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NOTES AND DISCUSSION

MY OWN PRIVATE SWABIA. ON THE IDIOCY OF HEIDEGGER’S NATIONALISM Robert Savage

The following reflections were stimulated by James Phillips’s Heidegger’s Volk. Between National Socialism and Poetry (Stanford University Press, 2005)

In April 1933, Martin Heidegger was elected unopposed to the rectorship of Freiburg University. Given the events that were to follow, and the seemingly endless debate they have occasioned on the relationship between Heidegger’s thought and his politics, it is worth revisiting his own account of the decision-making process that culminated in his election. Trying to put the best spin on the whole sorry affair some 12 years later, Heidegger maintained that even on the morning of the election, he still held grave doubts about his fitness for the task and had wanted to withdraw his candidature. He was not a member of the Party, had no connections to government, and had never before dabbled in politics. Only at ‘the urging of many colleagues, in particular the deposed rector von Möllendorff’ (Heidegger, 2000a: 374), did he relent, swayed by their argument that if he were to pull out, the Nazis would move to impose a far less suitable candidate of their own. The decision to nominate for the rectorship was thus not the expression of a will to power. On the contrary, at the time Heidegger still entertained the hope that, as leader of the university, he might be able to contribute to an ‘overcoming of the metaphysics of the will to power’ that held the West in its thrall, before belatedly coming to the realization that the German revolution whose course he had sought to influence was but the latest manifestation of that metaphysics (Heidegger, 2000a: 376). Thesis Eleven, Number 87, November 2006: 112–121 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi) Copyright © 2006 SAGE Publications and Thesis Eleven Co-op Ltd DOI: 10.1177/0725513606068780

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A few months later, Heidegger made another momentous, albeit far less controversial decision, this time to turn down the second offer of a prestigious professorship at Humboldt University in Berlin, perhaps the highest recognition the state could bestow upon his work. In effect, Heidegger was declaring his intention to stick out the remainder of his career in provincial Freiburg, which he felt offered him a more congenial working environment than the big city. Again, Heidegger composed a written account of the process by which he arrived at the decision. In an article initially broadcast on Berlin radio, and subsequently printed in the local Nazi Party news organ, Heidegger relates how, upon receiving the offer, he retired to his hut in the countryside to ponder his response: I hear what the mountains and the forests and the farmyards have to say. I go up to see my old friend, a 75-year-old peasant. He has read about the call to Berlin in the papers. What will he say? He slowly fixes the unwavering gaze of his clear eyes on mine, holds his mouth tightly shut, carefully lays his faithful hand on my shoulder and – almost imperceptibly shakes his head. That is to say: implacably No! (Heidegger, 1983: 12–13)

Adorno would spend the best part of a lecture poking fun at this passage, and it is not hard to see why he found its glorification of rural backwardness, its ‘laudatio to the simple, rustic life’, both nauseatingly kitschy and ideologically suspect (Adorno, 1973: 152). Clearly, taciturn hillbillies can be relied on to give better advice than smooth-talking university professors, for there is no doubt in Heidegger’s mind that his No to Berlin, unlike his Yes to the rectorship, was the right choice, nor that he has glossed the peasant’s tremulous gesture correctly – perhaps because it confirms what he has already been told by the ‘voice of the friend’ which, according to Being and Time, every Dasein carries in its ear (Heidegger, 1977: 217). In both cases, the decision seems to have been taken out of his hands by those around him, requiring only his consent to what is presented to him as a fait accompli. But two very different kinds of idiocy are involved here, which I am tempted to classify according to the well-worn Heideggerian schema of the ‘authentic’ and the ‘inauthentic’. On the one hand, there is what Heidegger privately referred to as ‘the greatest stupidity’ of his life, a failure to speak up at a critical moment that severely compromised his personal and philosophical integrity, earned him a ban on teaching in the immediate aftermath of the war, and was eventually to spawn a minor academic industry. On the other, there is the eloquent idiocy that derives from ‘a centuries-old, irreplaceable Alemannian-Swabian rootedness in the soil’, an unspoken and unspeakable attunement to one’s native land and its people which city folk, mired in ‘chatter’, tend to mistake for slow-witted reticence (Heidegger, 1983: 11). The task that confronts any serious investigation of Heidegger’s politics is to explain how these idiocies relate to one another.

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We can readily discern, behind the features of Heidegger’s peasant, the animating presence of Socrates’ daimon, who likewise intervenes only to prevent the philosopher from embarking upon a foolhardy course of action. In Republic 496c, Socrates credits his daimon with having deterred him from throwing himself into the hurly-burly of political life: ‘Weighing all these considerations [the philosopher] holds his peace and does his own work, like a man in a storm sheltering behind a wall from the driving wind of dust and hail.’ Why then did Heidegger’s daimon, which was to stand him in such good stead just a few months after the election, desert him at the moment when he was most sorely needed? When Heidegger, quoting from a little further on in the Republic, declares at the end of the rectorial address that ‘All that is great stands in the storm’ (497d), he suggests that the calculated recklessness with which the philosopher abandons his shelter – a recklessness which may appear idiotic in retrospect – forms the precondition for his entry into the realm of the decision. Precisely the fact that this is, as James Phillips notes, an ‘infamously inaccurate translation’ on Heidegger’s part (Phillips, 2005: 132), one which interpolates the storm into a Greek passage which speaks only of what is at risk (tá . . . megála pánta episphale), gives occasion for reading it as a defiant and pointed response to Socrates’ own refusal to commit himself to the tumult of the polis. Fools rush in where daimons fear to tread; sure enough, Heidegger was to hand in his resignation after barely a year in the job, disillusioned by the movement’s failure to live up to its ‘inner truth and grandeur’. But would he have acted any differently had his old friend been available for consultation on the morning of his election? And would the peasant, when he read about the election in the papers the following day, have shaken his head in approval or disbelief? THE VOLK RISES Such questions take us to the heart(land) of Heidegger’s Volk, the subject of Phillips’s masterly study. Volk is a difficult word to translate into English, and Phillips sensibly chooses to leave it in the original. The Australian Aboriginal term ‘mob’, used to designate an extended family network or community, comes close; it shares with Volk connotations of homeliness and belonging, along with a degree of abstraction from one’s immediate kith and kin. Yet the mobility from which the mob takes its name is inappropriate to Heidegger’s Volk, which ventures abroad only for the sake of returning to its cherished homeland – this the ‘law of becoming homely’ parsed in several of the wartime lectures. The village elder is obviously one of Heidegger’s mob, as is Hölderlin, the poet to whom he would turn after his resignation from the rectorship, while Heidegger himself is its self-appointed spokesperson, a kind of Swabian philosopher for indigenous affairs. Hitler, on the other hand, is not one of the mob, although for a time,

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blinded by his quixotic scheme to ‘lead the leader’ or swabianize Berlin, Heidegger thought that he might be. Phillips stresses that the notion of Volk which dawns in §74 of Being and Time and reaches its zenith in the speeches and lectures held under the Third Reich, before evanescing in the crepuscular gloom of the late Trakl interpretations, withdraws from the understanding of Being as presence with which Heidegger reproaches the entire Western metaphysical tradition. Just like the peasant who is its spirit incarnate, the Volk is always already lost for words, unable to speak for itself because it is never at one with itself in the first place; not so much a cohesive ethnic unit whose expansive tendencies are held in check by lines on a map as the abyssal ground which imparts to the world that lived-in thickness which makes it ever our world, the world of an historical people. An important corollary is that, for Heidegger, the German Volk is not characterized by any identifiable properties that could be used to distinguish it from other Völker, least of all by a putative preponderance of blond hair and blue eyes. His nationalism, if such it may be termed, is thus ‘irreconcilable with the biologism of National Socialism’, concerned as it was with ‘the preservation of breeding lines in the ahistorical manipulation of genetic material’ (Phillips, 2005: 15, 3). For Heidegger, what is special about the German Volk, and what the Nazi regime betrayed through its covertly ‘liberal’ conceptualization of that Volk as a mass of individuals to be brought into line and marshalled for combat by a triumphant will, is the impossibility of its being represented in any forum where its notional attributes could be put on show, respected, defended, or murderously enforced. The incessant movement of selfdetermination by which the Volk poses itself as a question – a question that can never be disentangled from its answer – tolerates no such artificial constraints. That is why, even after falling out with the regime, Heidegger applauded Germany’s withdrawal from the ‘sham community’ of the League of Nations (Heidegger, 2000a: 333). Indeed, he was quick to condemn any institutional delimitation of what it means to be German, regardless of its democratic legitimacy, for feigning to drag the Volk from out of the concealment that is proper to it. ‘The nationalism to which Heidegger could be read as exhorting the people of the centre’, Phillips writes, is ‘less the assertion of a given people’s distinct identity among the distinct identities of neighboring peoples than the assertion of the nonuniversality of a people against global anonymity’ (Phillips, 2005: 32). It is thus hardly fortuitous that Heidegger’s peasant, as the truest ‘representative’ of his people, failed to turn up at the very moment when Heidegger took it upon himself to speak in that people’s name. Not just the frailty of a septuagenarian, but the essential inconspicuousness for which he stands as cipher would, one suspects, have prevented him from marching alongside SA troops in one of the torchlit processions held throughout the Reich to celebrate the rising of the Volk. By making an ontological virtue of the political immaturity which had for

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so long kept Germany, the ‘delayed nation’ (Plessner), from enjoying its place in the sun, Heidegger set himself at odds with the regime which sought from the beginning to annex that place for the master race; to that extent, one may argue for the incompatibility of the philosopher’s ‘private National Socialism’ with Party doctrine (Phillips, 2005: 99). Yet before we jump to the conclusion that Heidegger’s daimon should have prevented him from putting his name forward for the rectorship – a conclusion that would force us to dismiss Heidegger’s engagement for National Socialism as an (in)excusable inconsistency or error of judgment on the part of a thinker who ought to have known better – we would do well to consider the highly idiosyncratic understanding of the daimonic that informs Heidegger’s telling of the anecdote. The topic receives its fullest treatment in the 1942/3 lecture series on Parmenides, where it is reproduced in German as the uncanny (or the monstrously unfamiliar: das Un-geheure). The daimonic, for Heidegger, names the intrusive shining into the accustomed realm of beings of that which pertains to Being as such. A daimonic gaze – the unwavering gaze of the peasant, for example – is one which silently and attentively gazes into its own ‘appurtenance to Being’ (Heidegger, 1992: 114). ‘The Socratic-Platonic talk of the daimónion as an inner voice’, Heidegger explains, ‘signifies only that its attuning and determining do not come from the outside, i.e., from some being at hand, but from invisible and ungraspable Being itself, which is closer to man than any obtrusive manipulable being’ (Heidegger, 1992: 117). Accordingly, the daimon who counsels Heidegger to remain in the provinces is not in the first instance to be construed in the customary sense of the term, as a divine signal which flashes up in warning whenever the philosopher seems likely to make a faux pas. Rather, he is an ambassador of ‘Being itself’, and the setting of their meeting is a daimónios tópos, that is, ‘a “where” in whose squares and alleys the uncanny shines explicitly and the essence of Being comes to presence in an eminent sense’ (Heidegger, 1992: 117): the AlemannianSwabian homeland. The peasant, it will be recalled, did not need to be told of Heidegger’s call to Berlin because he had already read about it in the newspaper. This, his sole concession to modernity, seems to situate him in the fallen world of everydayness against which he was invoked in the first place. ‘One’ reads the newspapers, one reads Being and Time, and that is enough to condemn the ones who read them to inauthenticity (Heidegger, 1977: 169). Crucially, however, the site of the peasant’s reading is not the locus communis occupied by the masses, a featureless terrain flattened out by cartographers to render it always and everywhere the same, but the daimónios tópos of the people of Being, the ‘creative landscape’ to which professor and peasant co-respond through their wordless agreement. The ‘initially rhetorical calls for self-sacrifice’ proclaimed by the Nazis were accepted by Heidegger at face value, indeed eagerly reaffirmed, because he recognized in them a

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promise to lead the Germans into that singular idiocy where they would be sealed off from the commonplaces so thoughtlessly exchanged and interchanged by other peoples (Phillips, 2005: 55). In his own mind, then, Heidegger remained faithful to his spiritus rector even and especially as he was aspiring to the rectorship of the German spirit. His No to the (metro)polis entailed the Yes to Hitler; it did not preclude it. The ‘greatest stupidity’ of his life, however much he may have rued it in later years and however far removed it may appear from the peasant’s unfathomable wisdom, still attained a measure of greatness unequalled by both the criminal foolishness of those to whom he pledged his allegiance and the average intelligence of those who stayed under cover while waiting for the storm to pass. Heidegger’s two decisions from 1933 demonstrate precisely the indistinction of idiocy and stupidity in his thinking of the mission of the German Volk. THE VOLK FALLS Heidegger’s Volk disappears after the war. It goes to ground in much the same way that a people intimately familiar with the lie of the land can sometimes vanish before an advancing army, leaving the baffled soldiers to poke about in the empty huts. Shirking a pitched battle with the enemy, the unbridled technocratic rationalism assumed to have seized possession of the entire planet since the stillbirth of the German resistance movement known as National Socialism, Heidegger’s Volk falls back to its remote hideaways and impenetrable dingles, there to await the god who will bring salvation. Having asserted itself with such forcefulness in 1933, it is henceforth nowhere to be seen – which is not to say that it has been eradicated altogether. Rather, it has fallen under the self-imposed prohibition on patriotic speech pronounced by Hölderlin in one of his late fragments: ‘Of the Most High I will keep silent.’ Heidegger had first quoted this interdiction soon after resigning from the rectorship; only now, with the rhetoric of Volk and Vaterland grown filthy from years of officially sanctioned abuse, is he prepared to take it at its word. In the final chapter of his book, Phillips shows how the Volk mutates, almost beyond recognition, into the Geschlecht (race, gender, family) of the Trakl interpretations of the 1950s. It was to emerge from its seclusion on a single further occasion, during an interview with Der Spiegel whose publication was, at Heidegger’s insistence, held back until after his death. ‘Do you accord the Germans a special role?’ he was asked. His answer was succinct: ‘Yes, in this sense: in conversation with Hölderlin’ (Heidegger, 2000a: 679). With the help of the extant documents, we can reconstruct the process by which the Volk sank into its postwar oblivion, and so get a better sense of what this conversation between people and poet might entail. The process gets underway in a dialogue whose final words were penned, as Heidegger

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notes at the bottom of the manuscript, ‘on the day the world [sic] celebrated its victory and did not realise that it has for centuries been the vanquished of its own rebellion’ (Heidegger, 1995: 249). This dialogue, conducted between two German inmates of a Russian prisoner of war camp, recapitulates much of what Heidegger had said and thought about the Germans’ collective Dasein since his resignation. The poets and thinkers are ‘those who wait in the most noble manner’, and ‘insofar as we become those who wait, we first become Germans’; the Germans, that is to say, are originally and futurally the people of poets and thinkers. This Volk, the prisoners add, is also the most endangered, ‘not through threats from outside’, but since it ‘tyrannised itself with its own unknowing impatience’ in the belief that ‘it had to wrest recognition from other peoples’, whereas in fact – and here Heidegger adapts to the national calamity of 1945 the tirade against Ausländerei launched by Fichte after the national calamity of 1806 – ‘this overhasty sham essence remains only the eternally clumsy imitation of the foreign’. Trapped in a bad mimesis, the Germans succumbed to foreign influences and paid insufficient attention to their own historical essence. By identifying the Nazi dictatorship with a slavish devotion to un-German ways of thinking, Heidegger posits an original and uncontaminated Germanness still to be recuperated from the global malaise of which the dictatorship was merely symptomatic. Accordingly, Heidegger’s faith in the Volk’s unfulfilled mission remains as strong as ever, and he sees the steadfast pursuit of that mission as offering the only way out of the current misery: ‘And this quite unusable people would have to become the oldest people, since no-one would care about it and exploit its strange activity, which is a letting-be, and thereby misuse it and prematurely use it up’. The lesson Heidegger draws from the war is as logical as it is astonishing. If the Germans had previously aped foreign manners in their impatient push for recognition, it is now (1945!) Germany’s turn to teach the foreigners a thing or two: ‘That is why we must learn to know the necessity of what is unnecessary and teach it, as learners, to the peoples’ (Heidegger, 1995: 232–7). By the time Heidegger came to write his next dialogue, ‘The Occidental Conversation’ (1946–8), the Volk had been quietly expunged from his philosophical vocabulary. The upper Danube valley, which Norbert von Hellingrath had called ‘the most German of landscapes’ (Hellingrath, 1936: 135), sets the scene for a discussion of the poet Heidegger had called ‘the most German of the Germans’ (Heidegger, 2000a: 333), yet the interlocutors avoid all talk of things German, as if skirting a taboo topic. The balmy late summer haze that wreathes the countryside through which they walk appears likewise to shroud their memory of the recent past, for the dialogue, unlike its predecessor, shows no trace of the geopolitical or historical circumstances under which it was written. Instead, the conversationalists give themselves over to a lyrical, apparently timeless meditation on the beauty of the river sung forth by Hölderlin, such that their measured pacing reconfigures

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and piously re-enacts the hermeneutic process held fast in the dialogue form itself: ‘How beautifully it dwells we learn . . . by walking along its bank and following it’ (Heidegger, 2000b: 177). The meaning of this silence with regard to the shared ground of their conversation may be inferred from the revised conception of German manifest destiny spelled out at the end of the previous dialogue. If no-one is to ‘care about’ the German Volk, if no-one is to ‘use it up’ as it was used up under the last regime, then it must efface itself for the sake of its eventual self-realization. By the end of the dialogue, the veil has already descended. The fact that the entire world – not: the rest of the world – believes it has won the war does not imply that Germany, too, has surreptitiously joined the victory party, but that it has slipped off the map into the shadowy utopia where it will remain, virtually undisturbed, for the rest of Heidegger’s life. In the valley of the upper Danube, Heidegger executes the escape plan he had hatched in the Russian POW camp: that Germany anonymously become the teacher of the peoples. These dialogues show Heidegger trying to establish a safe distance between the conditions of his thinking about the German Volk and the concurrent breakdown of the German nation-state, a distance that, in allowing him, Cassandra-like, to expose the hollowness of the free world’s triumph, helps to relieve some of the anguish of German defeat. Heidegger focuses upon this second, more optimistic consequence of his diagnosis of the age in a letter to Rudolf Stadelmann from 20 July 1945. ‘Everyone now thinks of downfall [Untergang]’, he observes, continuing: ‘We Germans cannot go under [untergehen] because we have not yet even gone up [aufgegangen] and must first see through the night’ (Heidegger, 2000a: 371). While Heidegger’s claim that the Volk’s rise and fall still stand before it may appear perverse, the thinking behind it is entirely consistent with his earlier positions. Just as the rapid ascent and belligerent territorial expansion of the Third Reich should not be confused with the advent of the true Germany – Hölderlin’s Germany – so its disintegration, unforgettably metonymized in the images of the capital city reduced to rubble, need not foster the mood of apocalyptic despair that was endemic at the time. In Heidegger’s account, the victims of the war fall silently into the cracks that open up between the centuries-old rebellion of the West and the indefinitely postponed dawning of the hidden Germany. What is needed, and what the Allied conquest and occupation of Germany could never deliver, is the authentic Untergang to be ushered in by Hölderlin, the no longer metaphysical poet, in partnership with Heidegger, the no longer metaphysical thinker. Two months later, Heidegger reveals to Stadelmann his conviction ‘that the Occidental spirit will awaken from out of our Swabian land’ (Heidegger, 2000a: 396). While ‘The Occidental Conversation’ does not fall under the purview of Phillips’s study, its narrative strategy is aptly summarized in one of the book’s most astute and beautifully observed passages. Phillips writes:

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‘Romanticism was never far removed from the art of the saboteur. Into the smooth space of a Europe that revolutionary imperialism first created before sweeping across it in conquest, the Romantics injected a fatherland inaccessible beneath its garbage. Germany thereby reasserted itself in its barbaric specificity, in the idiocy by which the classical world named that which is inviolably and unenviably one’s own. Ahead of the invading armies, the Romantics depopulated the countryside and the people that vanished left behind only the intractable and indigestible fragments of its superstitions. Ludwig Tieck’s Märchen are not dissimilar in purpose to the burning of Moscow’ (Phillips, 2005: 27–8). ‘The Occidental Conversation’, which is not dissimilar in purpose to Hitler’s command that the Volk go down with him, places itself squarely in this tradition. Rather than revise his one-sided philosophy of history to accommodate the lessons of the war, Heidegger takes his leave of history altogether. The Swabian landscape he so lovingly conjures up is a sterilized and depopulated fiction, a bunker disguised as a paradise. The war disappears into this unblemished, virginal landscape as though it had never happened. There is no room here for the hundreds of thousands of displaced persons who were trudging across German territory at the time in search of a new home, nor for the millions of dead and those who mourned them. Instead, the conversation with Hölderlin in which Heidegger invites the German Volk to participate provides an exit from history onto a virtual homeland where nothing ever happens. Stranded by the outcome of events he had hoped to steer, Heidegger was left to repeat a single, plaintive mantra to anyone willing to listen: read in reverence, dwell in beauty, wait in hope. As the Volk speeded past on the autobahn to European integration, ‘economic miracle’ and reunification, the philosopher wandered ever deeper into his own private Swabia in pursuit of the fugitive ‘hints’ and ‘signs’ of the gods, formulating his insights in an idiolect few could comprehend, until he finally joined his peasant friend at that uncanny place where words failed him.

Robert Savage works in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University. For Thesis Eleven (2004: 78), he has also written the review essay ‘Adorno’s Family and Other Animals’. [email: [email protected]. edu.au]

References Adorno, Theodor W. (1973) Philosophische Terminologie. Band 1. Frankfurt/M: Suhrkamp. Heidegger, Martin (1977) Sein und Zeit (= GA 2). Frankfurt/M: Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin (1983) Aus der Erfahrung des Denkens 1910–1976 (= GA 13). Frankfurt/M: Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin (1995) Feldweg-Gespräche (= GA 77). Frankfurt/M: Klostermann.

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Heidegger, Martin (1992) Parmenides (trans. André Schuwer and Richard Rojcewicz). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heidegger, Martin (2000a) Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges (= GA 16). Frankfurt/M: Klostermann. Heidegger, Martin (2000b) Zu Hölderlin. Griechenlandreisen (= GA 75). Frankfurt/M: Klostermann. Hellingrath, Norbert von (1936) Hölderlin-Vermächtnis (ed. Ludwig von Pigenot). Munich: Bruckmann. Phillips, James (2005) Heidegger’s Volk. Between National Socialism and Poetry. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.