The complexity of the problem then is this, how to account for the fact that so much of our intellectual life is indebted to a thinker who embraced fascism? Safranski’s biography walks a careful line between defenders and critics, but it cannot avoid the contested nature of Heidegger’s life, and the demand for an account of this conundrum. Amongst his followers were not just reactionaries like Jacques Maritain and Jean Beaufret, but also radicals like the Frankfurt School thinkers Max Horkheimer and Herbert Marcuse (both students), the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, the philosopher who analysed totalitarianism, his student and lover Hannah Arendt, and the post-structuralists like Jacques Derrida and Lyotard.
If Heidegger’s fascism is difficult to deny, so too is the intellectual debt owed him by so many of the century’s greatest philosophical and political thinkers.
But Heidegger was plainly an enthusiast who embraced the Führer-principle, even to the extent of having his student’s give him the Hitler salute in his classes. Of course, lots of Germans were members of the NSDAP. The problem is quite simple, and it was clearly set out by Farias, a one-time student of Heidegger’s: From 1933 right up until 1945, the greatest single influence on philosophy in the twentieth century was a paid up member of the National Socialist Workers’ Party, NSDAP, or colloquially, Nazi. Safranski’s Martin Heidegger affects to walk a path between the ideological condemnations by Farias, Rockmore and Ott, on the one hand, and the apologists like Derrida and Bourdieu on the other.
Quite apart from the discussions of Heidegger’s life is the mountain of criticism and re-publication of his work. On top of the biographies, came the commentaries on the biographies, from such intellectual heavyweights as defenders Jacques Derrida (Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, 1989), the late Jean François Lyotard (Heidegger and ‘the jews’, 1990), Pierre Bourdieu (The Political Ontology of Martin Heidegger, 1991) and critics Luc Ferry and Alain Renault (Heidegger and Modernity, 1990) and Farias’ translator, the American writer on philosophy Tom Rockmore (On Heidegger’s Nazism and Philosophy, 1992). Safranski’s biography of the philosopher Martin Heidegger adds to another volume to the pile that properly begins with the Chilean Victor Farias’ Heidegger and Nazism published in France in 1987, followed by Hugo Ott’s Martin Heidegger: A Political Life in 1994 and Elzbieta Ettinger’s account of the love affair Martin Heidegger – Hannah Arendt in 1995. Rudiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, Princeton University Press, £10.95 pbk, 469pp
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