2004-2005 Season: Hannah and Martin

Who Was Martin Heidegger?

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” –Hannah Arendt

Heidegger was born on September 26, 1889 in Messkirch in southwest Germany to a Catholic family. In his early youth Heidegger was being prepared for the priesthood, subsequently entering Freiburg University to study theology. After a break with his priesthood training in 1911, he took up studies in philosophy, mathematics and natural sciences.

In 1915 Heidegger became an unsalaried lecturer at Freiburg University, and in 1917 he married Thea Elfride Petri, a Protestant student who had attended his courses. In 1918, he secured a position as Professor Edmund Husserl’s assistant, and began lecturing in a groundbreaking way. His lectures on phenomenology and his creative interpretations of Aristotle would soon earn him wide acclaim.

In 1923 Heidegger moved to Marburg University where he obtained a position of associate professor. His students testified to the originality of his insight and the intensity of his philosophical questioning. In February 1927, partly because of administrative pressures, his fundamental, but also unfinished treatise, Being and Time, appeared. Within a few years, this book was recognized as a truly epoch-making work of 20th century philosophy. It earned Heidegger, in the fall of 1927, the full professorship at Marburg, and one year later, the chair of philosophy at Freiburg University.

Heidegger’s life entered a new, controversial stage with Hitler’s rise to power. Heidegger, who before was virtually apolitical, in the early 1930s became politically involved. In 1933 he was elected rector of Freiburg University by the faculty, and accepted this politically-charged post. In 1933 he joined the NSDAP party, and soon after delivered his inaugural rector’s address; the ambiguous text is frequently interpreted as an expression of his support of Hitler’s regime. There is little doubt that during his tenure as a rector, Heidegger became instrumental to Nazi policies and, willingly or not, helped to transform the university into National-Socialist mold. And yet, one year later Heidegger resigned the rectorate and took no further part in politics. In his lectures of the late 1930s and the early 1940s, he expressed covert criticism of the Nazi ideology, and was placed under Gestapo surveillance. He was finally humiliated in 1944 when he was declared the most “expendable” member of the faculty and send to the Rhine to dig trenches. Because of the ambiguity of Heidegger’s attitude toward Nazism, the relationship between his philosophy and his political involvement still provoke a heated debate. Following Germany’s defeat in WWII, Heidegger was first forbidden to teach, and then dismissed from his chair of philosophy because of alleged Nazi sympathies. The ban was lifted in 1949.

The 1930s are not only marked by Heidegger’s controversial involvement in politics, but also by a change in the thinking which is known as “the turn.” In his lectures and writings that followed “the turn,” he became less systematic and often more obscure than in his fundamental work Being and Time.

During the last three decades of his life, Heidegger wrote and published much. In his insightful essays and lectures, he strove to clarify his way of thinking after “the turn.” In 1966, Heidegger attempted to justify his political involvement during the Nazi regime in an interview with Der Spiegel entitled “Only a God Can Save Us.” It was published only ten years later, after his death. Heidegger died on May 26, 1976. To the very end he worked on various projects, including the extensive Gesamtausgabe, the complete edition of his works.

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