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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Philosophers have long struggled to reconcile Martin Heidegger's involvement in Nazism with his status as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. The recent publication of his
Black Notebooks has reignited fierce debate on the subject. These thousand-odd pages of jotted observations profoundly challenge our image of the quiet philosopher's exile in the Black Forest, revealing the shocking extent of his anti-Semitism for the first time.
For much of the philosophical community, the
Black Notebooks have been either used to discredit Heidegger or seen as a bibliographical detail irrelevant to his thought. Yet, in this new book, renowned philosopher Donatella Di Cesare argues that Heidegger's "metaphysical anti-Semitism" was a central part of his philosophical project. Within the context of the Nuremberg race laws, Heidegger felt compelled to define Jewishness and its relationship to his concept of Being. Di Cesare shows that Heidegger saw the Jews as the agents of a modernity that had disfigured the spirit of the West. In a deeply disturbing extrapolation, he presented the Holocaust as both a means for the purification of Being and the Jews' own "self-destruction": a process of death on an industrialized scale that was the logical conclusion of the acceleration in technology they themselves had brought about.
Situating Heidegger's anti-Semitism firmly within the context of his thought, this groundbreaking work will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and history as well as the many readers interested in Heidegger's life, work, and legacy.
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Contents
Cover
Copyright
Foreword
I Between Politics and Philosophy
1 A Media Affair
2 A Nazi by Chance . . .
3 Biographical Detail, or Philosophical Nexus?
4 Heidegger, an Anti-Semite?
5 What Has Been Left Unsaid about the Jewish Question
6 The Black Notebooks
7 Reductio ad Hitlerum On the Posthumous Trial of Heidegger
8 A Calling to Account?
9 From Derrida to Schürmann: Toward an Anarchic Reading
10 Taming Heidegger
11 The Exclusion of Nazism from Philosophy
12 Philosophical Commitment and Political Decision
Notes
II Philosophy and Hatred of the Jews
1 Luther, Augustine, and “the Jews and Their Lies”
2 The “Jewish Question” in Philosophy
3 Kant and the “Euthanasia of Judaism”
4 Hegel and the Jew without Property
5 “Anti-anti-Semite?” Nietzsche, the Antichrist, and the Falsification of Values
6 Lies and Fakery: The Non-being of the Jew in Mein Kampf
Notes
III The Question of Being and the Jewish Question
1 The Night of Being
2 In An Esoteric Tone . . .
3 Anti-Semitism and Never-dispelled Doubts
4 Metaphors of an Absence
5 The Jew and the Oblivion of Being
6 The Greeks, the Germans – and the Jews
7 The Rootless Agents of Acceleration
8 Against the Jewish Intellectuals
9 Geist and ruach: The “Original Fire” and the Spectral Breath
10 Machination and Power
11 The Desertification of the Earth
12 The Apocalyptic and the “Prince of This World”
13 The Deracification of Peoples
14 Race or Rank?
15 The Metaphysics of Blood
16 “My ‘Attack’ on Husserl”
17 Heidegger, Jünger, and the Topology of the Jew
18 The Enemy: Heidegger versus Schmitt
19 Polemos and Total War
20 Weltjudentum: The Jewish World Conspiracy
21 Judeo-Bolshevism
22 Weltlos – Without World: The Jew and the Stone
23 Metaphysical Anti-Semitism
24 The Jew and the “Purification” of Being
25 “What Is It about No-thing?”
Notes
IV After Auschwitz
1 Bellum judaicum
2 To Abdicate to Silence?
3 “The Production of Corpses” and Ontic Indifference
4 The Ontological Massacre: Parmenides and Auschwitz
5 “Do They die? They Do Not Die, They Are Liquidated . . .”
6 Positionality, Technology, Crime
7 The Northeast Wind: Heading Toward Defeat
8 Selbstvernichtung: The Shoah and the “Self-Annihilation” of the Jews
9 The Betrayal of the “German Essence”
10 If Germany is a Lager, Then Who Is the Victim?
11 The “Question of Guilt” and the Crime Against the Germans
12 The “Note for Jackasses”: Against the Jewish Prophecy
13 World Democracy and the Dictatorship of Monotheism
14 “An Old Spirit of Revenge Makes its Way upon the Earth”
15 Whether It Is Possible to Forgive a Rabbi
16 Cousin Gross and Cousin Klein Jews and Family Resemblances
17 The Oblivion of the Jew: The Hidden Debt
18 Where Paul is Hidden
19 The Future of Being and the Hebrew Name
20 A Pagan Landscape
21 The Other Beginning, the Beginning of the Other: Anarchy, Birth
22 An Angel in the Black Forest: Apocalypse and Revolution
Notes
Index
End User License Agreement
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Heidegger and the Jews
The Black Notebooks
Donatella Di Cesare
Translated by Murtha Baca
polity
First published in Italian as Heidegger e gli ebrei. I “Quaderni neri” © Bollati Boringhieri editore, Turin, 2014
This English edition © Polity Press, 2018
The translation of this book has been funded by SEPSSegretariato Europeo per le Pubblicazioni Scientifiche
Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press101 Station LandingSuite 300Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-0386-5
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Di Cesare, Donatella, author.Title: Heidegger and the Jews : the Black notebooks / Donatella Di Cesare.Other titles: Heidegger e gli Ebrei. EnglishDescription: English edition. | Medford, MA : Polity, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018001624 (print) | LCCN 2018018674 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509503865 (Epub) | ISBN 9781509503827 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509503834 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Heidegger, Martin, 1889-1976. Schwarze Hefte. |
Antisemitism--Germany--History--20th century. | Antisemitism--Philosophy.
Classification: LCC B3279.H48 (ebook) | LCC B3279.H48 S36233513 2018 (print) | DDC 193--dc23LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018001624
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Foreword
I hope that this book will be judged only after it has been read all the way to the end. In our times, there is little tolerance for complexity. The preference is for simple “pro” or “con” answers, opposite poles, black or white. But whoever philosophizes must tolerate complexity, must inhabit the varying shades of reflection. This holds true all the more for a delicate question like the one dealt with in this book.
The Black Notebooks have not placed a tombstone on Heidegger’s thought. Some had hoped that they would, with a sort of prediction that belied itself. Rather, something unusual happened – something that goes far beyond the interest that is normally elicited by a philosopher’s unpublished writings. What was sparked was an intense debate that, often in heated tones, has gone beyond the boundaries of the academy, extending to the world of culture and involving an increasingly broad audience. And Heidegger has always been the leading character. The liveliness of the debate demonstrates the continuing relevance of his thought.
When considered carefully, the scandal of the Black Notebooks has very little that is scandalous about it. If these notebooks are disturbing, if they literally represent a stumbling block, it is because they overturn the schemas by which Heidegger has been interpreted up to now. In that traditional interpretation, Heidegger’s political thought, for example, was reduced to or circumscribed within a brief span of time. But the Black Notebooks reveal a philosopher who was attentive to historical events, and aware of his own political decisions. This is why the scandal has had such a striking effect on the “Heideggerians” and, more generally, on the world of continental philosophy.
The two extreme positions about the Black Notebooks have been either to dismiss Heidegger altogether, or to “return to Messkirch.” On the one hand, there is an expression of moral indignation, while still reserving the right to use Heidegger’s work for one’s own purposes; on the other hand is the desire for everything to remain as it had been, regardless of what is written in the Black Notebooks. Both of these positions are profoundly anti-philosophical, rhetorical gestures.
The task of philosophy is, above all, critical interpretation, as sustained by the tradition that Heidegger himself contributed to nurturing: philosophical hermeneutics. It is impossible to know what the results will be of the publication of the Black Notebooks – what the effects will be. But an author lives in the history of effects, as Hans-Georg Gadamer said. And the Black Notebooks, whether one likes it or not, are now an integral element of Heidegger’s thought and of the history of its effects – an element that cannot be ignored.
This book takes into account what Heidegger wrote about the Jews and Judaism in the Black Notebooks that have been published as of this writing, which date from 1931 to 1948. The anti-Semitism revealed in the notebooks is their great novelty. This does not mean that it is their only theme – there are many others. Choosing to confront the so-called “Jewish question” therefore does not imply – as some have insinuated – that this is a single, exclusive theme.
Heidegger’s anti-Semitism cannot in any way be minimized, much less denied. The sterile and in some ways macabre nature of the passages of the Black Notebooks where Heidegger speaks about “Jews,” “Judaism,” “Jewish,” “Jewishness” – passages that are, moreover, much more numerous than one might imagine – does not silence the presence or the importance of the anti-Semitism expressed therein. The two defensive strategies that have been hitherto adopted – the one that refers to Heidegger’s personal relationships with particular Jews, and the other that would like to annul the entire question by maintaining that anti-Semitism does not touch the core of Heidegger’s thought – are both sure to be proven vain and inconsistent.
I have selected the adjective “metaphysical” to characterize Heidegger’s anti-Semitism. I was already convinced of the continuity of this anti-Semitism before the publication of the first volume of the Black Notebooks, GA 97, which contains the pages dating from the postwar period – pages that confirm that continuity. For that matter, anti-Semitism is not an emotion, a feeling of hatred that comes and goes and can be circumscribed within a particular period. Anti-Semitism has a theological provenance and a political intention. In the case of Heidegger, it also takes on a philosophical significance.
The adjective “metaphysical” does not mitigate Heidegger’s anti-Semitism. On the contrary, it is an indication of how deeply rooted that anti-Semitism was. Metaphysical anti-Semitism is more abstract and at the same time more dangerous than a simple aversion to Jews and Judaism. But the adjective “metaphysical” also refers to the tradition of Western metaphysics. In his metaphysical anti-Semitism, Heidegger was not alone: he followed in the footsteps of a long line of philosophers, from Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche. I have reconstructed a brief history of anti-Semitism among German philosophers in order to contextualize and make more understandable in their complex development some of the stereotypes and concepts that were dealt with by Heidegger.
As is well known, “metaphysics” was the way in which, above all during the 1930s, Heidegger criticized the Western tradition. If I speak of “metaphysical anti-Semitism,” it is because I maintain that Heidegger, in his attempt to define Jews and Judaism, fell back on metaphysics in his own turn. At the time of the Nuremberg laws, defining what a Jew was constituted one of the main tasks of the Nazi party. In his history of Being, Heidegger encountered the Jew; he intuited that the Jew was not “the enemy,” but rather “the Other” who, in his very otherness, could represent the passage for which he himself was searching, beyond metaphysics. Indeed, as this book attempts to demonstrate, there were numerous points of convergence between Heidegger’s thinking and Judaism, from the concept of nothingness to the concept of time. But Heidegger recoiled. Being was more important. The Jew was left aside.
And yet the Jewish question lies at the heart of Heidegger’s thought, at the center of the question par excellence of philosophy. To the Jews, seen as the rootless agents of modernity, accused of machination to seize power, of the desertification of the earth, of uprooting peoples, condemned to be weltlos – worldless, “without world” – Heidegger imputed the gravest guilt: the oblivion of Being. The Jew was a sign of the end of everything, impeding the rise of a new beginning.
Heidegger shared a vision of the Jews that was widespread during those years – a vision that would lead to a bellum judaicum. This does not mean that he was a precursor to the extermination of the Jews. The Black Notebooks obviate the great topos of twentieth-century philosophy: that of Heidegger’s silence. For that very reason, they raise the question, hitherto too often avoided, of the responsibility of philosophers. It is in this sense that I speak of an “ontological massacre.” The theme of the “Selbstvernichtung des Jüdischen” (self-annihilation of that which is Jewish) will give us much to think about, as the inversion that Heidegger used to usurp even the role of victim from the Jews will give us much to discuss. Thus, the Black Notebooks impose upon us the task of philosophically re-thinking what happened after 1945 as well.
IBETWEEN POLITICS AND PHILOSOPHY
Repentance is not a virtue.1
Don’t expect denial, nor repentance [. . .] It’s time for me to admit what I was, a philosopher, and a Nazi as much as you like, but a philosopher.2
1 A Media Affair
No other philosopher has aroused such a furor post mortem. Ever since, as early as 1945, “the Heidegger affair” – “l’affaire,” as the French say – became an issue, alternating phases have been imposed on public opinion, but with a resonance that has never failed, and that, in fact, has spread and become more intense in recent times.3 News of the recent revelations has burst out in newspapers and other media outlets around the world. It has even found space in The New York Times.4
The loftiest ideas have given rise to the most profound horror. And it is not difficult to understand the scandal. The greatness of Heidegger the philosopher and the baseness of Heidegger the Nazi constitute an extravagant antinomy, an unacceptable paradox. Heidegger is like a two-headed Janus who disturbingly shows two faces – one praiseworthy, the other ignoble. To avoid this dissociating, distressing vision, the alternative, suggested also by the urgency of the pressure exerted by the media, seems to be clear and clean: if Heidegger was a great philosopher, then he was not a Nazi, and if he was a Nazi, then he was not a great philosopher.
While the media outlets demand a succinct, definitive answer, a closure to the case, it also is the media that constantly re-open the issue, sensationalizing it by publishing things that have previously been hidden and unknown. Thus, over the years, a philosophical case has become a media affair. Heidegger, who was well aware of the complex theme of journalism, reflected on the notion of “resonance.” The more that information is concealed behind the appearance of objectivity – seeming to simplify issues by eliminating difficulties and problems, making a question seem superfluous and innocuous – the greater the need for an actual experience, the spasmodic desire to access that which, having remained mysteriously in the background, excites, moves, inebriates, creates a sensation.5 Just as this desire has no sense of embarrassment or shame, so also the mechanism that provides public access to formerly hidden information has no limits – it is an endless whirlwind. Heidegger was aware that his ideas were threatened by that incapacity to preserve the original question. In a letter to Hannah Arendt dated April 12, 1950, he wrote:
The way journalism is practiced around the world may be the first twitch of this coming devastation of all beginnings and how they are handed down. Is this pessimism? Is it despair? No! But a thinking that bears in mind that a history imagined only historically does not necessarily determine what is essential about human existence; that length of duration is no measure for the presence of essence; that an instant of rupture can be “more being”; that man must prepare for this “Being” and learn a different kind of remembrance; that, even with all that, something exalted is in store for him; that the fate of the Jews and the Germans does have its own truth, for which our historical calculation is no match.6
Certainly, journalism itself was not a threat for Heidegger. On more than one occasion, he praised the media for knowing how to “be on the alert” for what goes beyond the simple news of the day.7 Didn’t Heidegger grant his final interview, which was almost his philosophical last will and testament, to the magazine Der Spiegel? Rather than seeing journalism as a threat, Heidegger intuited that his case would become an affair taken up by “planetary journalism,” and he feared that the haste of the media would speed up the closing of his case, taking away the sense of urgency, canceling out any further questions.
2 A Nazi by Chance . . .
In spite of a series of new revelations, the discovery of letters and documents, the slow emergence from what Heidegger left behind in the form of unpublished texts and university course materials, in spite of the pioneering work of Hugo Ott and the provocative books by Victor Farías in 1987 and Emmanuel Faye in 2005, over the years there has been an official version of Heidegger’s Nazism that has only occasionally undergone some re-touching.8 It is worthwhile to give a brief summary of this official version.
In a life without a biography, as the life of every philosopher should be – according to the formula, “our only interest is that he was born at a certain time, that he worked, and that he died,” with which Heidegger, in 1924, had concluded his exemplary biography of Aristotle – Heidegger’s undeniable Nazism would be nothing more than a “political intermezzo.”9 Seemingly spurred on by circumstances more than by a deep conviction, Heidegger took up the post of rector of the University of Freiburg on April 21, 1933, and on May 1 he registered as a member of the NSDAP, the National Socialist Party, with the precise intention of safeguarding his academic freedom from political intrusions. But joining the NSDAP had no effect whatsoever, both because of Heidegger’s increasingly strident divergences from the upper echelons of the party, and on account of the ingenuousness with which he had aspired to become the spiritual guide of the movement, to guide even the Führer himself.10 His defeat was resounding, and the “failure” – as Heidegger recorded in a letter to Karl Jaspers written in 1935 – must have weighed heavily on his mind.11 He had no other choice but to learn a lesson from his political mistake; his resignation as rector of the university was accepted on April 27, 1934. All in all, it was a circumscribed period – just a year – a shameful parenthesis in his life, a passing incident, an accidental Nazism.
And afterward? The image of Heidegger that the official version disseminated is that of a philosopher in exile, isolated in Todtnauberg, in his refuge in the Black Forest, bent over the manuscripts of his university lectures, immersed in the evocative silence of the woods, far from the clamor of political life, searching for another destiny for Germany along the banks of the rivers of Hölderlin. The time of Heidegger’s Kehre, the “turn” in his thinking, would coincide with an increasingly marked distance on his part from Nazism and the tragic events related to it – to the point of making it possible to characterize his position as intellectual opposition or internal resistance.
First suspected by the Nazis, and then despised by the occupying Allied forces, Heidegger had to endure hostility and humiliation, paying dearly for that fatal error of his. In 1945 he was subjected to the judgment of the Allied Council on the Legal Purge; in 1946, he was barred from teaching. Karl Jaspers’ opinion was decisive.12 In the winter of 1945–6, Heidegger had a nervous breakdown, and was admitted to a sanatorium in Badenweiler; he recovered thanks to his work and to new projects that he undertook. A few years later, on September 26, 1951, he was re-instated by the university, but his chair was not restored to him. This act of rehabilitation marked the formal end of the chapter “Heidegger and Nazism.”
This version of the story of Heidegger’s relationship with Nazism leaves many questions unanswered. Why did he remain a member of the Nazi party until 1945? Why did he never condemn his mistake, if indeed it had been a mistake? Why did he never distance himself from his past? And what can be said about his obstinate silence, mute and impenetrable, which was assailed with questions and conjectures by poets and philosophers, from Paul Celan to Jacques Derrida?
3 Biographical Detail, or Philosophical Nexus?
If Heidegger’s Nazism was a mistake, limited to politics, contained within a very brief period, then it can easily be demoted to the status of a historical event of little importance. Indeed, it would be nothing more than a small biographical detail. This is why, when it is not completely passed over, it is usually treated only summarily in the pages dedicated to Heidegger’s life. The detail of his brief adherence to Nazism has nothing to do with Heidegger’s philosophy. What did his position as rector of Freiburg University have to do with the demise of metaphysics?
This is what bothers philosophers – not so much on account of the uproar that the case has raised in the media as for the enormous number of pamphlets and polemical writings relentlessly focusing on that detail that have given rise to a heated, at times virulent, debate, but one that is almost always flat and superficial. The heaping up of facts and documents, deeds and misdeeds, rather than clarifying the case, has if anything made it even more murky. The discussion, in its evident mediocrity, has gone on and on in alternating phases, remaining almost unchanged, because even his expert accusers, often unwittingly, reduce Heidegger’s Nazism to a historical event in his life. Thus, they end up validating the official version. It is not by chance that the contributions of these critics of Heidegger are generally devoid of philosophical solidity. But those who concentrate on the story of Heidegger the human being, on his poetic language, his innovations, are not interested – and why should they be? – in the defects, baseness, contradictions, and pettiness of the man. The despicableness of the philosopher is not the despicableness of his philosophy.
One is tempted to say that the analytic philosophers who – not without effort – keep life and philosophy separate are right. This problem arose in recent times with the publication of letters, diaries, and unpublished texts by Ludwig Wittgenstein. What legitimate use can be made of documents like these? In what way can the life story of a philosopher be important for understanding his ideas? Adherents of analytic philosophy would say that there is no way that the life of a philosopher is important for such an understanding.13 And yet Wittgenstein himself wrote: “Work on philosophy [. . .] is really more a work on oneself. On one’s own interpretation. On one’s own way of seeing things.”14
This question, which is a very old one for the continental philosophers, imbues the delicate case of Gottlob Frege, the founder of analytic philosophy. Frege, who sympathized with the extreme right, posited a “Third Realm” in logic.15 On April 30, 1924, he wrote in his diary: “One can acknowledge that the Jews are of the highest respectability, and yet regard it as a misfortune that there are so many Jews in Germany and that they have complete equality of political rights with citizens of Aryan descent.”16 A few days earlier, on April 22, Frege had confessed that “only in the last years” had he “really learned to comprehend anti-Semitism”; looking forward to the eventual enactment of what he considered timely “laws against the Jews,” he stressed the importance of not forgetting to impose a “distinguishing mark” that would make it possible “to be able to recognize a Jew.” In fact, Frege saw an effective “problem” here.17 The editors of Frege’s works have been careful to exclude his diary, with the intention, if not of hiding it completely, at least of attenuating its impact. Certainly, it is not necessary to concern oneself with an author’s anti-Semitism in order to read his treatise on logic, but Frege evoked numerous connections between the logical Reich and the theological and political Reichs.
Yet philosophy cannot be reduced to logic, nor identified with science; thus, a separation between the life and thought of a philosopher is abstract and artificial. This holds true especially for Heidegger, much like the model of Friedrich Nietzsche, who, as is well known, maintained that philosophy was an expression of one’s individuality. In emphasizing the difference between philosophy and science, Heidegger observed: “the point of departure of the path to philosophy is factical life experience”; but “philosophy itself can only be reached through a turning around of that path,” with repercussions on life.18
If this is the case – if a choice made in one’s life is at the same time a philosophical act – then political engagement is not a mere historical incident, and, behind the apparent biographical detail, there is perhaps concealed a philosophical nexus.
4 Heidegger, an Anti-Semite?
Whatever might be said about Heidegger’s Nazism – as we read in a recent publication – “not a single anti-Semitic phrase” can be found in any of his works.19 The lack of concrete proof of Heidegger’s purported anti-Semitism has contributed to the official version of the story. If he wasn’t an anti-Semite, then it is unlikely that Heidegger was a Nazi, according to this perspective. His political error seems thus to be lessened; his adherence to Nazism recedes into the background.
Heidegger, an anti-Semite? No, he was not. This has been the prevalent response for a long time. It is true that the hatred toward the Jews that the Nazis were quick to demonstrate did not lead Heidegger to distance himself from that movement; and yet his position cannot be compared to that of the racist ideologues of his day. Authoritative scholars such as Bernd Martin and Rüdiger Safranski are convinced of this.20 But this conviction was common even among Heidegger’s own Jewish students – “Heidegger’s children,” as Richard Wolin calls them with a certain note of sarcasm.21 Karl Löwith, Hans Jonas, Hannah Arendt, Herbert Marcuse: none of them ever made any insinuation of anti-Semitism against their teacher, whom they did not hesitate to criticize and reproach for other reasons. And yet their testimony would have been a determining factor.
There are two main arguments to be made with regard to the most serious accusation against Heidegger – that of anti-Semitism. This would make his enthusiasm for the Nazi movement much more understandable, but would also run the risk of jeopardizing his work.
The first argument is biographical in nature, and raises the issue of Heidegger’s personal relationships, friendships, and love affairs. How can we explain the magnetic attraction that Heidegger held for so many young Jews, first in Marburg and later in Freiburg? And the help that he gave to Jewish colleagues? A name that often comes up in this regard is that of Werner Brock, who, thanks to Heidegger’s intervention, succeeded in obtaining a scholarship to study at Cambridge. Not to mention Heidegger’s love affairs with Jewish women: Hannah Arendt, Elisabeth Blochmann, Mascha Laléko. How could hatred and love go together? As his pupil Hans Jonas confirmed: “Heidegger wasn’t a personal anti-Semite,” “Nein – Heidegger war kein persönlicher Antisemit.”22
The second argument stresses Heidegger’s distance from the “ideological lunacy” of the racists. His National Socialism was “decisionist,” according to Safranski: “What mattered to him was not origin but decision. In his terminology, a man should be judged not by his ‘thrownness,’ but by his ‘design.’”23 Heidegger did not intend to “exclude” others in the process of constructing a “new spiritual world.” Thus, he would have had no commonality with the crude, crass anti-Semitism of the Nazis – much less with the “spiritual” brand of anti-Semitism that maintained that there was a “Jewish spirit” that should be defended against.24 At the most, Heidegger showed a certain propensity, purely academic, to share the “competition anti-Semitism” of people who were worried about the overwhelming number of Jews in the German universities and who spoke about the danger of Verjüdung – “Jewification.”25
These two strategies for defending Heidegger were employed by Holger Zaborowski in an essay that, if on the one hand it reconstructs the entire debate, on the other hand, also takes into consideration the new materials that have come to light. By means of a historical investigation, focusing on documents, letters, and testimonies, Zaborowski attempts not only to rehabilitate Heidegger’s behavior toward Jews, but also – and above all – to defend Heidegger’s ideas against any negative imputation. Zaborowski does admit to a certain ambivalence. But he is quick to point out that in Heidegger’s philosophical works there is no trace of “a systematic anti-Semitism.”26 Nor, according to Zaborowski, were there “moments” or phases of anti-Semitism on Heidegger’s part. In a rather forced, arduous attempt to achieve a sense of balance, Zaborowski dismantles the few pieces of evidence of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, silences the rumors, and dispels suspicions and doubts. Thus, according to him, there was no anti-Semitism in Heidegger, neither open nor latent, personal nor philosophical – just a couple of remarks in his correspondence with his wife Elfride, remarks that can be traced to that “university anti-Jewish” attitude that was part of the spirit of the time.27 In the absence of other textual evidence, Zaborowski reaches the conclusion that anti-Semitism was far from Heidegger’s system of thought.
If this thesis has prevailed up to now, it is on account of the difficulty of maintaining, at one and the same time, the image of the philosopher who examines the question of Being, aspiring to authenticity, and the image of the common anti-Semite who, with his political gesture, becomes an anonymous Everyman, the average man whom Heidegger so deprecated in Being and Time – one of the millions of men who conformed to Nazism.28
Prominent among the dissonant voices is that of Jeanne Hersch, who, in an essay published in 1988, recalling among other things the time when she was studying in Freiburg in the 1930s, wrote: “Heidegger was not an anti-Semite, just as many non-Jews usually are not, but who, nevertheless, are not anti-anti-Semites.” And, with regard to the impossibility of reducing Heidegger the philosopher to the level of the Nazi Everyman, Hersch wonders whether “in Heidegger’s philosophy, or, if you will, in Heidegger the philosopher, there are not points to which his adherence to National Socialism can be anchored; thus compensating, in his own eyes, for certain disagreements, certain repugnancies, and, above all, points that would have instilled in Heidegger the hopes for a prophetic future.”29
5 What Has Been Left Unsaid about the Jewish Question
A new chapter recently opened in “the Heidegger affair,” after which it would be difficult to say that there is “nothing new.” In fact, it is a decisive chapter, both because it should resolve a controversy that has been going on for a long time, and because it deals with the nature of the decision that Heidegger made in the 1930s. The Schwarze Hefte, the Black Notebooks edited by Peter Trawny and published by Klostermann in 2014, contain what had previously been unsaid but many people had supposed, or hoped, was also un-thought.
On the last page of the notebook entitled Ponderings XIV, written shortly after the German offensive toward the East announced by Hitler on June 22, 1941, Heidegger noted:
The question of the role of world-Judaism [Weltjudentum] is not a racial [rassisch] question, but a metaphysical [metaphysische] one, a question that concerns the kind of human existence which in an utterly unrestrained way can undertake as a world-historical “task” the uprooting of all beings from Being.30
On numerous occasions in the Black Notebooks, and in different contexts, Heidegger wrote about Jews, Judaism, and the “Jewish question.” He clearly stated that this was not a “racial” question, but rather a “metaphysical” one. Beyond any possible misunderstanding, he asserted that the theme of Judaism should be addressed within the history of Being. What is the relationship between Being and the Jews? In what way do the Jews undermine Being, and its history? What connection is there between Seinfrage – the question par excellence in philosophy – and Judenfrage, the Jewish question?
This is what is new about the Black Notebooks – in them, anti-Semitism has a philosophical dimension and is seen in the context of the history of man’s existence. It is not a biographical detail that can be set aside, put in a corner, forgotten, because that would be forgetting the existence of man. Archival research gives way to testimony; the meticulous search for small or large bits of proof of Heidegger’s involvement with anti-Semitism, the reconstruction of the particular period in history, of what was going on in German universities at the time – all of this recedes into the background, losing a great deal of its significance, in the face of the reflections of Heidegger the philosopher speaking in the first person. The “Heidegger affair” can no longer be considered a time-worn historical diatribe. Rather, it is now established as a philosophical issue that directly calls into question philosophers and philosophy.
In light of the Black Notebooks, Heidegger’s adherence to National Socialism takes on much clearer outlines, because it was based on a metaphysical form of anti-Semitism. The radical nature of this kind of anti-Semitism casts new light on the fact that Heidegger joined the National Socialist party in 1933 – we now know that this was neither a random incident, nor a mistake. Rather, it was the result of a political choice that was coherent with Heidegger’s ideas. And his subsequent silence also appears to have been coherent with his ideas in an exemplary fashion. Anti-Semitism was not, in fact, an ideological “add-on” – it was the cornerstone of National Socialism. This also debunks the notion held by many that Heidegger’s anti-Semitism was a far cry from that of Carl Schmitt or Ernst Jünger, for example.
Thus, a page has been turned, and a new chapter opened, in which questions must be raised that have until now been largely avoided. The first and most urgent of these questions is that of the Shoah within the history of Western metaphysics.
6 TheBlack Notebooks
In the mid-1970s, 34 notebooks bound in black oilcloth were deposited in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach am Neckar. Heidegger had expressed the desire that the notebooks be published at the end of his complete works. Until that moment – as Heidegger’s son Hermann has stated – they were supposed to remain secret, “double-locked.” No one was supposed to read them, or even know about them. Heidegger’s wishes about the notebooks were only partially disregarded. The long time that it was taking to publish his other works led the administrator of his literary estate to hasten the publication of the Schwarze Hefte.
The notebooks cover a period of almost 40 years – roughly 1930 to 1970. They are organized in the following way: 14 notebooks [numbered II to XV] are entitled Überlegungen (Ponderings), nine are Ammerkungen (Notes), two are Vier Hefte (Four Notebooks), two Vigiliae, one Nocturne, two Winke (Indications), four Vorläufiges (Preliminaries). Two other notebooks, Megiston and Grundworte (Fundamental Words), have been found; it is not certain that these will be published among Heidegger’s complete works. All of the notebooks are classified with Roman numerals. The first notebook, Überlegungen I, dating from 1930, is missing as of this writing. It is also possible that other portions of Heidegger’s notebooks may have been lost. Überlegungen XV, written in 1941, comes to an abrupt halt and has no analytical index, which Heidegger normally compiled at the end of each notebook.
It is to be expected that, in the years to come, all of the Schwarze Hefte, comprising volumes 94 through 102 of Heidegger’s complete works, will be published. The Überlegungen II–XV (comprising volumes 94–6 of the complete works) were published in German in the Spring of 2014, followed in 2015 by volume 97, which covers the period from 1942 to 1948.
The date “October 1931” appears on the first page of Überlegungen II. In Vorläufiges III, Heidegger wrote the annotation “Le Thor 1969.” This means – as Trawny observes – that Vorläufiges IV must have been written at the beginning of the 1970s.31 And yet the numbering of the notebooks does not necessarily indicate a linear sequence. We must presume that, during certain periods, Heidegger was working on more than one notebook at a time. Given that there are few corrections, and that at times the notes are very long, it is probable that there were preliminary drafts of the texts in the notebooks, of which no trace is left. The Black Notebooks are neither private annotations, nor – much less – diaries; their style, their content, and, finally, the author’s intention clearly indicate that they are philosophical writings.
But why did Heidegger want to have the notebooks published at the end of the edition of his complete works? Are the Black Notebooks his philosophical last will and testament? What role do they play as part of the works he produced? Why did he envision them coming out after his unpublished treatises on the history of Being – texts that are already so esoteric?
A halo of mystery envelops the Black Notebooks. They should have been the eschaton – not just the last word, but the absolutely final word, uttered at the final frontier, at the abyss of silence. This is the reason for the unique position of these writings, to which Heidegger’s unpublished treatises refer, but which, by their very nature, cannot and should not be seen as central to his work. The peculiar eccentricity of the notebooks is revealed in their personal style, which bears the author’s imprint. Heidegger speaks in the first person, without too much reticence, with a brisk sense of freedom, his eye looking toward the future. It is as if he were addressing new interlocutors who, thanks to the distance of history, might perhaps be able to understand that dark epoch in European history in a different way. And, as far as Heidegger goes, he does not limit himself to bearing witness; rather, he scrutinizes and deciphers from his “advance outposts,” which are at the same time “rearguard positions.”32 How could we not think of Nietzsche? But it is Heidegger himself who warns that his reflections are not wise aphorisms or maxims. Rather, they are Versuche (experiments) – this is the word that appears in a note from the 1970s, chosen by the editor as an exergue – “attempts at simple designation,” neither statements nor notations for a planned system.33 They follow the thread of Heidegger’s investigations; they unfold, facilitating a kind of inquiry that is both the content and the form, the theme and the style of the notebooks. In this way, they do not have any term of comparison within Heidegger’s work; they represent a unicum in the philosophical literature of the twentieth century.
The Black Notebooks resemble the shipboard diary of a castaway crossing the night of the world. He is guided by the distant light of a new beginning. The passage, dark and tragic, is illuminated by profound philosophical glimpses and powerful eschatological visions.
7Reductio ad HitlerumOn the Posthumous Trial of Heidegger
Very few questios, but many summary judgments, apodictic verdicts, and lapidary assertions have fomented Heidegger’s posthumous trial, which, between sentences of first-degree guilt, appeals, and revisions, has made a powerful entry into the twenty-first century.
The publication of the Black Notebooks has re-opened, especially in France, a heated controversy that, upon close consideration, was never really closed. The scenario has embarrassing and caricatural aspects. On one side are the dyed-in-the wool defenders of Heidegger such as François Fédier, who, totally invested in the cult of Heidegger’s personality, reject all accusations and deny all evidence; on the other hand are the strenuously dogged, implacable prosecutors, first and foremost Emmanuel Faye, who seems to have made this accusation his life’s mission.
Fédier is a pupil of Jean Beaufret – who had been Heidegger’s most privileged interlocutor from 1946 on, and who had promoted Heidegger’s ideas, especially in the French context. Fédier had responded to Víctor Farías’ book as early as 1987 with a pamphlet, originally intended to bear the title Apology of Heidegger.34 Some time later, in an attempt to refute the scathing indictment by Faye, Fédier gathered around him a group of scholars and published the miscellany Heidegger, à plus forte raison in 2007.35
Faye’s voluminous work was a resounding success not so much with philosophers, but with the media and the general public; it was greeted as a new, definitive victory of light over darkness. The refrain “Heidegger the Nazi” was repeated with zealous constancy on almost every page. Evidence, testimonies, and documents were presented, in a net that was more asphyxiating than stringent, to support the accusation and to demand Heidegger’s incrimination. The dossier appeared to be complete, and Heidegger, “contaminated” by Nazism, seemed incapable of escaping his well-deserved condemnation. What was the sentence? Perpetual proscription: Heidegger’s work “cannot continue to be placed in the philosophy section of libraries.”36 For that matter, Heidegger was not even considered to be a “philosopher” by this group; Faye confessed to have been guided by the “growing conviction of the vital necessity of seeing philosophy free itself from the work of Heidegger.”37 The self-appointed inquisitor Faye therefore proposed that philosophy should proceed to excommunicate Heidegger – is there such a thing as philosophical excommunication? – and that it should admit his definitive demise.
Faye’s oversimplifications, which at times border on the absurd – for example, when he believes that he can make out a swastika in the Heideggerian schema of the Geviert (the fourfold) – can appear to be convincing at first glance. But what is problematic is precisely Faye’s simplistic argument, which, using a well-known formula introduced by Leo Strauss at the beginning of the 1950s, can be called a reductio ad Hitlerum. This is a case of an “erroneous method,” a fallacy, and therefore a variant of a reductio ad absurdum: Heidegger’s thesis is connected to the position of Hitler, the metonymy of evil.38 It is in relation to Heidegger, and to his ideas, that Strauss warns against the use of an ethically reprehensible tactic, which, diverting attention from the argument at hand, whose content goes out of focus, points immediately at condemnation. And in effect, the impression, also on the basis of recent developments, is that Faye, consumed by the impulse to be judge and jury, does not take the philosophical issues very much into consideration.39 Rather, it seems important to re-open the accusation which, this time, could be even more serious: the “introduction of anti-Semitism into philosophy.”40
The question is hermeneutic: Faye takes Heidegger’s great philosophical texts as the encrypted document that testifies to his adherence to Nazism, and, with exegetic zeal, he gives these works a second-class reading, as clever as it is inconsistent, reaching the presumed hidden meaning that, once it has been exposed, purports to be the only true, objective meaning. Obviously, Faye does not accept any other interpretations. This is why his book resembles a prosecuting attorney’s case file. A steadfast Cartesian and an adept of the “subject” and of objectivity, Faye also aims his arrows at Jacques Derrida, who, according to Faye, let himself be “deceived” by Heidegger, contributing, in fact, to spreading his poison.41
The two extreme positions – of Fédier and Faye – have a great deal in common; each aspires to impose the alternative of a pro or con onto a very complex issue. On the one hand, there is the idolized philosopher who seems to have gone through the months of his rectorate at the University of Freiburg undamaged and to have emerged untouched by historical events; on the other hand, Heidegger’s image, but also his philosophy, tainted by Nazism, are criminalized ante litteram.
This kind of “trial,” which still seems to be taking place outside of the French context as well, is crude and unacceptable. What is the point of putting Heidegger on trial? And who would be the plaintiffs? Or is this staged case nothing more than a sleight of hand that seeks to avoid the responsibility of thinking about the real issue?
8 A Calling to Account?
Given that anti-Semitism is at the heart of a commitment to Nazism, and therefore represents a point of no return, the Black Notebooks could provide the pretext for closing the door on Heidegger once and for all. This is the hope – and not even a very secret one – of Heidegger’s old and new accusers, but also of liberal critics, inveterate analysts, and right-thinking people of every sort. The success of Faye’s book has already decreed their revenge. But, on the other hand, hadn’t they already denounced that philosophy? So it seems that the moment has arrived to say a definitive “goodbye, Heidegger.” A mediocre revanchism and a strong reactionary impulse feed the spasmodic desire to discredit Heidegger, banishing him from every democratic country.
It is clear that the final attack on Heidegger would also be a calling to account of that “continental” philosophy which, although it is delimited by a questionable geopolitical adjective, has for quite some time found refuge and new outcomes in North American and South American universities as well as those of other continents. It is no coincidence that Faye’s book was published a year after the death of Derrida, in 2004, during a period when many leading thinkers directly inspired by Heidegger were coming onto the scene. At a close glance, we can see that these represent the most prominent political trends and the most engaged philosophers – Foucault, Lacoue-Labarthe, Derrida, Agamben, to name just a few. Those who violently attack Heidegger aim not least at discrediting and undermining the recent chapter in the history of philosophy – anything but closed – that came out of the intense relationship between conceptual work and revolutionary politics.
But liberating oneself from Heidegger would also mean avoiding the difficult questions that he raised; it would be a return to the landscape of modernity, clarified by light, reassured by faith in progress, by an unlimited faith in science. As if nothing had happened. And as if it were possible to harmonize that late modernity with the current globalized world.
9 From Derrida to Schürmann: Toward an Anarchic Reading
Although the most extreme stances toward Heidegger are those that have caused the greatest stir, the debate among philosophers about Heidegger and Nazism has unfolded in a fragmentary and unorganic way that has therefore drawn less attention. But upon closer examination, there have been almost no exponents of continental philosophy, except for Heidegger’s direct students, who have not made a pronouncement about the issue. To get an overall view, it is helpful to summarize seven different positions and outline them in broad strokes, choosing not the criterion of chronology, but rather that of content.42 Obviously, the distinctions between the various positions are not always clear-cut, and the positions sometimes overlap.
Hannah Arendt inaugurated the first position in her famous 1969 essay “Martin Heidegger at Eighty,” in which she suggested a comparison of Heidegger with Plato and the various voyages that he took to Syracuse. According to Arendt, Heidegger, like Plato, “succumbed to the temptation to change his ‘residence’ and to get involved in the world of human affairs.”43 In this sense, Heidegger is seen as the last of a great line of philosophers – “Plato as Heidegger.”
For that matter, “the attraction to the tyrannical can be demonstrated theoretically in many of the great thinkers.”44 Not without indulgence, Arendt speaks about a “false step,” and proposes a separation between Heidegger the individual and his work.
“Back from Syracuse?” is the title of an article published in 1988 by Hans-Georg Gadamer, who also defended Heidegger, focusing again on the incompetence of philosophers who struggle with politics.45 For Richard Rorty, Heidegger was an “exemplary, gigantic, unforgettable figure,” one of those philosophers who are “at best vapid, and at worst sadistic” when they attempt to say their piece about politics.46
Then there is the position of those who, for various motives, maintain that there should be a separation between politics and philosophy – more complex on account of the implications that derive from them; these are the writers who deny any connection between Heidegger’s philosophy and Nazism. According to this position, Heidegger’s involvement with the National Socialist movement can be circumscribed within the brief period of his rectorate at Freiburg University, where it purportedly originated from a misunderstanding that quickly faded. In effect, this was Heidegger’s own thesis when, shortly after the defeat of the Germans in 1945, he wrote a self-defense that has only recently been published, in which he referred to a “private vision of National Socialism.”47 This thesis is shared by many more followers of Heidegger than one might imagine, and, with different nuances, it also finds an echo in other positions as well.48 In the sense indicated by Heidegger, therefore, the contrast between the ideology of the Nazis and Heidegger’s own views can be seen as even greater, and a sort of opposition – an internal resistance to the ideology of the Nazis – can be seen in his philosophy. This is the interpretive line followed by Otto Pöggeler in numerous essays.49
Situated at the opposite pole is Theodor W. Adorno, for whom Heidegger’s philosophy is “fascist to its innermost cells.”50 For Adorno, any attempt to liberate Heidegger from that fatal involvement would be in vain; rather, he believed that it should be recognized that when Heidegger the philosopher spoke, so did Heidegger the Nazi. This is what first Farías and later Faye have attempted to demonstrate. Paradoxically, for opposite motives, this equating of Heidegger the philosopher and Heidegger the Nazi sympathizer has also been embraced by Ernst Nolte, for whom Heidegger would have “inevitably kept struggling to defend Europe, united around Germany, against the squalid folly of the two giant continental powers,” Bolshevism and Americanism.51
For anyone disposed to admit neither that there was a total concurrence nor that there was a complete separation between Heidegger’s philosophy and Nazism, the interpretive problems multiply with regard not only to his registration in the Nazi party in 1933, but also to the reflections that can be discerned in his work. It is precisely in this context that the place of individual philosophers amid the currents of contemporary thought clearly looms.
For a long time, the prevailing position in Germany was the one espoused by those who saw in Heidegger’s involvement with the Nazi party and the events of the 1930s the fatal result of his farewell to the “subject.” If, in Being and Time, the “responsible self” still retained traces of subjectivity, subsequently – wrote Ernst Tugendhat – the “turn” in Heidegger’s thought, understood as a “radical distancing from the philosophy of ‘subjectivity,’ occurred at the expense of reference to truth and responsibility.”52 A similar criticism was developed by Jürgen Habermas, who, in an article published in 1953, “Mit Heidegger gegen Heidegger denken,” pointed an accusatory finger at the genial but ambiguous reversal of modernity that characterized the turning point in Heidegger’s thinking.53 In Habermas’ view, Heidegger’s early writings are distinguished from those of his Nazi period, which are instead grouped together with his late work. If “in Being and Time, Heidegger does not construct intersubjectivity any differently than Husserl,” his error emerged later in the process of “subject-centered reason.”54 Thus, there was a growing preoccupation with at least saving the twentieth-century masterpiece Being and Time from the accusations that were being leveled against Heidegger and that, especially beginning in the 1980s, threatened to cast a shadow on all of German philosophy.
In this way a selective reading of Heidegger began to be legitimized, outside of Europe as well; this reading made it possible to select – not especially carefully – certain texts rather than others. This approach also had the advantage of making it easy to put a particular spin on the “error” of Heidegger’s political involvement. If this position often remains implicit, it has, however, at times, been made explicit. George Steiner, emphasizing the indomitable contradictoriness of Heidegger’s work, advocates a free approach to reading Heidegger.55
But the demand of those who, albeit with differing motivations, insist upon an internal connection, is just the opposite. According to this view, Being and Time has a strong continuity with Heidegger’s subsequent writings, and cannot be considered separately from his political commitment. As Tom Rockmore observes, “It is a matter of record that Heidegger, the philosopher of Being, did turn to Nazi politics.”56 But this more integral (or integralistic?) approach comes up against many difficulties, not the least of which is the choice of the criterion that permits a unitary reading of Heidegger’s works. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, for example, identify this as a “radical criticism of modernity.”57
A seventh position is the one around which a great deal of continental philosophy in its different trends has clustered. Without straightening out the twists and turns in Heidegger’s thinking, this position attempts to maintain a thread of continuity between Being and Time, Heidegger’s writings of the 1930s, and his last phase. In this view, Heidegger’s political commitment cannot be placed in parentheses, because it is strictly linked to his philosophy. And there’s more: according to this seventh position, Nazism can be understood only through Heidegger. This is the thesis put forward by Lacoue-Labarthe in 1987.58 Philosophers like these gave a new reading to Heidegger’s Letter on “Humanism,” and examined with growing interest his essay “The Question Concerning Technology.”59 It was time to reflect on “what happened,” as Lyotard wrote in his farsighted 1988 book Heidegger and the “Jews.”60 Derrida opened a new interpretive path, and, in his book Of Spirit, first published in French in 1987, he deconstructed Heidegger’s philosophy, pointing out its metaphysical residue.61 Unlike Habermas, and those who see the cause of Heidegger’s drift toward Nazism in his abandonment of the subject, Derrida finds in the remnants of that metaphysical “subject” a limit, a destruction that was never fully carried out.
Heidegger wasn’t sufficiently radical for the more recent exponents of continental philosophy. And, in a reversal, they proposed the possibility of reading him backward: beginning, so to speak, at the end – Heidegger’s last writings – in order to destroy the arché – the beginning, or the mirage of the beginning. This is the anarchical reading followed by Reiner Schürmann. If one begins with Being and Time, Heidegger’s early writings become “the framework that his political speeches would only have had to fill out as rallying cries to a leader capable of walking alone and resorting to violence.”62 When read in reverse order, Heidegger appears in a different light. “The hermeneutic dilemma” – Schürmann observes – “is noteworthy here.” Those who proceed from the beginning impose an idealized unity on Heidegger’s works. For those who take the backwards route, the topology of Heidegger’s work is presented within a plural scope.
Instead of a unitary concept of ground, we then have the “fourfold”; instead of praise for the firm will, detachment; instead of the integration of the university into the civil service, protests against technology and cybernetics; instead of a straightforward identification between Führer and right, anarchy.63
10 Taming Heidegger
The publication of the Black Notebooks again brings up, in a more acute form, the interpretive problems that had already emerged in the past. The volumes published in German as of this writing date from the 1930s and 1940s – precisely the period that some people would like to put between parentheses, but that instead is enriched and deepened with the release of these writings. Certainly, it would be simpler and more reassuring to pass directly from Being and Time to the Conversation on a Country Path about Thinking. This would, among other things, make it possible to return, without too many traumas, to the Heidegger of phenomenology and his studies of the pre-Socratic philosophers and Aristotle. When the various phases of Heidegger’s thinking multiply – no longer are there only three phases, with the turning point in his thinking seen as a sort of caesura, but perhaps four phases – some writers are tempted to break the thread of continuity.64
The attempt to fragment Heidegger’s work and to legitimize a partial usage of it is the way that is most in vogue today for “taming” Heidegger and making of him an innocuous phenomenologist. What is at stake is no longer only Being and Time. According to this view, given that Heidegger’s philosophically irrelevant political error is not circumscribed within a brief extemporaneous text on the autonomy of the university, but rather is claimed by the author in more than 1,000 pages, there remains nothing but to save Heidegger from himself, disparaging and obfuscating not only the Black Notebooks, but also all of Heidegger’s production from that period. What is really disturbing is the Heidegger of the 1930s.
