sense, erwidern as compliance with a request or
submission to a command (ibid., 12–13), and I argue
at length that, in §74, for reasons of the grammar of
the sentence as well as its context erwidern is used in
the sense of such a submission (ibid., 13–28). In addition,
I come back again and again to this topic to
substantiate and elaborate my claim (e.g., ibid.,
65–67, 83–84, 134–35, 173–74, 327–31n70; see, approvingly,
Dieter Thomä, “Heidegger und der
Nationalsozialismus: In der Dunkelkammer der
Seinsgeschichte,” in Dieter Thomä, ed., Heidegger-
Handbuch: Leben-Werk-Wirkung [Stuttgart: J. B.
Metzler, 2003], 145–46). I do so because I was aware
that erwidern as submission (to destiny and fate) is,
so to speak, the admission ticket to much of the German
right-wing ideology at Heidegger’s time, and
that its mistranslation as an act of distancing—as
which it is interpreted in all postmodern interpretations
and even by Charles Guignon (see Fritsche,
Historical Destiny and National Socialism,
9–11 and passim)—is just a sign of how alien to average
readers in the USA (and to Hannah Arendt’s
notion of politics; see ibid., 335n72) this ideology
is— so alien that another reviewer and even Elliot
Neaman—who publishes on German literature and
for whom my book is “the best analysis of
Heidegger’s Being and Time to come along in a long
time” (Constellations 8:1 [2003]: 155)—has misunderstood
me and makes me say what Birmingham
says (ibid., 157), after which what he attributes to me
in the remainder of the review cannot make much
sense. Robert Scharff insinuates that by “revolutionary
rightists” I mean only National Socialists (and
not also many others, e.g., Max Scheler) and makes
me say other strange things (Journal of the History of
Philosophy 38:1 [2000]: 455–56). As to my knowledge,
so far no one has challenged, let alone refuted,
any detail of my interpretation.
As I mentioned, most, if not all, of the literature on
the political aspects of Being and Time confines itself
to Being and Time. It is presumably part of the problem—i.e.,
of the unwillingness and incapacity of
trained philosophers, especially in the USA, to take
into account as possibly relevant also literature beyond
the more or less narrow realm of the kinds of
texts they are trained in—that my book has been
characterized most often only as an analysis of the
supposed intricacies of Heidegger’s and German language.
It is, however, primarily a comparison of the
political theory in Being and Time with contemporaneous
political theories. The parts on Hitler, Scheler,
Lukács, and Tillich take more space than the ones on
Being and Time.
22. Heidegger, Being and Time, 438; Sein und Zeit, 386.
Heidegger labels in Being and Time and later
“Gewesenheit” (“having-been”) a past that shall be
repeated and “Vergangenheit” (“past”) a past that has
no right to be repeated; see Fritsche, Historical Destiny
and National Socialism, 284–85n57.
23. Heidegger, Being and Time, 444 (replacement of the
indefinite article in front of “possibility” and insertion
of the German words mine); Sein und Zeit,
391–2 (see also Being and Time, 433; Sein und Zeit,
381; see Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National
Socialism, 40–43). See on the importance of the definite
article in German ibid., 238–39n17; on the primacy
of the future see above, n. 21.
24. Heidegger, Being and Time, 436 (replacement of the
indefinite article in front of “people” and insertion of
the German words mine); Sein und Zeit, 384.
25. Fritsche, Historical Destiny and National Socialism,
87, 146–47.
26. Ibid., 138–41 (see e.g. below, n. 99).
27. Ibid., 216–8; Johannes Fritsche, “From National Socialism
to Postmodernism: Löwith on Heidegger,”
Constellations 16 (2009): 93.
28. According to my knowledge, those who, in the
1920s, promoted the community of the people were
already members of the NSDAP or—either they
themselves or, as in the case of Moeller van den