Second thoughts on Gedachtes Wohnen

Abstract

Troy Paddock’s paper recapitulates the well-known association of Martin Heidegger with National Socialism and further argues that this association extended to the Nazis’ racial imperialism. Surprisingly, Paddock does not include what is perhaps most pertinent to his point: namely, Heidegger’s inclusion in his 1953 publication of the Introduction to Metaphysics, and again in a Der Spiegel interview in the 1960s, of allusions to “the inner truth and greatness of this movement,” that is, National Socialism. The former would have come at the very time that Heidegger was writing the semi-mystical cultural anti-capitalist romanticism that is the core of the author’s discussion. The Introduction to Metaphysics appeared in German in 1953, though Heidegger had compiled most of it by 1935. “Bauen, Wohnen, Denken,” the essay which is central to the author’s argument, was delivered as a lecture in Darmstädt in 1952. Heidegger was, then, a more or less unrepentant “old Nazi” at the time he composed “Bauen, Wohnen, Denken.” The temptation to oversimplify the case is great, all the more so since Heidegger has achieved the status of guru among some who can brook no criticism of his holy name. However, it does no harm to point out, in Heidegger’s defense, that he also showed genuine anguish in his confrontation with National Socialism. There just never seems to have been enough to call true repentance, and there was certainly no repudiation. Any attempt, such as Paddock’s, to clarify the connections between Martin Heidegger and other thinkers in the ambit of the National Socialist intelligentsia should therefore be welcomed. Tying Heidegger to Nazi geographers like Friedrich Ratzel, the subject of this essay, would be a highly original contribution to intellectual history. On the other hand, to my lights, very little connects Heidegger to Ratzel’s geography other than a homology of thought or what is more or less a shared “notion.” Paddock might have added a bit of background on the community of geographers within which Ratzel worked. For example, Götz Aly and Suzanne Heim’s Vordenker der Vernichtung contains much information on influential German geographers like Walter Christaller, who influenced post-war geography as well as Nazi racial imperialism. Providing more than an apposition of Ratzel’s or any Nazi era geographers’ thought and