1 Living through a Century

He who philosophizes is not at one with the previous and contemporary world’s ways of thinking of things. Thus Plato’s discussions are often not only directed to something but also directed against it. (DDP 39/GW5 187)

 

1. The Sky Over Breslau

Hans-Georg Gadamer was born in Marburg on February 11, 1900. His father was a well-known professor of pharmaceutical chemistry; deeply convinced of scientific progress, he was, according to his son, authoritarian “in the worst way but with the best of intentions” (PA ₃/PL ₉). In 1902 he was called as a full professor to Breslau, in today’s Poland, where Gadamer spent his entire childhood and adolescence. At the age of only thirty-five, Gadamer’s mother, Emma Caroline Johanna Gewiese, died in the spring of 1904. Her son, who barely knew her, always remembered her fondness for music, her passion for art, and her love of literature.

In the gray atmosphere of his paternal home the years in Breslau were gloomy and oppressive, marked by the technological advances that heralded the new century. On the city’s streets the first cars mingled with horse-drawn carriages. Gas lanterns were slowly replaced by electric lights, movie theaters opened their doors, and telephones were installed. The zeppelin flew across the Breslau sky, but the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 shocked contemporary culture and began to undermine the optimistic faith in technology (EPH 221/EE 8).¹ Although Breslau was a quiet provincial city far removed from the front, the effects of the First World War soon made themselves felt. Germany emerged from the chaos of war economically broke, politically unstable, disillusioned, and disoriented by a deep need for direction.

In the spring of 1918 Gadamer enrolled in Breslau University. During his first semester he studied some of the most disparate topics in the humanities: German, art history, psychology, history, and Asian studies. In his second semester he began to follow the lecture courses of the Neo-Kantians Eugen Kühnemann (1868–1946), Julius Guttmann (1880–1950), and Richard Hönigswald (1875–1947), and it was Hönigswald who urged him toward philosophy. Admitted to a seminar on the philosophy of language that Hönigswald held for advanced students, Gadamer asked a question about the difference between signs and words that brought him unexpected praise, strengthened his self-esteem, and in a sense opened his path to philosophy.²

As with many of his generation, the encounter with new ideas in those years occurred through the reading of the Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man) by Thomas Mann (1875–1955) and through the cultural criticism exerted by the George-Kreis, the circle around Stefan George (1868–1933).

2. Marburg and Philosophy

In October 1919 Gadamer moved with his family to Marburg, where his father, Johannes Gadamer (1867–1928), had received a new chair and where he became rector in 1922. Through a lucky coincidence the best of German intellectual culture had converged on this university town. It suffices to mention a few names: Ernst Robert Curtius (1886–1956) in Romance studies, Rudolf Bultmann (1884–1976) in theology, Richard Hamann (1879–1961) in art history, and Paul Natorp (1854–1924) and Nicolai Hartmann (1882–1950) in philosophy. Gadamer would take advantage of this constellation through his ability to listen to and learn from different points of view, which distinguished him even then. The twenty years spent in the university town—from 1919 to 1938—were important for his intellectual formation and decisive for his philosophical thought.

His involvement with the George-Circle also dates from his time in Marburg. Gadamer was introduced to the Circle by the Romanist Curtius, who strongly influenced his reading in those years. The Circle was distinctive for its scornful detachment from the decadent civilized world; dominated by the charismatic “leadership” of George, it was governed by ironclad, esoteric rules.³ The Circle’s activity in Marburg revolved around the historian of economics Friedrich Wolters (1876–1930), who taught there from 1920 to 1923; together with his friend, the poet Oskar Schürer (1892–1949), Gadamer attended Wolters’s seminars for a time, where he also became acquainted with Hans Anton. Gadamer later witnessed the relationship between Anton and Max Kommerell (1902–44), the writer and literary critic, which came to a tragic end. Gadamer was attracted to the group only by the privilege given to the poetic experience of truth; however, he was driven out of the Circle, where not only science but also philosophy began to be disliked. An even harder destiny befell Kommerell, who, by trying to keep his distance, showed that George and his poetry could also be admired outside the Kreis.

When Gadamer started studying philosophy, Marburg was famous above all for Neo-Kantianism. Its founder, Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), having worked for decades in Marburg with the rallying cry “Back to Kant,” moved to Berlin in 1912 and left the hard-won fate of the “Marburg School” in the hands of two other proponents: Natorp and Hartmann. Both men, but especially Nicolai Hartmann, would guide Gadamer’s initial steps.

Though considered the last representative of Neo-Kantianism, it was actually Hartmann who declared its end by distancing himself in the name of “critical realism.” Still relatively young, he was a teacher, a friend, and, in a sense, a father for Gadamer, supporting him with affection and esteem. Despite the appearance of being cold and distant, Hartmann was very close to his students. He knew how to alternate between intensive and focused work and evenings animated by his affable and energetic personality. His influence on Gadamer should not be underestimated (RPJ 7/GW2 483).⁴ It was Hartmann, after all, who convinced him to complete his dissertation with Natorp. Entitled “The Essence of Pleasure according to Plato’s Dialogues” (Das Wesen der Lust nach den Platonischen Dialogen), the dissertation remained unpublished; yet already in those 116 badly written pages, with only five footnotes, there appears the idea of the “good” that, as a bridge between Plato and Aristotle, would guide Gadamer’s future reflections.⁵ Even if Hartmann and Natorp wrote two diametrically opposed reviews of the work, they both agreed to give it the highest mark.

3. A Demanding Teacher: Heidegger’s Example

Immediately after his graduation in August 1922, Gadamer contracted a severe form of infantile paralysis: poliomyelitis. The illness marked a profound break in his life. He had to live in quarantine while his convalescence stretched throughout the entire winter. In those long months he read, among others, the literary work of Jean Paul and the Logical Investigations of Edmund Husserl (1859–1938). Yet something new occurred during the time of his illness: Natorp lent Gadamer a manuscript on Aristotle written by Husserl’s young assistant in Freiburg, Martin Heidegger (1889–1976).⁶

Heidegger’s name had been discussed for a long time, and Gadamer had already heard of him. Surrounded by an aura of fame, Heidegger was regarded as the “secret king” of German philosophy—as Hannah Arendt would later describe him in her memoirs.⁷ However, since Heidegger had not yet published anything, this fame was based only on the suggestive power of his lectures. That was precisely why Natorp, who wanted to appoint him to a professorship at the University of Marburg, asked him for a report on his work on Aristotle. Gadamer, perhaps influenced by Natorp’s positive evaluation, decided to go to Freiburg as soon as his strength would allow him. In a letter dated September 27, 1922, he communicated his decision to Heidegger, who answered quickly with a card.⁸ This was the beginning of a relationship that lasted a lifetime, and the encounter with Heidegger left an indelible mark on Gadamer. Not only were the results Gadamer had achieved by that time in his study of philosophy put into question, but the initial doubts about his self-confidence, which may have been gained too early, started to emerge (PA 14/PL 23).

In April 1923, not yet having recovered fully from his illness and having just married Frida Kratz (1898–1979), a native of Breslau, Gadamer moved to Freiburg. The small-town university scene was dominated by Husserl, and so Gadamer felt almost obliged to attend his lectures and seminars. For Husserl, it was clear that the young student, recommended by Natorp, should write on Aristotle, while the name of Aristotle seemed the only link that, beyond the label of “phenomenology,” still connected Husserl and Heidegger. Yet Gadamer’s enthusiasm for Heidegger soon mirrored his disappointment in Husserl, who indulged in long didactic monologues during his lectures—Gadamer would later speak of the “seduction of the podium” (GW2 212).⁹ Fjodor Stepun (1884–1965), one of his fellow students, described Husserl as a “watchmaker gone mad,” because during his explications he turned his right hand in the left, a movement of concentration that had something of a craftsmanlike, ideal descriptive technique to it (PA 35/PL 31). Thereafter, for Gadamer, phenomenology remained above all that of Max Scheler (1874–1928), whom he had already met in 1920 in Marburg and whom he never ceased to admire.

Heidegger had prepared a course on logic for the summer semester of 1923, but when he learned that a colleague was to offer the same course, he decided to change the topic and announced a new title: “Ontology.” A little later the title was stated more precisely: “The Hermeneutics of Facticity.”¹⁰ Thus Gadamer’s first encounter with Heidegger took place under the banner of hermeneutics. But during that summer semester Gadamer was almost more attracted to another topic.¹¹ Heidegger held a lecture and gave four seminars, one of which dealt with the sixth book of the Nicomachean Ethics. The concept of phrónesis, discussed in those pages by Aristotle, would accompany Gadamer into his final years.¹²

The seminar on Aristotle marked the beginning of an even closer relationship between the two that went far beyond academic boundaries: Heidegger invited Gadamer to read the Metaphysics with him, and this work stretched unexpectedly into the summer vacation. From July 29 to August 23, 1923, Gadamer and his wife spent four weeks in Heidegger’s hut, or Hütte, in Todtnauberg. Following his teacher, Gadamer learned how to read Aristotle “phenomenologically,” but at the same time he also learned from Aristotle how to address philosophical questions to his own time (GW10 31–45). Along with the seminars in Freiburg, this reading experience was his first practical “introduction to the universality of hermeneutics” (RPJ 10/GW2 486).

Heidegger, for his part, also needed an introduction. The philosopher from the Black Forest, who had never left Freiburg and Baden, had just been invited to Marburg by Natorp and hence took advantage of Gadamer to learn more about that philosophers’ stronghold. He was inspired by anything but peaceful intentions: even before his official entry to Marburg, Heidegger took an almost aggressive posture toward his Neo-Kantian colleagues. Hartmann was his main target. On July 14, 1923, he wrote to Karl Jaspers (1883–1969), with whom he had developed a philosophical kinship, about his combat plans: he would “make things hot” for Hartmann, supported by the “shock troops” of sixteen students he would bring with him from Freiburg, some of them just hangers-on, others serious and capable collaborators.¹³

Among the latter was also Gadamer, who left Freiburg reluctantly. The summer semester distanced him once and for all from the “abstract exercises in thinking led by Nicolai Hartmann,” and drew him onto Heidegger’s paths (PA 37/PL 34). His very earliest writings testify to this change. In a contribution to the Festschrift for Natorp published in 1924, Gadamer revealed his perplexities about the idea of a philosophical “system,” which in Neo-Kantianism was almost a dogmatic principle.¹⁴ In his review of Hartmann’s Metaphysics of Knowledge (Metaphysik der Erkenntnis) for the distinguished journal Logos, the place where the text was written appears very clearly: Freiburg im Breisgau.¹⁵ Although he viewed Hartmann’s rapprochement with phenomenology positively, Gadamer did not consider his Aristotelian realism radical enough. He pointed to the unavoidable task of a “critical destruction of the philosophical tradition,” thus revealing Heidegger as the source of his reflections.¹⁶ At issue in the long debate with Hartmann was the purely descriptive attitude, free from every point of view: according to Gadamer, there was “no way to approach a thing that would not be decisively determined by the peculiarity of one’s own position.”¹⁷ Though the word “hermeneutics” does not appear, its seeds are clearly recognizable in his critique of the theory of knowledge and his doubts about the very idea of a system.

All beginnings bring significant difficulties. When Gadamer returned to Marburg in the winter semester of 1923–24—this time with his new teacher, whose assistant he had become—he encountered the problem of finding his own place within the complicated academic landscape. He tried to mediate in the relationship between Hartmann and Heidegger, which was steadily worsening. Whereas the majority of students went to the lectures of the latter, the lectures of the former remained poorly attended.¹⁸ When Heidegger stepped up to the podium, he impressed everyone with his energy, his power of concentration, and his radicalism. “It is impossible to exaggerate the drama of Heidegger’s appearance in Marburg,” Gadamer recalled (PA 48/PL 214; GW10 16). An entire generation was mesmerized by him: along with Gadamer there were such philosophers as Hannah Arendt (1906–75), Karl Löwith (1897–1973), Gerhard Krüger (1902–72), Jacob Klein (1899–1978) and Hans Jonas (1903–93).

But Heidegger was a demanding teacher, especially once he had freed himself from the dominant figure of Husserl and gained a new self-confidence, not only in his self-worth but also in the possibility that he could shape the future of German philosophy. He also owed his confidence to the work that was slowly taking shape through his lectures, namely, Being and Time. Gadamer, who had produced only a little, had to bear the consequences. Despite everything, in Heidegger’s eyes he remained a follower of Hartmann. For the philosopher from the Black Forest, who in this way revealed his petit bourgeois revanchism, Gadamer was the son of that academic aristocracy, which he could barely tolerate. He bluntly expressed his doubts about Gadamer’s philosophical talent in a letter to Löwith from March 27, 1925, using words similar to what he had written to Gadamer himself in a letter from 1924: “If you cannot summon sufficient toughness toward yourself, nothing will become of you.”¹⁹ Gadamer, who had decided to write his Habilitation with Heidegger, bore his genial teacher’s lack of trust with a scarcely concealed bitterness. In truth, he was deeply disappointed. His inner self-certainty, which had already been sorely tested by the figure of his father, was once again powerfully undermined.

4. Plato in the Future

Thus began the years that Gadamer called in his autobiography his “no one’s years” (PA 35/PL 30). He describes them accordingly: “These were years of deep doubt about my intellectual gifts, but they were also years in which I finally began to work seriously. I became a classical philologist under the friendly guidance of Paul Friedländer” (PA 37/PL 34). For Gadamer, the study of classical philology was his way of liberating himself from Heidegger. After Easter 1925, he started up his new studies and attended the classes of Paul Friedländer (1882–1968) as well as of Ernst Lommatzsch (1871–1949) and Paul Jacobstahl (1880–1957). What he was looking for, after the encounter with Heidegger, was a solid “ground”: “I actually became a classical philologist because of the feeling that I would simply be crushed by the dominance of his thinking, unless I found my own ground on which I could stand more firmly than this powerful thinker himself.”²⁰

A solid ground meant first of all material security. These were the years of the great inflation, the ruin of the middle class in Germany. Gadamer’s situation was no different from that of his friends and colleagues in Marburg: all of them barely managed to get by with the help of a fellowship from the Emergency Association of German Science (Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft).²¹ Philology also undoubtedly offered him more security: it would not necessarily facilitate a university career, but it would at least give Gadamer the chance to become a high school teacher of ancient Greek. A solid ground also meant the grounding of textual knowledge: Gadamer moved from the slippery territory of contemporary philosophy to the stable and solid ground of the classics. He would respond to those who asked him about his studies thusly: “I basically only read books that are at least two thousand years old” (PA 72/PL 47).

Gadamer felt encouraged in his decision by Bultmann, the Protestant theologian who had found in Heidegger’s philosophy a framework for critical exegesis, whereby he read the New Testament as a text like any other classic. Gadamer was admitted into Bultmann’s famous Graeca—in academic terms the Graeca meant a circle of docents and students who interpreted the texts of classical literature together—and he took part in it for fifteen years. This was one of his most deeply formative experiences.

Yet Gadamer’s initial passion for literature did not diminish during this time. Every week he met with his closest friends, including Löwith and Krüger, to read the great novels by Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Gontcharov, while not overlooking modern authors such as Joseph Conrad, Knut Hamsun, and Andre Gide (PA 41/PL 39).²²

Gadamer’s main reference point in those years, however, was Paul Friedländer, who was engaged with the first of the three volumes of his magnum opus on Plato (GW10 403). Besides attending his lectures and seminars, Gadamer also took part in Friedländer’s Graeca.²³ This intensive collaboration was productive for both: Gadamer’s interpretations may have helped to form Friedländer’s image of Plato, while Friedländer’s minute textual exegeses not only of Plato and Aristotle, but also of the poets, especially Pindar, deeply influenced the development of Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. At that time Gadamer discovered that dialogue was not merely an artistic expedient but a leading motif of Plato’s philosophy; the idea of a “dialogical ethics,” which would later form the basis of his Habilitation, arose in those years.

In Friedländer’s seminar Gadamer presented his work on Aristotle’s Protrepticus, which would be published in 1928 in the prestigious journal Hermes.²⁴ The famous philologist Werner Jaeger (1888–1961) believed that the Protrepticus is a text from Aristotle’s youth that, in its conception of ethics, retains traces of Platonism. Jaeger wanted to establish a “genetic” interpretation of Aristotle, according to which at least three phases in his philosophy could be distinguished. Gadamer was able, however, through his attentive and bold philological reading of both the text and the context, to show that the Protrepticus, as its title would suggest—protréptein means “to stimulate” or “to awaken”—does not contain a conception of ethics but rather a call to philosophize. On the invitation from Friedländer, Gadamer took part in the meeting of classical philologists from July 10 to 12, 1930, in Naumburg, where among others he met Karl Reinhardt (1886–1958), for whom he formed a lasting appreciation. On this occasion he also met Jaeger personally, and they remained in contact until his emigration to America in 1936.²⁵ In the Greek ideal of education Jaeger saw the basis of a “Neo-Humanism,” which would emerge later in his Paideia, a work published clandestinely in the thirties in Germany. Though Heidegger found humanism to be naïve and bloodless, Gadamer campaigned in Truth and Method for a rehabilitation of humanistic concepts.²⁶

On July 20, 1927, Gadamer passed the state examination in classical philology with less than brilliant results. He had already decided to continue his studies and to write his Habilitation with Friedländer. But the day after the examination Gadamer received a short and peremptory letter from Heidegger, urging Gadamer to write the Habilitation with him in philosophy. Despite the strenuous path he had taken to achieve self-confidence and autonomy, Gadamer was surprised and flattered, and could not say no. Once again, Heidegger marked a turning point in his life, bringing him back to philosophy.

Yet time was short: Heidegger was on the verge of returning to Freiburg in order to become Husserl’s successor. For Gadamer, there was another even more pressing issue: for some months his father had lain seriously ill in the Marburg University clinic. He died on April 15, 1928, full of concern about his son’s future, before it was possible for Gadamer to receive the venia legendi, the teaching certification. Even in this difficult situation Gadamer was able to concentrate once again on Plato and to write his Habilitation within one year. Its first title, which did not correspond entirely to its contents, was: “Phenomenological Interpretations of Plato’s Philebus.” Later, however, it was changed to Plato’s Dialectical Ethics: Phenomenological Interpretations Relating to the Philebus, the final title of the book published in 1931. The work, which remained largely inconclusive, was conceived as a preliminary study of the Nicomachean Ethics. It was assessed positively by both Friedländer and Heidegger, and Gadamer graduated on February 23, 1929.

5. “A Terrible Awakening”

A great goal seemed to have been reached. Yet the years immediately following became even more difficult. Gadamer remained a private docent (Privatdozent) for almost a decade, so that the thirties would be the hardest and most critical years of his life. His working activity and financial situation did not improve, even after he received the venia legendi. He worked at the Philosophical Seminar in Marburg as a Privatdozent alongside Löwith and Krüger, with whom he developed an enduring friendship and a deep solidarity. After Heidegger’s departure his three students, who had finally become docents, felt much freer and much more responsible. They formed a joint front and in a very short time gained an outstanding reputation. But Privatdozenten were not paid and survived in the most humble conditions, supported only by either occasional fellowships or the compensation they received, according to the number of their students, at the end of their courses. Competition was terribly keen. Löwith impressed everyone with his competence, his irony, and his personal charm. Krüger was brilliant and logical in the construction and exposition of his lectures. Gadamer, by contrast, was the youngest and the least confident, and he felt uncomfortable at the podium. The saying was among the students in Marburg that whatever Krüger would distinguish clearly and precisely, Gadamer would turn into a muddle. Soon a new scientific unit of measurement was discovered: the “Gad,” which designated “a settled measure of unnecessary complications” (PA 71/PL 46). In this precarious situation, it was almost impossible to find enough time to devote to research. After having completed his Habilitation Gadamer had not published anything else; the project of an edition with a commentary on Aristotle’s Physics was never carried out.²⁷ However, these were not the actual reasons that prevented him from receiving a chair.

In 1933 Adolf Hitler seized power in Germany. The political events that followed very rapidly upset the life of the country and did not stop at the gates of the universities. Although many of the docents and students were critical of the Weimar Republic, the seizure of power by the National Socialists brought surprise, bewilderment, and astonishment. The German intelligentsia awoke as if from a long slumber:

It was a terrible awakening, and we could not absolve ourselves of having failed to perform adequately as citizens. We had underrated Hitler and his kind, and admittedly we made the same mistake as the liberal press in doing this. Not one of us had read Mein Kampf. (PA 75/PL 51)

Inside the university, all or nearly all were convinced that the “nightmare” would soon be over. The deep contempt for the National Socialists, mixed with a foolish arrogance, led to a false estimation of the political reality. Even the anti-Semitism, which seemed far too primitive to be true, was misunderstood as a campaign slogan in a time of serious economic crisis. But the events, which with considerable blindness could be misinterpreted as isolated occurrences, took quite a different course: they proved to be the long-planned and state-sanctioned persecution of Jews, communists, political opponents, and all those taken by the Nazi regime to be foreigners and enemies. The Nuremberg Laws finally left no more room for illusions. All Dozenten of the Jewish “race” were forced to quit teaching, and Marburg University was emptied by this decree. Whereas some, such as Erich Frank (1883–1949), were able to withdraw, even after Kristallnacht in 1938, and continue to live in Germany, most left the country—among the first to leave was Löwith. He was joined by Strauss, Friedländer, Spitzer, Klein, Auerbach, Kroner, and Jacobstahl, to name just a few. “One felt ashamed to remain,” Gadamer later remarked (PA 77/PL 54).

6. Germany during National Socialism

Gadamer remained. But remaining did not mean joining National Socialism. Various questions arise at this point. How did Gadamer live in those years? What did he think? How did he act? These could be summarized in the one question that everyone confronted at that time: what should be done in the face of National Socialism? If those are exempted who were forced into emigration, for the most part because of racist discrimination, or the minority who chose exile, then it is extremely problematic to evaluate by today’s criteria the behavior of those who remained during the Third Reich. Nevertheless, this difficulty does not free us from the task of judging.

The case of Gadamer is not a “case”—as some have attempted to argue in recent years. The accusations, which range from opportunism to complicity or participation, demand a response. Hence it is necessary to show first of all where the accusations arise and what the motivations are behind them. In 1995 a book was published by Teresa Orozco, whose goal was to prove Gadamer’s involvement in National Socialism on the basis of his publications from that time.²⁸ Four years later, in 1999, Jean Grondin published his biography of Gadamer, an extensive collection of materials that are nonetheless insufficiently elaborated; the work achieves precisely the opposite effect from the one the author presumably intended.²⁹ The way in which Grondin defends Gadamer, especially where no defense is required, gives rise to doubts and suspicions among even the most supportive readers. So he causes irritation and delivers above all a pretext to those who actually, beyond Gadamer, take aim at hermeneutics. In 2000 an essay appeared in English by Richard Wolin, who speaks in the most aggressive tones of Gadamer’s “complicity” with National Socialism.³⁰ The essay was also published in German in an edition of the Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie.³¹ The editors chose to limit themselves to managing the spectacle, so to speak, and declared that their actual goal was in no way to solve the “case” of Gadamer, but was to bring to light the “continuity” between “‘political’ hermeneutics” in the Third Reich and the subsequent “philosophical hermeneutics.”³² Their attempt is obviously not to prove Gadamer’s possible complicities, for these in fact do not exist, but to discredit hermeneutics. Yet what evidence are these accusations based upon? What are the arguments that have been brought forward?

To begin, three clarifications are necessary. First, Gadamer was no National Socialist—in contrast to Heidegger and other “muses called to arms.”³³ Gadamer was never a member of the NSDAP (Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei), the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, and never a supporter of National Socialist ideas. His position did not change after the Röhm Putsch of June 30, 1934, when there was no longer any doubt about the totalitarian violence of the Nazi dictatorship and no further dissent allowed. Not being a party member was no mere bagatelle: one’s life was at risk.³⁴

Second, Gadamer was no anti-Semite. In those years this was far from obvious, since anti-Semitism had deep and widespread roots. It is worth citing the significant example of Gottlob Frege in this regard. The founder of modern logic and the father of analytic philosophy sympathized with the extreme political right and wished for a logical “Third Reich” that would also lead the way to the new, political Third Reich.³⁵ Several times he stressed his contempt for every form of democracy, which should undermine the naïve and dangerous belief that logical reason necessarily leads to political insight. On April 30, 1924, he wrote in his diary: “One can recognize that there are highly respectable Jews and still consider it a disaster that there are so many Jews in Germany and that they have the same political rights as the citizens of Aryan descent.”³⁶ Just a few days earlier, on April 22, 1924, he had recorded his attitude in black and white: “Only in recent years have I learned to understand anti-Semitism well. If one wants to make laws against the Jews, one must create a sign by which a Jew can quickly be recognized. This is the difficulty I have always seen.”³⁷ There is not even the shadow of such statements by Gadamer. More importantly, however, his friendships remained unchanged with those Jews from whom many had broken off contact.³⁸ In difficult conditions, in which any contact with Jews was scarcely tolerated and was already a form of resistance, Gadamer sheltered his friend Klein in his house for almost two years, from 1933 to 1934. Similarly, he supported Frank until the latter’s departure from Marburg in 1939, and above all he maintained a steady connection with Löwith during the Nazi period and after, as their correspondence proves.³⁹

Finally, Gadamer was in no way “unpolitical”—and certainly not after 1933. This point may seem less relevant when compared to others. Yet Gadamer’s allegedly unpolitical attitude has brought the charge that he observed the events around him from a certain “distance,” and opportunistically sought only his own interest. But what this claim attacks first is hermeneutics: insofar as it delivers no objective and normative criteria, hermeneutics would only be a philosophy of ambiguity, of ambivalence, and of “non-commitment.”⁴⁰

Gadamer belonged to the cultural elite, those who never sided with Hitler and who, even after the initial “terrible awakening,” firmly believed that the Nazis would stay in power for only a few months. His position was no different, for example, from that of Löwith.⁴¹ Of course this does not lessen the responsibility of philosophy or philosophers at that time. But the difficulty of reacting immediately to the traumatic reality that had suddenly broken into the Marburg ivory tower cannot even be compared with Heidegger’s assent. Heidegger believed he could recognize in the “National Socialist revolution” an answer to the “forgetfulness of Being” in the Western world, and thus felt compelled to “lead the Leader” (den Führer zu führen). Like Carl Schmitt he remained loyal to the National Socialist regime, even after he had given up, from 1934 to 1945, all direct involvement.

In order to make this difference still clearer, one must add that Gadamer never succumbed to the fascination that National Socialism had on the second generation of European nihilists, a generation that was on a desperate quest for a way out of the crisis of the bourgeois world. He was, moreover, allergic to the mystical exaltations with which Ernst Jünger described the “storms of steel” in the First World War, just as he was impermeable to the fascistic ideology that in the Hitler regime celebrated the triumph of vitalistic impulses, the victory march of nature and technology, of force and myth. Gadamer was also intellectually immune to the aesthetic attractions of National Socialism that, for example, pervaded the George-Circle.

Certainly one can speak of a “distance” in Gadamer’s attitude. But this distance was not the result of cynicism or resignation. Rather it was the distance of irony—which in any case distinguished his manner of thinking and acting. Gadamer was, above all, ironic toward himself; he did not believe that he had been called to a higher mission. This irony marked his entire oeuvre beginning with Truth and Method, where his philosophy of play emerges, and for Gadamer guides human practice.⁴²

From a political point of view Gadamer always stressed that he was “liberal”—before and after the Nazi period.⁴³ This position is reflected in both his political thought, which remains insufficiently studied, and his philosophy, which aims for liberation in the sense of going beyond oneself.

This becomes apparent in the difference that exists between Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics and Heidegger’s path of thinking. For Heidegger, Dasein in its “thrownness” is imprisoned, without escape, in the facticity of its “there” (Da), which subsequently risks becoming ensnared. Levinas very clearly showed the similarity between an ontology of Dasein, who only cares about its own modes of being and does not call for any other, and the “philosophy of Hitlerism.”⁴⁴ For Gadamer, the experience of finitude is the collision of Dasein against its limits, which indeed, while it reveals its irrefutable ex-centricity, drives Dasein at the same time to go outside itself into a beyond that is always the infinite beyond of the other.⁴⁵

Yet even before this difference in their philosophies could emerge, relations broke off between student and master. The news of Heidegger’s official entry into the National Socialist Party left everyone in Marburg speechless.⁴⁶ Almost no one from his close circle followed him. The new rector of Freiburg was deeply disappointed by the irresoluteness of those “little spoiled professors’ sons who never wanted to make a commitment.”⁴⁷ Beyond the evident political motives, one of the reasons for his resignation in April 1934 may also have been his humiliating isolation.

In 1933 Heidegger sent a folder of various writings to Gadamer, among them his Rectorial Address, and signed the package with a “German greeting.”⁴⁸ Gadamer did not reply.⁴⁹ He met Heidegger again only three years later, and art was the pretext for the meeting. The topic that Gadamer had chosen for one of his courses in the summer semester of 1936 was “Art and History (Introduction to the Humanities).” Heidegger, for his part and after the failure of the rectorship, had begun the first of his lecture series on Hölderlin in the winter semester of 1934–35.⁵⁰ The echo of these lectures, which were already considered to be a “Hölderlinian philosophy,” soon reached Marburg. In November of 1936, news arrived of a three-part lecture series that Heidegger would hold near Frankfurt on “The Origin of the Work of Art.” Gadamer, Frank, and Krüger went without hesitation; but even this occasion was not sufficient to break the ice between them. Only Gadamer’s visit to Todtnauberg in October of 1937—during which he was accompanied by Krüger and Walter Bröcker (1902–92)—would restore the relationship, which remained unbroken until Heidegger’s death in 1976. Yet this relationship was anything but easy or simple for Gadamer, who had to play the role of student, friend, and finally successor: indeed, it was the source of many stimulating ideas but also of many frustrations. “We never had successful conversations with each other,” he confessed after Heidegger’s death (GW10 274).

Gadamer’s attitude toward his teacher and his political choices was similar to the responses of Heidegger’s other students, both before and, above all, after the war.⁵¹ Apart from a few exceptions—Günther Anders (1902–92) and Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) should be mentioned—none were intransigent, and, after the break in 1933, all resumed contact. Although they did not follow his path, his students—even the German Jews—were incapable of acknowledging his compliance with National Socialism and the seriousness of his involvement. Löwith himself never broke off correspondence with Heidegger. Hannah Arendt restored her friendship with her former teacher on her return to Germany in 1950, and in an essay that appeared in 1969 to commemorate Heidegger’s eightieth birthday, she wrote in a footnote of his attachment to National Socialism as if it were an “escapade.”⁵²

If one thinks of Heidegger’s enormous influence, it is surprising that Gadamer was able to evade it, all the more since in his closest circle, several, from Max Kommerell to Hans Lipps (1889–1941), followed one another to join the National Socialist Party at a dizzying rate. What kept Gadamer from decisions of this kind was his friendship, either casual or not, with many Jews, which became, in various ways, a kind of salvation—as Gadamer later often repeated.⁵³ Since he experienced the years 1933 to 1934 with his Jewish friends, he inevitably adopted their perspective and saw the events through their eyes. Besides Löwith, it was above all Klein, a passionate reader of newspapers and attentive political observer, who gave the younger Gadamer decisive insights.⁵⁴

7. “Our guilt is that we are alive”

In light of the fact that Gadamer remained in Germany, though he never entered the NSDAP, two accusations have been leveled against him: that he built his career in an opportunistic way and that he held lectures and wrote texts which, through their resonances and indirect references, could be ambiguously in line with the politics of National Socialism. The first charge is directed at the person, the second at his work. However, both charges are aimed at hermeneutics more than at Gadamer.

As for the first charge: not only was Gadamer never a member of the NSDAP, but there is no further documentation that would indicate his involvement. The only exception is his signature on the “Declaration of Support by Professors at German Universities and Colleges for Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist State.”⁵⁵ At the end of this document there appear twenty-six signatures, among them Heidegger’s, but also Krüger’s and Werner Krauss’s (1900–1976). The latter at that time was a Marxist and later a member of the Rote Kapelle.⁵⁶ Yet why did Gadamer sign? The document was read at a public meeting, where only those who had opposed it could have refused to sign. To oppose would have meant, in the best case, to pack one’s bag. From today’s perspective, Gadamer, and not only Gadamer, can be reproached for not expressing his dissent openly. But in Germany at the time there were few alternatives between being a Nazi and keeping silent. The assumption that silence means agreement certainly did not apply in that totalitarian state. One’s life was at stake, and those who remained silent simply did not want to risk it. Jaspers wrote in 1946:

We survivors did not seek death. We did not, as our Jewish friends were led away, go to the streets, we did not scream until someone killed us, too. We preferred to stay alive with the weak but valid reason that our death would not have helped anything. Our guilt is that we are alive.⁵⁷

To have remained in Germany and to have remained alive—this is Gadamer’s guilt. Still, life at that time was anything but easy; on the contrary, those were years of hardships and obstacles. Gadamer could have spared himself these troubles for the most part if he, like his teacher, had become a member of the party. In any case this would have facilitated his career. Indeed, it is evident that his political position damaged him—how could it have been otherwise? Gadamer completed his Habilitation in 1929, but became a full professor only in 1939. At the outset he did not receive a temporary teaching position because of the terrible financial conditions of the university. He had his first appointment in Marburg in the winter semester of 1933–34. In the following two semesters, the summer semester of 1934 and the winter semester of 1934–35, he was called to the University of Kiel, where the chair held by Richard Kroner, who as a Jew was no longer allowed to teach, remained vacant. But since he did not have further prospects in Kiel, Gadamer returned in the winter of 1935 to Marburg, which in the meantime had changed profoundly. The pressure from the National Socialists had intensified. Some months before, the philosophy department had requested a temporary professorial position for him, which was common practice after six years of being a Privatdozent. But the Dozentenbund, the Association of National Socialist University Professors, opposed this decision; Gadamer had been stigmatized as politically unreliable. Even the loss of his title of Privatdozent was considered.

Gadamer found himself at an extremely difficult crossroads. He would have had to relinquish his academic career, begin another profession (but which?), and perhaps consider emigration—or he could have finally taken the party’s membership card. He chose none of these. Instead, he sought another way out of the dilemma. In the fall of 1935 he “voluntarily” put himself forward for a kind of rehabilitation camp (Rehabilitierungslager) that had recently been organized to bring docents in line with National Socialism. He went to the camp at Weichselmünde on the Baltic Sea near Danzig, where he spent a few weeks. The “rehabilitation” was primarily a formal matter: besides some “paramilitary nonsense,” songs and gymnastic exercises in which all the participants had to engage, no statement of allegiance was required. Along with all the others, Gadamer had to declare publicly what he was working on. The proverbial interest of Germans in philosophy made his life considerably easier (PA 79/PL 56).

It was during the rehabilitation that all participants at the camp were brought to a ceremony at Tannenberg. On this occasion Gadamer saw Hitler from afar. What struck him was Hitler’s small stature and his nervous way of moving his hands, as well as the mediocrity of the person, who even made an “awkward” impression (PA 79/PL 57).

Back in Marburg, in the winter semester of 1935–36 and in the following summer semester of 1936, Gadamer acted as substitute for the chair held by Frank, who had been “suspended” because of racial discrimination. It had been Frank, a close friend of Gadamer, who had fought for his nomination.⁵⁸ But such paradoxical situations had in the meantime become the norm. If not to Gadamer, the substitute position would have been granted to Krüger—who, however, was already committed—or to someone else. Many professorial chairs were vacant, and some of them were canceled. This was the case with Frank’s chair, which was eliminated in 1936. Gadamer, who awaited the outcome of an application that had already been lodged in December 1935, received the title of temporary professor on April 20, 1937; one year later he was called to Leipzig as a substitute, where at the beginning of 1939 he finally received a professorial chair.

The “indoctrination” to which he had submitted—not without irony—in order to be “rehabilitated,” had probably been decisive in the eyes of the Nazis. If he had not taken this step he probably would have had to give up teaching. But it makes little sense to argue over mere conjecture. Indeed it is questionable to claim that Gadamer promoted his career in an opportune, or even opportunistic, way by profiting from the political conditions of Nazi Germany.⁵⁹ The available chairs, which had remained vacant because of the Race Laws, would have certainly facilitated his situation, but his refusal to enter the NSDAP was a major obstacle. How can advantages and disadvantages be weighed up here? Would it not have been much easier to set aside the main disadvantage and declare oneself a Nazi?

Gadamer’s decision in those years was to remain in Germany and continue to teach philosophy. However, he published little.⁶⁰ From 1933 to 1945, aside from the numerous reviews written mostly in the 1930s (more than twenty can be counted), and his lectures or short talks (about twenty-five), which almost all occurred in the 1940s, Gadamer published only six philosophically relevant works: “Plato and the Poets” and “Ancient Atomic Theory,” 1934; “On Kant’s Foundation of Aesthetics and the Meaning of Art,” as well as “Hegel and the Historical Spirit,” 1940; “Hegel and the Dialectic of the Ancient Philosophers,” 1940; “Folk and History in Herder’s Thought,” 1941; and “Plato’s Educational State,” 1942.⁶¹ Gadamer not only put aside his work on the physics and ethics of Aristotle, but he also avoided all topics that had clearly political echoes. The most telling example is a work on Hölderlin and the repercussions of the French Revolution on German culture: on the one hand, Gadamer did not want to expose himself to attacks, for Nazis liked to speak of Germany’s “special path” (Sonderweg), and, on the other hand, he feared the exploitation of Hölderlin.⁶² His research activity was mostly limited to Greek philosophy. Only at the end of the 1930s did the name of Hegel begin to emerge and, within the context of his philosophy of history, also that of Herder. Even the apparently “safe territory” of Greek philosophy would have been insecure—which confirms that philosophy, in as much as it has its place in the pólis, is always already political.⁶³

The second accusation leveled against Gadamer concerns the publications from those years. Two texts in particular are controversial: “Plato and the Poets” and the work on Herder. What accusation has been raised against Gadamer’s Plato? Undoubtedly Plato’s philosophy represents the leading focus of his reflection during those years—and not only of those. What interested him was the “Sophistic and Platonic doctrine of the state”; but, as he remembered later, he had to interrupt his research “for the sake of caution” (RPJ 13/GW2 489). Therefore only two essays, “Plato and the Poets” and “Plato’s Educational State,” were published.⁶⁴ The accusation interprets both essays, especially the first one, against the background of the increasing Nazification of German classical studies, a deep and inexorable process of “ideological transformation.” Allegedly this process extends from Jaeger’s “Neo-Humanism,” whose co-responsibility is particularly emphasized, back to the philology of Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf (1848–1931), and finally to the classicism of Winckelmann.⁶⁵ The idea of Germany as a new Hellas would have found expression, during the early decades of the twentieth century, in the political relevance attributed to Greek antiquity, which focuses attention on Plato’s Republic. Gadamer’s guilt, presumably, would be his defense of one of the most controversial passages in Plato, namely, the banishment of the poets from the state.

Besides the simplistic reconstruction of the history of classical studies in Germany, there were certainly more than a few philologists and philosophers who in the 1930s drew connections between the Platonic and the National Socialist states. Yet this is not at all the case with Gadamer, who referred to Plato’s utopia with the opposite aim: to criticize the idea of poetry devoid of all truth and to propose, through the “inner state,” an educational model that could suggest a rebirth of the pólis.⁶⁶ In 1934, exactly one year after the National Socialists seized power, and then again in 1942, Gadamer expressed—in tyrannos—his political dissent through the ironic and utopian art of allusion, the only way to criticize the totalitarian state from within.⁶⁷ This, and nothing else, is what the motto borrowed from Goethe and appearing at the beginning of the lecture on “Plato and the Poets” means: “Whoever philosophizes does not agree with the ideas of his time.” It is not by chance that Gadamer will return to these themes in the development of his political thought in order to show the value of utopia.⁶⁸

Further charges have also been brought against the essay that appeared in 1941, “Volk und Geschichte bei Herder” (“Volk and History in Herder’s Thought”), which is interpreted in the context of German studies at the time. As far as he could be considered a critic of the Enlightenment and a representative of the peculiarity of every culture, Herder was seen in German studies, which was just as assimilated as philology by Nazism, as the prophet of Pan-Germanism.⁶⁹ His concept of “folk” seemed to suit this cause.

The text on Herder was the basis of a talk that Gadamer gave in 1941 at the Deutsches Institut in Paris.⁷⁰ During the war he undertook two further trips, one to Florence in 1940 and one to Portugal and Spain in 1944. Although he did not have any “political merits,” the trips were nevertheless authorized because of the prestige he enjoyed already at that time. Actually these trips were a double-edged sword. On this point he wrote later: “I did not fully recognize that thereby one was being used for purposes of foreign propaganda, for which a political innocent was sometimes suitable” (PA 99/PL 118). On the one hand, his trips represented the real danger of becoming an instrument of the National Socialist power machine; on the other, they offered the opportunity to make rare contact with the intellectual world outside of Germany. Not least, they were also a way to bring home consumer goods that had become unavailable.

It is not known whether Gadamer lectured in French or in German in Paris, since versions of the text are available in both languages. The German version was revised when the text was published in 1967.⁷¹ But what might be the ideological echoes in this text? The lecture, according to critics, would yield a position favorable to an “ethos of German particularism.”⁷² In Hegel’s wake, Gadamer reflected for some years on the philosophy of history; thus his interest in Herder is not surprising, and even in Truth and Method Gadamer continues to refer to his thought.⁷³ But if, then as now, the concept of “folk” can be used in ambiguous ways, there is not a single passage in the text in which the key words of the National Socialist jargon appear—which in those years was customary and almost required. Against this backdrop, it is rather the lack of such words that is telling. Even more important is Gadamer’s insistence on the ideal of the Bildung of humanity, in Herder’s sense, which would have seemed a provocation to the Nazis.

Gadamer not only republished the writings from those years. After the war he also spoke about both National Socialism and his own life at that time—which distinguishes him from Heidegger’s “silence”—in his autobiography, in various essays, and in many interviews.⁷⁴ But these reflections and questions about the past reminded Gadamer, as well as those who—from Strauss to Löwith—made National Socialism the turning point of their thinking, of the difficulty of understanding an event experienced as a traumatic laceration.⁷⁵

8. Leipzig, the War, and the Rectorate

On January 1, 1939, after nearly ten years of waiting, Gadamer finally received a chair of philosophy at the University of Leipzig, a university that was considered less politically submissive to the regime. The inaugural lecture that he gave on July 8 had the title “Hegel and the Historical Spirit.”

On September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland and the Second World War began. Gadamer, who until that point had not imagined the possibility of war, had to change his mind.

The war news was received in Leipzig like a report of death. Depressed quiet all around, grim faces on the street. . . . I myself was shattered. I still held to the illusion that such an insane thing simply could not happen (PA 95/PL 113).

Events came to a head. On June 22, 1941, Hitler gave the order to march into Russia. Soon after came the order to begin the Endlösung, or the “Final Solution,” which had been planned for a long time. Over two days in January 1942, all the remaining Jews in Leipzig were deported by the Gestapo.⁷⁶ But the defeat at Stalingrad introduced a new phase of the conflict and gave hope to those who, under the hail of bombs, awaited the end of the terror. Et illud transit was the motto that expressed that feeling in Leipzig (PA 99/PL 118). Gadamer made it his own motto. Life in the city was marked by air raids. On December 4, 1943, the center was nearly completely destroyed, and more than half of the university’s buildings were blown up. Yet teaching continued in the remaining rooms or in the air raid shelters. With the few students remaining, Gadamer read Rilke’s third “Duino Elegy.” Two of his students, Karl-Heinz Volkmann-Schluck (1914–81) and Walter Schulz (1912–2000), were sent to the Eastern Front.⁷⁷ At the beginning of 1945, after he had learned of the Allies’ landing, Gadamer was called to the Volkssturm, the last bastion of the Nazi regime. The Nazis did not hesitate to call in those who had been considered unfit for service, such as Gadamer, the elderly. and children, not least to keep them under control.

On April 18, 1945, American occupying forces entered Leipzig and the almost completely destroyed city capitulated on May 8. Only two months later the Soviets took over political and administrative control from the Americans. By the beginning of 1946 it had become necessary to vote on a new rector for the university. The Russian choice was Gadamer, who had never been a member of the Nazi Party. The reopening of the university on February 5, 1946, was the occasion for Gadamer’s rectorial address: “On the Primordiality of Science” (Die Ursprünglichkeit der Wissenschaft).⁷⁸ Gadamer shared with the Russians the desire for a “democratic renewal” of the German university. It was a matter, he explained, of saving an institution that had been discredited without avoiding the question that would determine the debates of the coming decades: how could the “disfigurement [Unwesen] of National Socialism” have arisen among the people of poets and thinkers (EPH 15/GW10 287)?⁷⁹ Gadamer emphasized the role of science, which in its broadest sense could be understood as epistéme, as that theoretical knowledge which is primordial and originary insofar as it is the very form of life itself. He described as well a new kind of researcher and, at the same time, denounced the irresponsibility of German scientists: their “alienation from the world,” their lack of “decisiveness” and their “immodesty.” All this, Gadamer argued, had brought them to “accommodate to the National Socialists’ regime,” if not to support it (EPH 20/GW10 293). Precisely during those weeks there occurred the anniversary of Leibniz’s birth (1647–1716), which could mark a new point of orientation for the world of science. In his memorial speech Gadamer highlighted the exemplary way in which the great philosopher had found a “path to Europe” among the ruins of the Thirty Years’ War.⁸⁰ But paradoxically the figure of Leibniz came to represent an obstacle in Gadamer’s relationship with the Russians, who called on him to distinguish the academies as pure and free research centers, apart from the universities. Gadamer, by contrast, was convinced that freedom and autonomy should also be given to the universities (PA 115/PL 131). These differences in conception made a break with the Russian administration unavoidable.

Gadamer began to look for a new position as chair with the intention of settling in the Western sector. Heidegger, who had been suspended from teaching by the Allies, expressed the wish to see Gadamer as his successor in Freiburg.⁸¹ The disappearance of any hope for a reunification of Germany, and the gradual acceptance of the logic of the Cold War, came together to make Gadamer’s situation in Leipzig even more untenable. On October 1, 1947, in a climate of suspicion and denunciations, he submitted his resignation as rector.⁸² In September he had decided to accept a chair offered to him by the University of Frankfurt. One last event confirmed this decision for him. On November 7, 1947, when he returned briefly to Leipzig for the formal handover of his position, he was arrested by the military police. The reason is not known, and the incident retained a Kafkaesque halo; it was probably a matter of revenge for his resignation (PA 111–114/ PL 133–135). After four days in prison he was released as a result of protests from the university and the Socialist Unity Party. He immediately left the Eastern sector on a journey that lasted more than five days. After many adventures he reached the metropolis on the Main, which at that time was occupied by Allied troops. He traveled by freight car, on which he had managed to load his books, furniture, and the few things left to him after the war.

During the stormy and grueling period of his rectorate, Gadamer had not been able to devote much time to a philosophical project of any breadth. Nevertheless, the seeds of his interpretations of literary works by Hölderlin, Goethe, Rilke, and Hesse had sprouted, and most appeared together later in the ninth volume of the Collected Works. These are not only the seeds of a “poetic hermeneutics.” They document the fundamental role of poetry, almost as a kind of “religion of inwardness,” in that difficult phase of his life. But these interpretations bear witness above all to Gadamer’s public efforts to save whatever was salvageable of German culture from the ruins of war.

9. The Calm of Heidelberg

During the reconstruction Gadamer felt it was absolutely necessary to promote the role of philosophy again. Hence some of his publications from the late 1940s have a pedagogical intent, as for example the new edition of the Outline of the History of Philosophy by Dilthey or the translation of book 12 of Aristotle’s Metaphysics.

The years in Frankfurt from 1947 to 1950 represented for him neither a meaningful nor a happy “intermezzo” (PA 117–125/PL 139–150), insofar as the living conditions of the postwar period were uncommonly hard. Almost everything was lacking. And while his marriage was coming apart, he had to devote his time entirely to the university, where he had received the only position in philosophy that had been available since 1945 and already had to supervise numerous students. Just as Gadamer applied to leave Frankfurt, Max Horkheimer (1895–1973) and Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69) returned from the United States. Thus there was no opportunity for a debate at that time with the “Frankfurt School,” which would only take place much later in the dialogue with Habermas.⁸³

In the time of reconstruction, though, contact was resumed with those who had been forced into exile. It was particularly significant for Gadamer to take a trip to Argentina, where from March to April 1948 he took part in the International Congress for Philosophy in Mendoza, the first one that took place after the war. The title of his talk was “The Limits of Historical Reason.”⁸⁴ The occasion of this congress allowed him to meet with, among others, Helmut Kuhn (1899–1991) and Karl Löwith.⁸⁵

On his return he received important news. Embittered and disillusioned after the publication of his controversial book on the question of German guilt, Karl Jaspers had decided to give up his position in Heidelberg. He felt forced to leave Germany and move to Basel. Gadamer applied for the position, and was called to the University of Heidelberg on September 2, 1949. The small city on the Neckar River became, after Breslau and Marburg, his third hometown, the one with which he was perhaps most tied and where he spent nearly fifty-three years—the last long period of his life became the luckiest and most productive.

After only a short while, Gadamer succeeded in fulfilling a promise he had made to himself: to enable Löwith’s return. In April 1951, after decades of exile in Italy, Japan, and the United States, Löwith received a position in the philosophy department in Heidelberg in April 1951. Thus the collaboration between the two philosophers, sustained by a friendship that neither National Socialism nor the war could extinguish, resumed. For the former students, however, the “Heidegger” question remained open, since he was banned from academic circles and lived in isolation in Freiburg. Already at that time there appeared the twofold and almost schizophrenic position taken for years by German—and not only German—philosophers toward Heidegger: servile imitation on the one hand, and exclusion to the point of dismissal on the other. Löwith’s attitude toward his former teacher was well known, and marked by a calm but unbending hostility. The surprise was thus all the greater when Löwith took part in the Festschrift that Gadamer prepared for Heidegger’s sixtieth birthday. Without Löwith’s support the Festschrift, for which Krüger and Romano Guardini (1885–1968) also contributed articles, would never have appeared.⁸⁶ In those years, when Heidegger was far from the fame that would later follow the publication of Holzwege in 1950, Gadamer tried to bring him out of isolation by repeatedly inviting him to hold short seminar series in Heidelberg.⁸⁷

In 1953, Gadamer, who had in the meanwhile got married for the second time, to Käte Lekebusch (1921–2006), founded the journal Philosophische Rundschau with Helmut Kuhn, a philosophical journal that soon gained a great national and international reputation. Numerous younger philosophers assembled around it, from Jürgen Habermas to Walter Schulz, from Ernst Tugendhat to Wolfgang Wieland. Through this collaboration they received motivations and suggestions that would later help them to choose their own paths.

But Gadamer was not to play only a “protreptic” role. Convinced of the importance of dialogue for teaching, he became known as an attentive, careful, and accessible teacher. His first generation of “students” stretched back to the days in Marburg and Leipzig—the first was Arthur Henkel (1915–2005). In Frankfurt and then in Heidelberg there arose a second generation of students, most of them Germans: Dieter Henrich (b. 1927), Reiner Wiehl (b. 1929), Friedrich Fulda (b. 1929), Wolfgang Wieland (b. 1933), Konrad Cramer (b. 1936), Rüdiger Bubner (1941–2007), and later Gottfried Boehm (b. 1942). Also part of this generation were Valerio Verra (1928–2001), Gianni Vattimo (b. 1936), and the Spaniard Emilio Lledo (b. 1927) (RPJ 17/GW2 493). The Festschrift entitled Hermeneutik und Dialektik, which was dedicated to Gadamer on his seventieth birthday, testified not only to the resonance of hermeneutics in Germany, but also the work Gadamer had accomplished by teaching so many and such diverse students. In the last years of his life his activity intensified as he continued to teach in North America, in Italy, and finally also again in Heidelberg. In this way Gadamer succeeded in gaining a third generation of students: Günter Figal in Germany, Dennis J. Schmidt in the United States, Jean Grondin in Canada, and Donatella Di Cesare in Italy.⁸⁸

10. Truth and Method

His students, for their part, had a positive influence on Gadamer. In the 1950s it was they who pressured him to put into writing everything he had been teaching them in his classes. Since 1931, the year Plato’s Dialectical Ethics appeared, Gadamer had not published another book. Heidegger, too, poured salt on this wound when he repeatedly insisted: “Gadamer must finally write a book!”⁸⁹ Yet Heidegger was precisely the reason why Gadamer hesitated. The critical gaze of the philosopher from Messkirch haunted Gadamer early and late, as he later admitted: “Writing [remained] a torment for me. I had the terrible feeling that Heidegger was standing behind me and looking over my shoulder” (RPJ 15/GW2 491).

Around the middle of the 1950s Gadamer decided to live in a more withdrawn manner and to avoid every distraction. He took out the lecture notes that he had collected over the previous decades. From these materials Gadamer, who was actually a master of the short essay, put together a manuscript of more than five hundred pages.

The title was a problem from the beginning. It could be predicted that it would include the word “hermeneutics.” The word had already emerged in its new connotation in Bultmann’s book from 1950, The Problem of Hermeneutics. Gadamer, for his part, thought of calling what he did “philosophical hermeneutics”; but he always hesitated to speak of “hermeneutic philosophy.” He wanted to emphasize the difference of a philosophy that is no longer metaphysical, because it arises from that “middle” to which understanding always refers, and thus renounces a “final foundation.”⁹⁰ If there is a prius, it is hermeneutics, which can also claim philosophical relevance. With the title Outline of a Philosophical Hermeneutics, the book was given to the publisher Hans-Georg Siebeck, in Tübingen who, however, expressed his doubts. What was “hermeneutics” supposed to mean? The planned title became the subtitle, and Gadamer’s magnum opus became Truth and Method. Ironically, this titular “simplification” proved to be the source of many misunderstandings.⁹¹

T^ru^{th and} M^ethod, the work Gadamer completed very late, nevertheless became the starting point of all his subsequent thought. The edition of his collected works in ten volumes stretched from 1985 to 1995.⁹² But the collected bibliography of his writing compiled by Etsuro Makita (b. 1961) shows that the ten volumes include only a part of his publications. Gadamer loved the form of impromptu speech, which allowed him to dialogue with others, even if the others were a crowd of hundreds. From this untiring activity several further books followed: Hegel’s Dialectics (1971), Who am I and Who are You? Commentary on Celan’s “Atemkristall” (1976), Reason in the Age of Science (1976), In Praise of Theory (1983), Heidegger’s Ways (1983), The Inheritance of Europe (1989), and On the Enigma of Health (1993).

11. Hermeneutics in the World

After the publication of Truth and Method at the beginning of the 1960s, Gadamer continued his usual life. The book met with only a limited response.⁹³ This changed with the second edition in 1965. Decisive for the success of the work was, on the one hand, the numerous translations and, on the other hand, the debates it provoked—particularly those with Habermas and Derrida.⁹⁴ Especially their questions and criticisms prompted Gadamer to continue to develop his philosophical hermeneutics, to modify and, in some cases, to rethink it in significant ways.

Following the winter semester of 1967–68 he went into retirement, but although he was “emeritus,” he held seminars in Heidelberg until 1970. He had already received several invitations to the United States, which he had always declined. Yet unlike Heidegger, for him it was not a matter of preclusion or cautious reserve. The cause of his reluctance was otherwise: Gadamer spoke English very poorly and feared this would be a great obstacle. Tugendhat encouraged him, however, and finally convinced him to travel to the United States. The occasion was a conference on Schleiermacher arranged by Charles Scott at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.⁹⁵ In February, 1968, Gadamer embarked on the Queen Elizabeth from Hamburg harbor. He wrote to Heidegger:

In order to bridge the hiatus of becoming emeritus, I have accepted an invitation to the USA and will be abroad from the middle of February until Easter. Over there it is not my philosophy that interests them—for them I am not even an old-timer worth seeing—. But precisely this state of affairs in philosophy there has made my book an unexpected novelty for theologians and people in the humanities (critics above all). They see in the book a legitimation of their own needs, which the philosophy of science leaves unsatisfied.⁹⁶

Many other travels were to follow this first trip. Gadamer was invited to teach at numerous North American universities: the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. (1969), Syracuse University (1971), McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada (1972–74), and Boston College (1974–86). With his teaching in North America a new chapter of his life began, which he described as a “second youth” (PA 158/PL 198).

His name was indeed completely unknown in the United States—it was as if he were beginning from nothing. Analytic philosophy dominated the “new continent,” while all other philosophical movements, which were banished to either departments of literature or theology, were considered “phenomenology”:

That analytic philosophy took up enormous room there, and that so-called continental philosophy was entirely in the shadows was no surprise to me. It was also no surprise that the German philosophy of our time was known only through the phenomenology of Husserl, and that Heidegger and hermeneutics seemed to be completely unknown. However, when I learned to speak English better, it became evident that bridges could be built even from analytic philosophy to hermeneutics.⁹⁷

From the outset Richard Palmer (b. 1933) helped Gadamer to build the initial bridges. Palmer had studied for some years in Heidelberg and in 1969 he published the first introduction to hermeneutics in English.⁹⁸ Certainly at the beginning not only the themes, but also his way of conceiving and practicing philosophy, were foreign to the American context. Nevertheless Gadamer did not give up. He continued to teach for two decades, and though at first he had access only to departments of humanities, eventually he was also invited by departments of philosophy. The 1970s were a decisive time, perhaps because Gadamer’s presence also coincided in the United States with a kind of critical self-reflection within analytic philosophy. Hermeneutics became both the motivation and the point of reference for a debate. It still seems difficult to evaluate the deep and lasting impact that Gadamer’s teaching activity had there on both the spread of “continental philosophy” and the hermeneutization of analytic philosophy. On the other hand, it is necessary to remember that the experiences in the United States considerably expanded Gadamer’s own horizon, which until then had been restricted to the German world, and doubtlessly had deep repercussions on the content and manner of his thought.

Gadamer also traveled to South America, Japan, and Africa, without ever neglecting Europe. From the 1980s, for reasons of age, he preferred to avoid trips by air and traveled by train. He concentrated his activity in Italy, the country with which he had felt closely connected for a long time, at least since hearing enthusiastic stories from Löwith—who had been imprisoned in Genoa during the First World War. Gadamer had already been to Italy many times from the 1930s onward; also after the war, in the 1950s, he came back to Italy many times simply as a tourist. In 1961 he was invited to Milan and then to Rome, where he participated in a conference organized by Castelli on “The Problem of Demythologization.”⁹⁹ His contacts at that time led him above all to northern and central Italy. He went to Naples for a congress organized by the Goethe Institut; on April 22, 1978, he gave his first lecture at the Instituto Italiano per gli Studi filosofici, where Gerardo Marotta had invited him to speak on “Hegel and Hermeneutics.”¹⁰⁰ With this talk began a long and intensive collaboration, which continued from 1980 until the last seminar Gadamer gave in Naples, January 6–10, 1997, entitled “From Word to Concept, from Concept to Word.”¹⁰¹ It should be emphasized, though, that this activity was not restricted to individual talks, since he regularly held a series of lectures in Naples, where he received honorary citizenship of the city on November 27, 1990. It is probably not an exaggeration to say that, after Heidelberg and Boston, teaching on the Palazzo Serra di Cassano was Gadamer’s last chair. With little regard for his time and energy, he also traveled across southern Italy, where his teaching left deep marks.¹⁰² Numerous connections drew Gadamer not only to Naples but also to the countryside, which for him was still the Magna Grecia, Greater Greece. This “intellectual affinity,” as Marotta described it, was reciprocal.¹⁰³ The status that Naples had always given to German philosophy was matched by the significance that Gadamer found in the names of Pythagoras and Parmenides, but also Bruno, Campanella, and Vico, not to mention Bertrando Spaventa and Benedetto Croce. The years of teaching in Naples were years of hermeneutic practice in which Gadamer spoke the language of others and learned to listen to their questions and to value their particularities.

12. The Final Years: Between Success and Loneliness

Gadamer’s fame, which came only late in life, ultimately became worldwide. From the 1970s on, in Germany and elsewhere, he received honors and prizes that continued to increase until the end of his life.¹⁰⁴ In addition to these came the honorary doctorates from universities in Bamberg, Tübingen, Washington, Hamilton, Ottawa, Boston, Breslau, Leipzig, Prague, and finally, in 2000, St. Petersburg. The honorary doctorate that he received from the University of Marburg on June 24, 1999, brought Gadamer particular pleasure, for it topped off a long career. However, the success became frankly overwhelming. Photographers, journalists, colleagues, and students from all over the world came to his office in the philosophy department at Heidelberg, which he had had for decades. Only with great effort could he satisfy all the obligations that also came, which he nevertheless did not want to refuse because he was convinced of the importance of contact with younger generations. Indeed, these flocked in droves to meet him. With this he had, as he admitted, taken on the role of a “steam engine,” and saw himself at times, even if unhappily, forced to reciprocate the strangest requests from many petitioners, including those who wanted to make arrangements for an interview, a dedication, or only a signature, in the hope of basking, however briefly, in his fame. Some only wanted to see themselves in person with the most famous of living philosophers. Thus his public appearances regularly became mass events. All of this distanced him, however, from the gravitational center of his life. With success grew loneliness. For a long time Gadamer had felt himself a “living anachronism,” after all his friends and associates gradually disappeared. There was one date that he never forgot, May 24, 1973: the day Karl Löwith died, whom Gadamer cherished as his best friend. At that time Gadamer was convinced that he too would soon die, and he began—so to speak—to prepare himself. Among other things, he sold the greater part of his books to the library at McMaster University in Canada. Loneliness as well as a deep feeling of alienation—the word that he often used was unheimlich, “uncanny”—intensified above all in the last years. Furthermore, it did not escape his notice that the philosophical scene in Germany, starting precisely with Heidelberg, had shifted direction; many had begun to work in analytic philosophy, just at a time when American analytic philosophers showed growing interest in hermeneutics.¹⁰⁵

On February 11, 2000, his one-hundredth birthday, the University of Heidelberg honored Gadamer with a large public ceremony in the “Aula Magna.” This event was organized by the Academy of Science, the Department of Philosophy, and the city of Heidelberg. It ended with a philosophical conference in which Gadamer was the central figure.¹⁰⁶

In the summer of 2001, after the yearly hermeneutic symposium which had been organized since 1989 in Heidelberg by his American students, among others Lawrence K. Schmidt and James C. Risser, it was easy to see that Gadamer was unwell, and this time not only physically.¹⁰⁷ His condition worsened toward the end of August and the beginning of September. He had almost stopped going to the university, as he usually did; his legs simply no longer carried him. Yet there was more than that. He could no longer read for long periods, as he inclined to do, and even conversation exhausted him. His proverbial ability to concentrate, his Dabei-sein, his complete absorption in and involvement with everything he did, his attentive dedication, which he had raised to a category of his hermeneutics, had declined. He was no longer able to set himself aside—and precisely that meant the end. He was, by the way, completely conscious of this. To the surprise of those who were close to him, he had even packed his own suitcases since now, as he said, the hour had finally come. In a certain sense he was torn between his strong connection to life and the process of a slow and irresistible alienation. This alienation was not so much from the world of the third millennium, whose events he followed passionately, but from the world immediately surrounding him. Nevertheless, it was enough during those days in March to mention the name of Parmenides, and Gadamer would lift his eyes and begin to speak with enthusiasm. He felt zu Hause, “at home,” only in philosophy.

Gadamer died on the evening of March 13, 2002, in the University Clinic in Heidelberg. He was buried in the Köpfel cemetery in Ziegelhausen. His gravestone reads: Hans-Georg Gadamer—Philosopher.

Notes

1. Compare the account by Ernst Jünger in Antonio Gnoli and Franco Volpi, Die kommenden Titanen. Gespräche mit Ernst Jünger (Vienna: Karolinger, 2002), 17–20.

2. See Gadamer, “Zu einem Brief von Hönigswald an Gadamer vom 22.12.1919” (“On a Letter from Hönigswald to Gadamer from December 22, 1919”), in Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, ed., Erkennen—Monas—Sprache, Internationales Richard-Hönigswald-Symposium (Kassel 1995), Studien und Materialien zum Neukantianismus Band 9 (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 1997), 455–461 at 455.

3. There is still no study that traces the influence of the George-Circle on philosophy. An important testimonial is Gadamer’s “Die Wirkung Stefan Georges auf die Wissenschaft” (1983), in Ästhetik und Poetik II. Hermeneutik im Vollzug, GW9 258–270; see also Stefan Breuer, Ästhetischer Fundamentalismus. Stefan George und der deutsche Antimodernismus (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1995); Carola Groppe, Die Macht der Bildung. Das deutsche Bürgertum und der George-Kreis 1890–1933 (Köln u.a.: Böhlau 1997), 395–399.

4. On Gadamer’s relation to the Marburg School, see Mirko Wischke, Die Schwäche der Schrift. Zur philosophischen Hermeneutik Hans-Georg Gadamers (Köln u.a.: Böhlau, 2001), 61–71. On Gadamer and Natorp, see Jürgen Stolzenberg, “Hermeneutik und Letztbegründung. Hans-Georg Gadamer und der späte Paul Natorp,” in István M. Fehér, ed., Kunst, Hermeneutik, Philosophie. Das Denken Hans-Georg Gadamers im Zusammenhang des 20. Jahrhunderts, Heidelberg, Universitätsverlag: Winter 2003, 63–74.

5. Dissertation accepted on May 15, 1922, by the philosophical faculty of the University of Marburg. Compare in this volume chapter 6, part 2, and chapter 7, part 5.

6. The manuscript was long considered missing, but was luckily found in 1989 in the estate of Josef König, a student of Georg Misch. See Martin Heidegger, Phänomenologische Interpretationen zu Aristoteles (Anzeige der hermeneutischen Situation). Ausarbeitung für die Marburger und die Göttinger Philosophische Fakultät (1922), in Phänomenologische Interpretationen ausgewählter Abhandlungen des Aristoteles zur Ontologie und Logik, Gesamtausgabe (GA), vol. 62, ed. Günther Neumann (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2005), 341–415. See also Gadamer, “Heideggers theologische Jugendschrift,” in Dilthey-Jahrbuch für Philosophie und Geschichte der Geisteswissenschaften 6 (1989): 228–235.

7. Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, trans. Ewald Osers (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press 1998), 121; Ein Meister aus Deutschland. Heidegger und seine Zeit (Munich: Hanser, 1994), 166.

8. Gadamer, Sechs Briefe an Martin Heidegger aus der Marburger Zeit. Hans-Georg Gadamer zum 100. Geburtstag, 11 Februar 2000, Jahresgabe der Martin-Heidegger-Gesellschaft (Messkirch: Martin-Heidegger-Gesellschaft, 1999), 13.

9. Compare Gadamer, “Erinnerungen an Edmund Husserl,” in Hans Rainer Sepp, ed., Edmund Husserl und die phänomenologische Bewegung (Freiburg/Munich: Alber, 1988), 13–16 at 14.

10. See the editor’s afterword in Martin Heidegger, Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität), GA 63, ed. by Käte Bröcker-Oltmanns, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1995), 113; Ontology—Hermeneutics of Facticity, trans. John van Buren (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1999), 88.

11. Gadamer, “Sechs Briefe an Heidegger aus der Marburger Zeit,” 27–32.

12. See in this volume chapter 6, part 2.

13. See The Heidegger-Jaspers Correspondence, 1920–63 (Amherst, N.Y.: Humanity Books, 2003), 36; Martin Heidegger/Karl Jaspers, Briefwechsel. 1920–1963, ed. Walter Biemel and Hans Saner (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann/Munich: Piper, 1990), 41.

14. See Hans-Georg Gadamer, “Zur Systemidee in der Philosophie,” in Festschrift für Paul Natorp zum 70. Geburtstag (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1924), 55–75.

15. Gadamer, “Metaphysik der Erkenntnis. Zu dem gleichnamigen Buch von Nicolai Hartmann,” in: Logos 12 (1923/1924): 340–359. Gadamer had not wanted to publish these two works in the edition of his Gesammelte Werke, since he took them as “premature stuff” (RPJ 8/ GW2 483). In my opinion this judgment is not right, especially concerning the essay “Zur Systemidee in der Philosophie,” so I suggested to him that he should have it republished in the collection Hermeneutische Wege.

16. Gadamer, “Metaphysik der Erkenntnis,” 350.

17. Gadamer, “Metaphysik der Erkenntnis,” 341.

18. See Karl Löwith, My Life in Germany before and after 1933: A Report, trans. Elizabeth King (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994), 61; Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933. Ein Bericht (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1986), 65.

19. Both letters are preserved in the German National Archive in Marbach am Neckar.

20. Gadamer, “Von Lehrenden und Lernenden” (1986), in Das Erbe Europas, 158–165 at 159; see also Gadamer, “Paul Friedländer” (1993), GW10 403–405 at 403. See in addition: “A Conversation with Hans-Georg Gadamer” (with Alfons Grieder), in: The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 26 (1995): 116–126 at 119.

21. Gadamer mentions this in his letters from March 15, 1928; October 2, 1928; October 18, 1928; and April 17, 1929. See Gadamer, “Sechs Briefe aus der Marburger Zeit,” 17, 21, 25 and 29. The Emergency Association of German Science was a government-sponsored agency to support academic research, the predecessor of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (German Society for Research).

22. Compare Löwith, My Life in Germany, 60; Mein Leben in Deutschland, 64.

23. See the letter to Heidegger from April 17, 1929, in Gadamer, “Sechs Briefe an Heidegger aus der Marburger Zeit,” 27–32.

24. See Gadamer, “Der aristotelische ‘Protreptikos’ und die entwicklungsgeschichtliche Betrachtung der aristotelischen Ethik” (1927), GW5 164–185.

25. See Gadamer, “Sechs Briefe an Heidegger aus der Marburger Zeit,” 21–25.

26. See in this volume chapter 2, part 3.

27. See the letters to Heidegger from October 2, 1928; October 18, 1928; and April 17, 1929, in Gadamer, “Sechs Briefe an Heidegger aus der Marburger Zeit,” 21, 23, and 29.

28. See Teresa Orozco, Platonische Gewalt. Gadamers politische Hermeneutik in der NS-Zeit (Berlin: Argument, 1995; 2nd ed. 2004). The archival material on which Orozco bases her argument is actually quite negligible. For an initial review of this book, see Stefan Breuer, “Mit Platon in den Führerstaat? Teresa Orozcos Analyse von Gadamers Wirken unter dem NS überzeugt nicht,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, December 4, 1995, 4. Grossner had already discussed the possibility of Gadamer’s entanglement in National Socialism: see Claus Grossner, Verfall der Philosophie. Politik deutscher Philosophen (Reinbek bei Hamburg: Wegner, 1971), 234–237 at 234. More detailed information about philosophy in Germany in the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich is given in Stefan Tilitzki, Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie in der Weimarer-Republik und im Dritten Reich, 2 vols. (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 2002). After the book by Orozco there appeared a number of more polemical, rather than documentary, articles on this topic: Jan Ross, “Schmuggel: Gadamers Geheimnis,” Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, February 11, 1995, 27; Christian Delacampagne, “Questions d’interprétation. L’ouvre du dernier des disciples de Heidegger est enfin largement disponible en français. Avec ses silences,” Le Monde, May 17, 1996; Robin May Scott, “Gender, Nazism and Hermeneutics,” in Lewis E. Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Library of Living Philosophers 24 (Chicago and La Salle: Open Court, 1997), 499–508. The political and philosophical relevance of Gadamer’s writings on Plato during the Nazi period had already been highlighted by Dallmayr and Sullivan in an entirely different way. See Fred Dallmayr, “Hermeneutics and Justice,” in Kathleen Wright, ed., Festivals of Interpretation (Albany: SUNY Press, 1990), 95–105; Robert R. Sullivan, Political Hermeneutics: The Early Thinking of Hans-Georg Gadamer (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990); see also Sullivan, “Gadamer’s Early and Distinctively Political Hermeneutics,” in Hahn, The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, 237–255, and Gadamer, “Reply to Robert R. Sullivan,” 256–258. A further discussion of Orozco’s thesis took place in the section “Gadamer in Question,” in the book edited by Bruce Krajewski, where Geoff Waite wrote to support Orozco. Catherine H. Zuckert wrote an answer to Orozco and Waite in her article “On the Politics of Gadamerian Hermeneutics,” in Bruce Krajewski, ed., Gadamer’s Repercussions: Reconsidering Philosophical Hermeneutics (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 229–243.

29. Jean Grondin, Hans-Georg Gadamer. Eine Biographie (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1999); Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biography, trans. Joel Weinsheimer (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 2003).

30. Richard Wolin, “Nazism and the Complicities of Hans-Georg Gadamer: Untruth and Method,” in New Republic, May 15, 2000, 36–45, republished in “Fascism and Hermeneutics: Gadamer and the Ambiguities of ‘Inner Emigration,’” in Wolin, The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004), 89–127; see too the review of Grondin’s book: Richard Wolin, “Socratic Apology: A Wonderful Horrible Life of Hans-Georg Gadamer,” Book/Forum 2003, Summer, http://www.bookforum.com/archive/sum_03/wolin.html. Unfortunately, because of the dearth of factual content, Wolin’s contribution ultimately turns into mere slander of Gadamer. See in response, Richard E. Palmer, “A Response to Richard Wolin on Gadamer and the Nazis,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10 (2002): 467–482.

31. See Richard Wolin, “Unwahrheit und Methode. Gadamer und die Zweideutigkeiten der ‘inneren Emigration,’” in Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 2001/1 (“Hermeneutik und Politik in Deutschland vor und nach 1933”), ed. Andreas Graeser, Dominic Kaegi, André Laks und Enno Rudoph, 7–32.; “Untruth and Method: Nazism and the Convenient Complicities of Hans-Georg Gadamer,” New Republic, no. 4452 (May 15, 2000): 36–45. The only one of the editors who writes anything in the German edition is Graeser. Yet the ressentiment and animosity of the editors are clearly expressed in the foreword to this edition. Günter Figal immediately distanced himself from this publication and removed himself from the editorial board of the journal, which from then on remained in Rudolph’s hand. Against the presumed intentions of the editors, the polemical debate about the issues scarcely continued after the publication. Several others participated in this edition of the Internationale Zeitschrift, including Frank-Rutger Hausmann, Robert R. Sullivan, Micha Brumlik, Georgia Warnke, and Gabriel Motzkin, with various perspectives and points of emphasis. A further essay by Wolin formed the conclusion. Recently Delannoy has contributed a more balanced appraisal to the discussion, concentrating above all on the interpretation of Gadamer’s texts. See Franck Delannoy, “Gadamers frühes Denken und der Nationalsozialismus,” in Marion Heinz and Goran Gretic, Philosophie und Zeitgeist im Nationalsozialismus (Würzburg: Könighausen & Neumann, 2006), 327–351.

32. See the editors’ foreword in: Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 2001/1, 4.

33. Whoever begins from an “existential anti-Nazism,” which might even spring for example from one’s own Judaism, can clearly see the danger that a charge applied to anyone as a Nazi might bring. Gabriel Motzkin makes this point explicitly in his “Comment on Richard Wolin’s ‘Untruth and Method,’” in Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 2001/1, 78–85, 78. The line about “muses called to arms” comes from Philippe Burrin, La France à l’ heure allemande (Paris: Seuil, 1995), chapter 22.

34. As is well known, this was one of the reasons why there was so little opposition in Germany, except for rare and marginal cases. The members of the “White Rose” or the “Red Chapel” were conscious of heading toward certain death.

35. On the connection between these apparently unrelated points see the important essay by Gottfried Gabriel, “Reich, Drittes,” in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, ed. Joachim Ritter and Karl Gründer, vol. 8 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1992), 496–502.

36. “Gottlob Freges politisches Tagebuch. Mit Einleitung und Kommentar herausgeben von Gottfried Gabriel und Wolfgang Kienzler,” Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 42 (1994): 1057–1098 at 1092. The diary has not been included in the edition of Frege’s posthumous writings (Nachgelassene Schriften). Today is not a question of whether to take Frege’s comments in his diaries seriously. But it does mean that analytic philosophy cannot make—any more than can continental philosophy—the claim of being immune to ethico-political errors.

37. “Gottlob Freges politisches Tagebuch,” 1087. See the outrage of Dummett to this, who however obviously takes this naïve supposition as self-evident. Michael Dummett, Frege. Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth, 1973), XII.

38. It suffices at this point to mention the tragic epilogue in the friendship between Husserl and Heidegger, which in no way honors the latter.

39. This chapter of Gadamer’s life has not yet been fully explored. Grondin included a few letters from the correspondence with Löwith, but only those that had been written before the war. The entire correspondence is preserved in the German National Library in Marbach am Neckar. I would like to thank Klaus Stichweh for the chance to see the material. Löwith had a completely different attitude toward Heidegger. In a letter addressed to Gadamer from September 2, 1933, he writes: “Heidegger’s evasiveness disgusts me, even if nothing else was to be expected.” On Löwith see the monograph by Enrico Donaggio, Una sobria inquietudine. Karl Löwith e la filosofia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 2004).

40. This is the thesis of Andreas Graeser, “Philosophische Hermeneutik. Ein Plädoyer der Unverbindlichkeit?” Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 2001/1: 86–92.

41. Löwith wrote to Paul Tillich on April 16, 1933: “What might happen to me is still unknown to me—politically I stand neither to the left nor the right but more than ever in the middle of philosophy, with Hegel and his followers.” The outline of this letter is preserved in the University Library in Marburg.

42. See Motzkin, “Comment on Richard Wolin,” 75–85. Motzkin correctly identifies this characteristic of Gadamer’s, and emphasizes that the question posed by his work consistently focuses on the play between “tradition and subversion,” and between “authority and irony.”

43. “Liberal” in the German context means neither national-liberal nor conservative. Gadamer said: “I never thought of myself as a conservative. . . . I have always been a liberal from early times to today” (EPH 140). Compare “Hans-Georg Gadamer in conversation with Dörte von Westernhagen: ‘Die wirklichen Nazis hatten doch kein Interesse an uns . . .,’” in Das Argument. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaften 182 (1990): 543–555 at 546.

44. Compare Emmanuel Levinas, Die Unvorhersehbarkeiten der Geschichte (Freiburg/Munich: Alber, 2006). For the argument that the other is beyond Being, see also Emmanuel Levinas, “La trace de l’autre,” in En découvrant l’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, 3rd ed. (Paris: Vrin, 1982), 187–202, 189–191. Compare Adriaan T. Peperzak, “On Levinas’s Criticism of Heidegger,” in The Philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1997), 204–217. In this context Bruns writes: “the relation between Gadamer and Levinas is not so much one of disagreement as one of mutually illuminating differences.” See Gerald L. Bruns, “On the Coherence of Hermeneutics and Ethics. An Essay on Gadamer and Levinas,” in Bruce Krajewski, ed., Gadamer’s Repercussions (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 30–54 at 41. On Gadamer and Levinas, also compare James Risser, “Shared Life,” Symposium 6, no. 2 (2002): 167–179.

45. I will later go more fully into the differences between Heidegger and Gadamer; on this point, see in particular the discussion in chapter 9, parts 4–6.

46. See among others the account by Löwith, My Life in Germany, 26; Mein Leben in Deutschland,

47. Gadamer, “Breslauer Studienjahre. Hans-Georg Gadamer im Gespräch (mit Roswitha Grass),” in Schriften des Forschungsprojekts zu Leben und Werk Richard Hönigwalds an der Universität Mannheim, ed. Georg Groth, 1/40 (1996); republished in Pädagogische Rundschau 51 (1997): 115–139 at 124. See also Gadamer, “Erinnerung,” in Jahrbuch der deutschen Schillergesellschaft 34 (1990): 464–468 at 465.

48. Martin Heidegger, “Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität,” in Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges: 1910–1976, GA 16, ed. Hermann Heidegger (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2000), 107–117; “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, ed. Richard Wolin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993, 29–39).

49. By contrast, Gadamer remained in contact with Jaspers during these years—as the Jaspers collection in Marbach documents.

50. Martin Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymnen ‘Germanien’ und ‘Der Rhein,’ GA 39, ed. Susanne Ziegler, 2nd ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1989).

51. These comparisons should be kept in mind when evaluating more or less explicit claims that charge Gadamer with not having broken off all contact with his teacher. The claim is mentioned by, among others, Grondin in his Gadamer: A Biography, 189; Eine Biographie, 195.

52. Hannah Arendt, “Martin Heidegger ist achtzig Jahre alt,” Merkur 10, no. 258 (1969): 893–902; reprinted in: Günther Neske and Emil Kettering, eds., Antwort—Martin Heidegger im Gespräch (Pfullingen: Neske, 1988), 232–246.

53. The importance that Gadamer ascribed to friendship should not be underestimated. See in this volume chapter 8, part 7. The inaugural lecture that he gave on February 23, 1929, in Marburg, had the title “The Role of Friendship in Philosophical Ethics.”

54. The relationship between Gadamer and Klein has not yet been sufficiently researched. It was important on both levels: the personal and the philosophical. Recently, Burt Hopkins has contributed a great deal in opening new ways into Klein’s philosophy, in particular his critique of Husserl’s phenomenology. See Burt Hopkins, “Meaning and Truth in Klein’s Philosophico-Mathematical Writings,” St. John’s Review 48, no. 3 (2005): 57–87. For more on this issue, see chapter 7, part 4.

55. Submitted by the National Socialist Society of Teachers, Germany/Saxony, Dresden 1933.

56. See “Gadamer in conversation with Dörte von Westernhagen,” 548; see in addition George Leaman, Heidegger im Kontext. Gesamtüberblick zum NS-Engagement der Universitätsprofessoren (Berlin/Hamburg: Argument, 1993), 40. Krauss was sentenced to death in 1943. Gadamer intervened immediately with a letter, which helped at least somewhat by transmuting the death sentence into imprisonment, which then ended with the war. The letter on behalf of Krauss is published in Lendemains 18 (1969–70): 147–148.

57. Karl Jaspers, The Question of German Guilt, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001), 59; Die Schuldfrage. Ein Beitrag zur deutschen Frage (Heidelberg: Schneider, 1946), 64.

58. Despite Gadamer’s concerns it is easily imaginable that it was less bitter for Frank to know that his chair was in the hands of a friend, which may also be why he continued to support Gadamer.

59. See Grondin, Gadamer. Eine Biographie, 206, and A Biography, 199, as well as Wolin, “Untruth and Method,” 10.

60. Above all he did not want to struggle with the National Socialist censorship officials. Gadamer was also very sick during these years and suffered considerably from the diatribes against him from the Dozentenbund.

61. Apart from the writing on Kant’s aesthetics, which is taken further in Truth and Method, and with the exception of the essay on Herder, all of these works were published again unchanged. “Plato and the Poets” and “Plato’s Educational State” are in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eight Hermeneutical Studies on Plato, trans. and ed. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1980); “Hegel and the Dialectic of the Ancient Philosophers” is in Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, trans. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1976).

62. The work was only resumed in the 1980s: Gadamer, “Die Gegenwärtigkeit Hölderlins” (1983), GW9 39–41.

63. See “Gadamer in Conversation with Dörte von Westernhagen,” 549.

64. Gadamer, “Plato und die Dichter,” GW5 187–211; “Plato and the Poets,” Dialogue and Dialectic, 39–72; “Platos Staat der Erziehung” (1942), GW5 249–262; “Plato’s Educational State,” Dialogue and Dialectic, 73–92.

65. See Wolin, “Untruth and Method,” 18; Teresa Orozco, “Die Platon-Rezeption in Deutschland um 1933,” in Ilse Korotin, ed., Die besten Geister der Nation: Philosophie und Nationalsozialismus (Vienna: Picus, 1994), 141–185. Jaeger had been forced to immigrate in 1936 and taught at first at Chicago, then at Harvard. In light of his ideal of paideia, which Heidegger not coincidentally scorned, one should guard against the overly hasty judgment that would equate Neo-Humanism with National Socialism.

66. The dismissal of poetry, as well as of every kind of art, which serves only self-forgetfulness, prefigures the critique of an “aesthetic consciousness.” See in this volume chapter 2, part 5.

67. Orozco misses this significance of the allusion. See Teresa Orozco, “Die Kunst der Anspielung. Hans-Georg Gadamers philosophische Intervention im Nationalsozialismus,” Das Argument. Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Sozialwissenschaften 37 (1995): 311–324. In the summary review, which appeared in 1933 and which included Gadamer’s “Die neue Plato-forschung” (1933), GW5 213–229, the concepts of “utopia” as well as the “educational state” also appear.

68. See in this volume chapter 6, part 5.

69. See Jost Schneider, ed., Herder im “Dritten Reich” (Bielefeld: Aisthesis, 1994).

70. The assumptions by Orozco and Wolin regarding the conditions under which the lecture took place have proven to be historically false. For a thorough discussion, see Frank-Rutger Hausmann, “Unwahrheit als Methode? Zu Hans-Georg Gadamers Publikationen im Dritten Reich,” Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 2001/1: 33–54.

71. For a comparison of the passages, see Orozco, “Platonische Gewalt,” 235–239.

72. See Richard Wolin, “Gadamer und der deutsche Sonderweg,” Internationale Zeitschrift für Philosophie 2001/1: 93–103 at 99.

73. See in this volume chapter 4, part 3.

74. See the carefully compiled list by Richard E. Palmer, “Published Interviews and Archival Tapes,” in Hahn, The Philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer, 588–599.

75. The perspective of the exiles was decisive for the small group of German Jews who were among the first to recognize in Auschwitz a “break” in Western history.

76. See David Cassidy, Uncertainty: The Life and Science of Werner Heisenberg (New York: Freeman, 1992), 430.

77. Volkmann-Schluck was not only the first, but also the favorite student of Gadamer’s. See Gadamer, “Gedenkreden auf Karl-Heinz Volkmann-Schluck (1914–1981),” Kölner Universitätsreden 59 (self-published) (1982): 8–17.

78. See Gadamer, Über die Ursprünglichkeit der Wissenschaft (Leipzig: J. A. Barth, 1947), now “Über die Ursprünglichkeit der Wissenschaft” (1947), GW10 287–294; “On the Primordiality of Science: A Rectoral Address,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer on Education, Poetry and History: Applied Hermeneutics, ed. Dieter Misgeld and Graeme Nicholson, trans. Lawrence Schmidt and Monica Reuss (Albany: SUNY Press, 1992), 15–21; as well as Gadamer, Über die Ursprünglichkeit der Philosophie. Zwei Vorträge (Berlin: Chronos, 1948).

79. PA 99/PL 118.

80. Gadamer, “Zum 300. Geburtstag von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. Festrede an der Universität Leipzig” (1946/90), GW10 295–307 at 297.

81. See the letter from Heidegger to Stadelmann from September 1, 1945: “In the first place I recommend Gadamer (Leipzig); I have no idea where he is at the moment. He is, according to intellectual format, the most valuable as teacher and colleague. I would like to see him as my successor, if that were possible” (Heidegger, Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges: 1910–1976, 395).

82. The chapter of his autobiography dedicated to these years is entitled “Leipzig Illusions.” Compare PA 103–115 and PL 122–138.

83. See in this volume, chapter 10, part 2.

84. See Gadamer, “Die Grenzen der historischen Vernunft” (1949), GW10 175–178.

85. See “‘. . . nein, das letzte Wort will ich gar nicht haben.’ Ein Gespräch mit dem Philosophen Hans-Georg Gadamer über die gewaltlose Macht der Sprache,” in Frankfurter Rundschau, February 11, 1995, 8.

86. The Festschrift appeared with the title Anteile (Participations) in 1950, about one year later, from Klostermann. It had no dedication and did not include the name of the editor, who was obviously Gadamer.

87. Gadamer also succeeded in having Heidegger chosen as a member of the Academy of Sciences in Heidelberg.

88. The memories of Gadamer from these students have been gathered in a volume, edited by Günter Figal: Begegnungen mit Hans-Georg Gadamer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000). Carsten Dutt worked with Gadamer in his later years in the philosophy department, and he among others should be thanked for perhaps the most successful interview with Gadamer: Carsten Dutt, ed., Hans-Georg Gadamer im Gespräch (Heidelberg: Winter, 1995).

89. See “Gadamer im Gespräch,” February 11, 1995. Interview with Austrian radio.

90. See in this volume chapter 9.

91. See in this volume chapter 2, part 1.

92. Gadamer was personally involved in the publication of his works. One of his intentions was to avoid the publication of his lectures. In March 1997, he wanted to clear his office at the university and threw a great number of papers away, among them the manuscripts of the lectures he had held in the United States. On that day, unfortunately, I got to the university later than usual, and so many of the papers had already been lost. I was able, however, to save a few significant exchanges of letters, including those with Löwith and Klein as well as the exchange with Heidegger, which had just recently reappeared. I brought the documents at that time to the university archive in Heidelberg, together with all the other materials that were preserved in the department of philosophy. Today they can be found in the German National Library in Marbach am Neckar, where in the meantime a Gadamer archive has been opened.

93. See the list of reviews in this volume, chapter 10, part 1.

94. See chapter 10 in this volume for all discussions of Gadamer’s works.

95. See Gadamer, “The Problem of Language in Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutic,” trans. David E. Linge, in Schleiermacher as Contemporary: Journal for Theology and the Church 7, ed. Robert W. Funk (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 68–84; “Das Problem der Sprache bei Schleiermacher” (1968), in Neuere Philosophie II. Probleme—Gestalten, GW4 361–373.

96. Letter to Heidegger from February 3, 1968, in the German National Library in Marbach.

97. “Mit der Sprache denken” (1990), GW10 346–353 at 346–7.

98. Richard E. Palmer, Hermeneutics: Interpretation Theory in Schleiermacher, Dilthey, Heidegger, and Gadamer (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1969).

99. See in this volume chapter 10, 5.

100. The lecture was slightly revised by Gadamer and given again when he received the Hegel Prize from the city of Stuttgart on June 13, 1979. See Gadamer, “Das Erbe Hegels,” in Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jürgen Habermas, Das Erbe Hegels (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1979), 33–84, republished as “Das Erbe Hegels” (1980), GW4, 463–483; “The Heritage of Hegel,” in Reason in the Age of Science, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 38–68. See in this volume chapter 7, part 6.

101. Antonio Gargano gives an overview of Gadamer’s seminars in “Hans-Georg Gadamer e l’Istituto Italiano per gli Studi filosofici,” Sophia 4 (2002): 151–155.

102. It is for example due to an initiative in those years of the Istituto Italiano degli Studi filosofici in Naples, as well as RAI Educational, that Gadamer taped a series of twenty-seven video cassettes for the series Enciclopedia multimediale delle scienze filosofiche, which deals with the history of philosophical thought. The series bore the title Il cammino della filosofia (“The Way of Philosophy”), and went back to an idea from Gerardo Marotta (see www.emsf.rai.it).

103. See Gerardo Marotta, “Mit Gadamer für ein Europa der Kultur,” in Günter Figal, ed., Begegnungen mit Hans-Georg Gadamer (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2000), 21–32 at 25.

104. Compare the “Chronology” at the end of this volume.

105. See in this volume chapter 10, part 1.

106. See Rüdiger Bubner, ed., “Sein, das verstanden werden kann, ist Sprache,” in Hommage an Hans-Georg Gadamer (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 2001).

107. The first unofficial meeting actually took place in the summer of 1988. The participants at that time were Lawrence K. Schmidt, James C. Risser, Brice Wachterhauser, and Joel Weinsheimer. This first group then arranged the symposium for 1989 in the “Wissenschaftsforum.” After 1989 the symposium was to be held in the philosophy department in Heidelberg every two years; in light of its success it was held every year after 1991. Many renowned American philosophers, such as John Sallis, and many important representatives of philosophical hermeneutics in the United States, for example Richard E. Palmer, P. Christopher Smith, and Charles Scott, regularly took part in the symposium. This was also a valuable opportunity for a conversation between American and European philosophers. After Gadamer’s death in 2002 the symposium was moved to Freiburg, where it still takes place every year in the philosophy department.