More than three decades after his death, the legacy of German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) remains highly contentious. Both supporters and detractors agree that Heidegger’s books on existentialism, religion, and language have left an indelible mark on world philosophy. But his ties to the Nazis—Heidegger wore a swastika armband, gave Nazi salutes to his students, and proclaimed “Heil Hitler” at the end of lectures as late as 1936—have stained his reputation in the eyes of many critics.
Heidegger was born in southwestern Germany and raised in a Catholic household. His first academic interest was theology, and he briefly trained for the priesthood. But he developed an interest in philosophy, abandoned Catholicism in 1919, and won his first paid teaching position at a German university in 1923.
Most of Heidegger’s most famous works were published in the 1920s and 1930s. His first, Being and Time (1927), was a landmark in European philosophy.
Prior to the early 1930s, Heidegger had never expressed an interest in politics. But when Hitler took power in 1933, Heidegger welcomed the Nazi movement and joined the party. He was elected rector of his university and gave an infamous speech urging his students, “Let not theories and ‘ideas’ be the rules of your being. The Führer himself and he alone is German reality and its law, today and for the future.” Although he became privately disillusioned with Hitler in the late 1930s, Heidegger retained his party membership until the end of World War II.
After the war, Heidegger was forbidden to teach. He was eventually rehabilitated, in part thanks to the efforts of a former lover, the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt (1906–1975), who thought Heidegger had been too naive to understand the evil nature of Nazism. Heidegger himself refused to talk about his Nazi period, except for an interview with a German magazine that was published after his death.
Heidegger continued to write and lecture prolifically after the war and was hailed as a highly influential force in French philosophy. But he was also famous for his impenetrable prose; one American reviewer described Heidegger’s writing as “a distasteful mixture of nonsense and banality.”
ADDITIONAL FACTS
- Heidegger enlisted in the German army upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914, but was released two months later because of his delicate health. He was recalled to service near the end of the war and served on the western front for part of 1918 before Germany’s defeat.
- Many of Heidegger’s students ended up as refugees in the United States during World War II. Two of the most famous were ideological rivals: Leo Strauss (1899–1973), who became one of the heroes of American neoconservatism, and Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979), who influenced many left-wing radicals of the 1960s and 1970s.
- In the summer of 1944, at age fifty-five, Heidegger was deemed “expendable” by his university and ordered to help dig trenches for the Nazi army near the Rhine.
