6

Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

In the chapters that follow, we tackle a range of questions including the intellectual and
cultural background against which Heideggers commitment to National Socialism
must be understood, the question of his antisemitism,7 the role that victors morality
has played in the way the Heidegger affair has been pursued in the intellectual world
and the question as to whether Heidegger is philosophically silent with respect to
the Holocaust or whether in fact his examination of the essence of technology is an
attempt to respond philosophically to the Holocaust. In the first two chapters then, the
second in particular, we shall, among other things, look to offer a sustained analysis of
how Heideggers meditation on technology, in particular its essence Gestell, can be
understood as a philosophical confrontation with the Holocaust.8 Read in such a way,
Heideggers philosophy offers the possibility of a searching examination and indictment
of the way we understand and reveal the world around us which makes such an event
not just the very antithesis of a singularity or an anomaly in Western history but rather
an ongoing possibility. And while countless commentators, journalists, film-makers,
popular moralists, demagogues and artists continue to bay loudly about the importance of historical remembrance, thoughtlessly invoking Santayanas famous epigram
to that effect, far too few of them successfully identify what needs to be remembered;
too few of them manage to really address the lesson that history continues, unsuccessfully, to try and teach us. Our failure in this regard is attested to by the numerous
acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing which have marred our political landscape since
the end of the Second World War. Far from having grasped what history should have
taught us, our wilful self-deception has ensured the recurrence of the same problems
right to the present day. As Christopher Browning notes.
From the Nazi war of destruction in eastern Europe and the war against the Jews
to the war without mercy in the Pacific and most recently Vietnam, soldiers have
all too often tortured and slaughtered unarmed civilians and helpless prisoners,
and committed numerous other atrocities. Dowers account of entire American
units in the Pacific openly boasting of a take no prisoners policy and routinely
collecting body parts of Japanese soldiers as battlefield souvenirs is chilling
reading for anyone who smugly assumes that war atrocities were a monopoly of
the Nazi regime.9

Anti-Heideggerians (and no doubt custodians of the Holocausts historically singular

character) will protest that this is an exculpatory strategy, yet another in a long line of
misbegotten exercises in Heideggerian apologetics.10 But I am no apologist and, as an
intellectual who has spent the majority of his intellectual life trying to come to grips
with Heideggers thought, I, as much as anyone, am appalled at some of the things
Heidegger said, did and wrote during his years as a Nazi and, in particular, during
his tenure as Rector of Freiburg University. Nevertheless, I still insist on my right as a
liberal and as a democrat to abstain from the victors moralizing which dogmatically
maintains that any opponents of its narrative be tarred with the brush of Auschwitz.11
I will argue moreover, that far from making apology or excuses for what happened
during the Second World War, some of Heideggers postwar philosophy implicitly
undermines an erroneous show trial that has taken place; I argue further that what we
must face up to is the shocking possibility that we are, all of us, at some level complicit