Heidegger's rectorate at the University of Freiburg , where Heidegger was
Rector from April 21, 1933, to April 23, 1934
Adolf Hitler was sworn in as
Chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. Heidegger was elected
rector of the
University of Freiburg on April 21, 1933, on the recommendation of his predecessor von Möllendorff, who was forced to give up his position because he had refused to display an anti-Jewish poster, and assumed the position the following day. He joined the "National Socialist German Workers' Party" ten days later, on May 1 (significantly the international day of workers' solidarity: Heidegger said after the war he supported the social more than the national). He co-signed a public telegram sent by Nazi rectors to Hitler on May 20, 1933. In Germany, the atmosphere of those days has been described by
Sebastian Haffner, who experienced it himself, as "a widespread feeling of deliverance, of liberation from
democracy."
Rüdiger Safranski explains: This sense of relief at the demise of democracy was shared not only by the enemies of the republic. Most of its supporters, too, no longer credited it with the strength to master the crisis. It was as if a paralyzing weight had been lifted. Something genuinely new seemed to be beginning — a people's rule without political parties, with a leader of whom it was hoped that he would unite Germany once more internally and make her self-assured externally. [...] Hitler's "Peace Speech" of May 17, 1933, when he declared that "boundless love and loyalty to one's own nation" included "respect" for the national rights of other nations, had its effect. The London
Times observed that Hitler had "indeed spoken for a united Germany." Even among the Jewish population — despite the boycott of Jewish businesses on April 1 and the dismissal of Jewish public employees after April 7 — there was a good deal of enthusiastic support for the "National revolution". Georg Picht recalls that
Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy, in a lecture in March 1933, declared that the National Socialist revolution was an attempt by the Germans to realize
Hölderlin's dream. [...] in actual fact Heidegger, during that first year, was bewitched by Hitler.
Jaspers noted about his last meeting with him in May 1933: "It's just like 1914, again this deceptive mass intoxication." During his time as rector, Heidegger, like his predecessor, refused to display the anti-Jewish poster. He argued after the war that he joined the Party to avoid dismissal, and he forbade the planned book-burning that was scheduled to take place in front of the main University building. Nevertheless, according to Victor Farias, Hugo Ott, and Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger implemented the
Gleichschaltung totalitarian policy, suppressing all opposition to the government. Faye [pp. 40–46] details precisely Heidegger's actions in implementing anti-Semitic legislation within Freiburg University. Along with Ernst Krieck and
Alfred Baeumler, Heidegger spearheaded the
Conservative Revolution promoted (in the beginning) by the Nazis. Young quotes the testimony of a former student,
Georg Picht: The way Heidegger conceived of the revival of the university, this became clear to me on the occasion of a memorable event. To give the first lecture within the framework of "political education" a compulsory measure introduced at the universities by the Nazis [...] – Heidegger, rector at that time, invited my mother's brother in law,
Viktor von Weizsäcker. Everyone was puzzled, because it was well-known that Weizsäcker was no Nazi. But Heidegger's word was law. The student he had chosen to lead the philosophy department thought he should pronounce introductory words on national socialist revolution. Heidegger soon manifested signs of impatience, then he shouted with a loud voice that irritation strained: "this jabber will stop immediately!" Totally prostrated, the student disappeared from the tribune. He had to resign from office. As for Victor von Weizsäcker, he gave a perfect lecture on his philosophy of medicine, in which national socialism was not once mentioned, but far rather
Sigmund Freud. Picht recalls his uncle Weizsäcker told him afterwards about Heidegger's political engagement: I'm pretty sure it's a misunderstandingsuch a thing happens often in history of philosophy. But Heidegger is a step ahead: he perceives something is going on that the others don't. Heidegger's tenure as rector was fraught with difficulties. He was in conflict with Nazi students, intellectuals, and bureaucrats. Philosophical historian
Hans Sluga wrote: Though as rector he prevented students from displaying an anti-Semitic poster at the entrance to the university and from holding a book burning, he kept in close contact with the Nazi student leaders and clearly signaled to them his sympathy with their activism. Some Nazi education officials viewed also him as a rival, while others saw his efforts as comical. His most risible initiative was the creation of a
Wissenschaftslager or Scholar's camp, seriously described by Rockmore as a "reeducation camp", but by Safranski as rather a "mixture of scout camp and Platonic academy", actually "to build campfires, share food, have conversation, sing along with guitar... with people who were really a little beyond Cub Scout age". Safranski tells how a dispute occurred with a group of SA students and their military spirit. Some of Heidegger's fellow Nazis also ridiculed his philosophical writings as gibberish. He finally offered his resignation on April 23, 1934, and it was accepted on April 27. Heidegger remained a member of both the academic faculty and of the Nazi Party until the end of the war, but took no part in Party meetings. In 1944, he didn't even have the right to teach anymore, was considered a "completely dispensable" teacher, and was ordered up the Rhine to build fortifications, then drafted into the
Volkssturm national militia, "the oldest member of the faculty to be called up". In 1945 Heidegger wrote of his term as rector, giving the writing to his son Hermann; it was published in 1983: The rectorate was an attempt to see something in the movement that had come to power, beyond all its failings and crudeness, that was much more far-reaching and that could perhaps one day bring a concentration on the Germans' Western historical essence. It will in no way be denied that at the time I believed in such possibilities and for that reason renounced the actual vocation of thinking in favor of being effective in an official capacity. In no way will what was caused by my own inadequacy in office be played down. But these points of view do not capture what is essential and what moved me to accept the rectorate.
Inaugural address Heidegger's inaugural address as rector of Freiburg, the "Rektoratsrede", was entitled "The Self-Assertion of the German University" ("Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universität"). This speech has become notorious as a visible endorsement of Nazism by Heidegger, giving the blessing of his philosophy to the new political party. However, philosopher Jacques Taminiaux writes that "it is to admit that the rectorate speech do[es] not tally at all with the Nazi ideology", and Eduard Langwald calls it even a "challenge to Hitlerism" or an "anti-Mein-Kampf-address", for Heidegger refers to Plato instead of Hitler (who is not mentioned) and, above all, puts limits on the Nazi leader-principle (
Führerprinzip): All leading must concede its following its own strength. All following, however, bears resistance in itself. This essential opposition of leading and following must not be blurred let alone eliminated. In this speech, Heidegger declared that "science must become the power that shapes the body of the German university." But by "science" he meant "the primordial and full essence of science", which he defined as "engaged knowledge about the people and about the destiny of the state that keeps itself in readiness [...] at one with the spiritual mission." For instance, Austrian-born Israeli philosopher
Martin Buber said in 1911: "Blood is the deepest power stratum of the soul" (
Three addresses on Judaism). In 1936, anti-fascist poet
Antonin Artaud wrote that "Any true culture is based on race and blood." The 1933–34 lecture course "On the Essence of Truth": There is much talk nowadays of blood and soil as frequently invoked powers. Literati, whom one comes across even today, have already seized hold of them. Blood and soil are certainly powerful and necessary, but they are not a sufficient condition for the
Dasein of a people. Heidegger's concept of a people is "historical" and not only biological as in
Alfred Rosenberg, the Nazi Party's chief racial theorist. In his 1941–42 lecture course on Hölderlin's poem "Andenken", Heidegger contends that a people finding itself only in skull measurements and archaeological digs is unable to find itself as a people. The rectorate speech ended with calls for the German people to "will itself" and "fulfill its historical mission":
Denounced or demoted non-Nazis According to Farias and Ott, Heidegger also denounced or demoted three colleagues for being insufficiently committed to the Nazi cause. But this has been disputed by Eduard Langwald, who considers "Heidegger was never a Nazi-minded informer". According to Hugo Ott, Heidegger leaked information on September 29, 1933 to the local minister of education that the chemist
Hermann Staudinger had been a pacifist during World War I. Staudinger was a professor of chemistry at Freiburg, and had developed the theory that
polymers were long chain molecule, a theory confirmed by later work and for which Staudinger received the Nobel Prize in 1953. Heidegger knew that the allegation of pacifism could cost Staudinger his job. The Gestapo investigated the matter and confirmed Heidegger's tip. Asked for his recommendation as rector of the university, Heidegger secretly urged the ministry to fire Staudinger without a pension. and asserts Ott did not interpret the facts properly. After Hitler's "Peace Speech" of May 17, 1933, Heidegger more likely wanted to test Staudinger, because as a chemist his researches could become dangerous. Safranski, although he charges Heidegger, recognizes: "It is likely that Heidegger [...] may not even have viewed his action as a denunciation. He felt he was a part of the revolutionary movement, and it was his intention to keep opportunists away from the revolutionary awakening. They were not to be allowed to sneak into the movement and use it to their advantage." Heidegger in the same spirit denounced his former friend Eduard Baumgarten in a letter to the head of the organization of Nazi professors at the
University of Göttingen, where Baumgarten had been teaching. He intervened as Baumgarten applied for membership in the SA brownshirts and in the National Socialist Dozentenschaft. In the letter, Heidegger called Baumgarten "anything but a National-Socialist" and underlined his links to "the Heidelberg circle of liberal-democratic intellectuals around
Max Weber." But he failed and the opportunistic Baumgarten continued in his career – with the help of the Party. Langwald thinks Heidegger considered Baumgarten as a dangerous pragmatist who could give philosophical weapons to the NS-ideologie. The Catholic intellectual
Max Müller was a member of the inner circle of Heidegger's most gifted students from 1928 to 1933. But Müller stopped attending Heidegger's lectures when Heidegger joined the Nazi party in May 1933. Seven months later, Heidegger fired Müller from his position as a student leader because Müller was "not politically appropriate." Then in 1938 Müller discovered that Heidegger had blocked him from getting a teaching position at Freiburg by informing the university administration that Müller was "unfavorably disposed" toward the regime. But the reason is perhaps that the only copy of this letter about Baumgarten seems actually not to have been written by Heidegger himself. Moreover, Heidegger did indeed write a "very impressive letter to the Education minister" (Hugo Ott) in July 1933, this one authentic, to defend Eduard Fränkel against the new anti-Semitic law. There are nevertheless troubling passages from Heidegger's lecture and seminar courses from the period of the Nazi
Gleichschaltung. In a passage reflecting on Heraclitus' fragment 53, "War is the father of all things", in the summer of 1933–34 after the Nazis' first round of anti-semitic legislation (including university employment and enrollment reforms), Heidegger argued in the following terms concerning the need for 'polemos' or 'Kampf' (combat, war and/or struggle) with an internal enemy: The enemy is one who poses an essential threat to the existence of the people and its members. The enemy is not necessarily the outside enemy, and the outside enemy is not necessarily the most dangerous. It may even appear that there is no enemy at all. The root requirement is then to find the enemy, bring him to light or even to create him, so that there may be that standing up to the enemy, and so that existence does not become apathetic. The enemy may have grafted himself onto the innermost root of the existence of a people, and oppose the latter’s ownmost essence, acting contrary to it. All the keener and harsher and more difficult is then the struggle, for only a very small part of the struggle consists in mutual blows; it is often much harder and more exhausting to seek out the enemy as such, and to lead him to reveal himself, to avoid nurturing illusions about him, to remain ready to attack, to cultivate and increase constant preparedness and to initiate the attack on a long-term basis, with the goal of total extermination [
völligen Vernichtung]. In his advanced contemporary seminars "On the Essence and Concept of Nature, State and History," Heidegger expostulated in essentialising terms concerning "semitic nomads" and their lack of possible relation to the German homeland, "drifting" in the "unessence of history": History teaches us that nomads did not become what they are because of the bleakness of the desert and the steppes, but that they have even left numerous wastelands behind them that had been fertile and cultivated land when they arrived, and that men rooted in the soil have been able to create for themselves a native land, even in the wilderness…the nature of our German space would surely be apparent to a Slavic people in a different manner than to us; to a Semitic nomad, it may never be apparent.
Attitude towards his mentor Husserl Beginning in 1917, the philosopher
Edmund Husserl championed Heidegger's work, and helped him secure the retiring Husserl's chair in philosophy at the University of Freiburg. On April 6, 1933, the
Reichskommissar of
Baden Province, Robert Wagner, suspended all Jewish government employees, including present and retired faculty at the University of Freiburg. Husserl, who was born Jewish and was an adult convert to Lutheran Christianity, was affected by this law. Heidegger did not become Rector until April 22, so it was Heidegger's predecessor as Rector who formally notified Husserl of his "enforced leave of absence" on April 14, 1933. Then, the week after Heidegger's election, the national Reich law of April 28, 1933 came into effect, overriding Wagner's decree, and requiring that all Jewish professors from German universities, including those who had converted to Christianity, be fired. The termination of Husserl's academic privileges thus did not involve any specific action on Heidegger's part. Heidegger had by then broken off contact with Husserl, other than through intermediaries. Heidegger later stated that his relationship with Husserl had become strained after Husserl publicly "settled accounts" with him and
Max Scheler in the early 1930s. However, in 1933 Husserl wrote to a friend, "The perfect conclusion to this supposed bosom friendship of two philosophers was his very public, very theatrical entrance into the Nazi Party on May 1. Prior to that there was his self-initiated break in relations with me – in fact, soon after his appointment at Freiburg – and, over the last few years, his anti-Semitism, which he came to express with increasing vigor – even against the coterie of his most enthusiastic students, as well as around the department." Heidegger did not attend his former mentor's cremation in 1938. He spoke of a "human failure" and begged pardon in a letter to his wife.
Support for the "Führer principle" in January 1933. According to Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger supported the "necessity of a
Führer" for Germany as early as 1918. speaks about people who are rightly "appalled at the Pan-Germanic chimerae" after the first World War. In a number of speeches during November 1933, Heidegger endorses the
Führerprinzip ("leader principle"), i.e. the principle that the Führer is the embodiment of the people; that he is always right and that his word is above all written law and demands total obedience. For example, in one speech Heidegger stated: Let not propositions and 'ideas' be the rules of your
being (
Sein). The Führer alone
is the present and future German reality and its law. Learn to know ever more deeply: that from now on every single thing demands decision, and every action responsibility. Heil Hitler! In another speech a few days later, Heidegger endorsed the
German election of November 1933, in which the electorate was presented with a single Nazi-approved list of candidates: The German people has been summoned by the Führer to vote; the Führer, however, is asking nothing from the people; rather, he
is giving the people the possibility of making, directly, the highest free decision of all: whether itthe entire peoplewants its own existence (
Dasein), or whether it does not want it. [...] On November 12, the German people as a whole will choose
its future, and this future is bound to the Führer. [...] There are not separate foreign and domestic policies. There is only one will to the full existence (
Dasein) of the State. The Führer has awakened this will in the entire people and has welded it into a single resolve. Later in November 1933, Heidegger attended a conference at the
University of Tübingen organized by the students of the university and the
Kampfbund, the local Nazi Party chapter. In this address, he argued for a revolution in knowledge, a revolution that would displace the traditional idea that the university should be independent of the state: We have witnessed a revolution. The state has transformed itself. This revolution was not the advent of a power pre-existing in the bosom of the state or of a political party. The national-socialist revolution means rather the radical transformation of German existence. [...] However, in the university, not only has the revolution not yet achieved its aims, it has not even started. Heidegger addressed some of these remarks in the 1966
Der Spiegel interview "
Only a God Can Save Us"Jonas' reading can be supported by citations from Heidegger's lectures during and immediately following the time he was rector. In "On the Essence and Concept of Nature, History and State", for instance, Heidegger appears to give a direct ontological sanction to Hitler's absolute rule: ...The origin of all political action is not in knowledge, but in being. Every
Führer is a
Führer, must be a
Führer [italics in original], in accordance with the stamp in his being, and simultaneously, in the living unfolding of his proper essence, he understands, thinks, and puts into action what the people and the state are. In his 1934 class on Hölderlin, Heidegger is able to comment that "The true and only Führer makes a sign in his being towards the domain [
Bereich, realm] of the demigods. Being the Führer is a destiny …”, On a related note, in his 1985 book
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity,
Jürgen Habermas wrote that Heidegger's lack of explicit criticism against Nazism is due to his unempowering turn (
Kehre) towards
Being as time and history: "he detaches his actions and statements altogether from himself as an empirical person and attributes them to a
fate for which one cannot be held responsible."
Resignation from rectorship In his postwar justification, Heidegger claimed he resigned the rectorship in April 1934 because the ministry in Karlsruhe had demanded the dismissal of the deans Erik Wolf and Wilhelm von Möllendorff on political grounds. But Rüdiger Safransky found no trace of such events and prefers talking about a disagreement with other Party members. According to the historian
Richard J. Evans: By the beginning of 1934, there were reports in Berlin that Heidegger had established himself as 'the philosopher of National Socialism'. But to other Nazi thinkers, Heidegger's philosophy appeared too abstract, too difficult, to be of much use [...] Though his intervention was welcomed by many Nazis, on closer inspection such ideas did not really seem to be in tune with the Party's. It is not surprising that his enemies were able to enlist the support of
Alfred Rosenberg, whose own ambition it was to be the philosopher of Nazism himself. Denied a role at the national level, and increasingly frustrated with the minutiae of academic politicswhich seemed to him to betray a sad absence of the new spirit he had hoped would permeate the universitiesHeidegger resigned his post in April 1934.
Post-rectorate period After he resigned from the rectorship, Heidegger withdrew from most political activity but he never withdrew his membership in the
Nazi party. In May 1934 he accepted a position on the Committee for the Philosophy of Law in the
Academy for German Law (
Ausschuss für Rechtsphilosophie der Akademie für Deutsches Recht), where he remained active until at least 1936. The academy had official consultant status in preparing Nazi legislation such as the
Nuremberg racial laws that came into effect in 1935. In addition to Heidegger, such Nazi notables as
Hans Frank,
Julius Streicher,
Carl Schmitt and
Alfred Rosenberg belonged to the academy and served on this committee. in order to hide his own version of Nazism, as per Emmanuel Faye. This lecture was published in 1953 under the title
An Introduction to Metaphysics. In the published version, Heidegger left the sentence, but added a parenthetical qualification: "(namely, the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity)". Heidegger did not mention that this qualification was added at the time of publication, and was not part of the original lecture. This raised concerns in post-Nazi Germany that Heidegger was distinguishing a "good Nazism" from a "bad Nazism", a contention supported by his philosophical opponents, including
Baeumler. The controversial page of the 1935 manuscript is missing from the Heidegger Archives in
Marbach.but didn't read it aloud. Heidegger defended himself during the
denazification period by claiming that he had opposed the philosophical bases of Nazism, especially
biologism and the Nazi interpretation of Nietzsche's
The Will to Power. In a 1936 lecture, Heidegger still sounded rather ambiguous as to whether Nietzsche's thought was compatible with Nazism, or at least with that hypothetical "good Nazism": "The two men who, each in his own way, have introduced a counter movement to
nihilismMussolini and Hitlerhave learned from Nietzsche, each in an essentially different way." A subtle correction followed immediately: "But even with that, Nietzsche's authentic metaphysical domain has not yet come unto its own." According to personal notes made in 1939 (not published until 2006), Heidegger took strong exception to Hitler's statement, "There is no attitude, which could not be ultimately justified by the ensuing usefulness for the totality." Under the heading "Truth and Usefulness", Heidegger's private critique is as follows: Who makes up this totality? (Eighty million-strong extant human mass? Does its extantness assign to this human mass the right to the claim on a continued existence?) How is this totality determined? What is its goal? Is it itself the goal of all goals? Why? Wherein lies the justification for this goal-setting? [...] Why is
usefulness the criterion for the legitmacy of a human attitude? On what is this principle grounded? [...] From where does the appeal to usefulness as the measure of truth acquire its comprehensibility? Does comprehensibility justify legitimacy? In a 1942 lecture, published posthumously, Heidegger was once again ambiguous on the subject of Nazism. During a discussion of then recent German classics scholarship, he said that: "In the majority of 'research results', the Greeks appear as pure National Socialists. This overenthusiasm on the part of academics seems not even to notice that with such "results" it does National Socialism and its historical uniqueness no service at all, not that it needs this anyhow." In the same lecture, he commented on America's entry into World War II, in a way that seems to identify his philosophy with the Nazi cause: The entry of America into this planetary war is not an entry into history. No, it is already the last American act of America's history-lessness and self-destruction. This act is the renunciation of the Origin. It is a decision for lack-of-Origin. Siegfried Bröse, relieved of his functions as subprefect by the Nazis in 1933, and subsequently one of Heidegger's teaching assistants, wrote to the de-Nazification hearing: One could seeand this was often confirmed to me by the studentsthat Heidegger lectures were attended
en masse because the students wanted to form a rule to guide their own conduct by hearing National Socialism characterized in all its non-truth... Heidegger's lectures were attended not only by students but also by people with long-standing professions and even by retired people, and every time I had the occasion to talk with these people, what came back incessantly was their admiration for the courage with which Heidegger, from the height of his philosophical position and in the rigor of his starting point, attacked National Socialism. Equally, Hermine Rohner, a student from 1940 to 1943, bears testimony to the fact Heidegger "wasn't afraid, as for him, even in front of students from all faculties (so not only "his" students), to attack National Socialism so openly that I hunched up my shoulders." Due to what he calls Heidegger's "spiritual resistance", Czech resistance fighter and former Heidegger student Jan Patočka included him among his "heroes of our times". The testimony of
Karl Löwithwho was not in Germanysounds different. He was another of Heidegger's students, aided by Heidegger in 1933 in obtaining a fellowship to study in Rome, where he lived between 1934 and 1936. In 1936, Heidegger visited Rome to lecture on
Hölderlin, and had a meeting with Löwith. In an account set down in 1940 and not intended for publication, Löwith noted that Heidegger was wearing a swastika pin, even though he knew that Löwith was Jewish. Löwith recounted their discussion about editorials published in the
Neue Zürcher Zeitung: He left no doubt about his faith in Hitler; only two things that he had underestimated: the vitality of the Christian churches and the obstacles to the
Anschluss in Austria. Now, as before, he was convinced that National Socialism was the prescribed path for Germany. [I] told him that [...] my opinion was that his taking the side of National Socialism was in agreement with the essence of his philosophy. Heidegger told me unreservedly that I was right and developed his idea by saying that his idea of historicity [
Geschichtlichkeit] was the foundation for his political involvement. In response to my remark that I could understand many things about his attitude, with one exception, which was that he would permit himself to be seated at the same table with a figure such as
Julius Streicher (at the German Academy of Law), he was silent at first. At last he uttered this well-known rationalisation (which
Karl Barth saw so clearly), which amounted to saying that "it all would have been much worse if some men of knowledge had not been involved." And with a bitter resentment towards people of culture, he concluded his statement: "If these gentlemen had not considered themselves too refined to become involved, things would have been different, but I had to stay in there alone." To my reply that one did not have to be very refined to refuse to work with a Streicher, he answered that it was useless to discuss Streicher;
Der Stürmer was nothing more than "pornography." Why didn't Hitler get rid of this sinister individual? He didn't understand it. Heidegger's defenders have pointed to the
deep ecology dimension of Heidegger's critique of technological "enframing" – i.e., that the way human beings relate to nature has a determining influence on the way we relate to one another. At least Heidegger does not say that the mechanization of agriculture and the extermination camps are equivalent, "the same thing" (
dasselbe) but "the same" (
das Selbe, a very strange turn of phrase in German), so only "in essence", but not in the technical or metaphysical meaning of identity. Heidegger explained during his lecture: "The same is never the equivalent (
das Gleiche). The same is no more only the indistinctive coincidence of the identical. The same is rather the relation of the different." Moreover, many of those who align themselves with Heidegger philosophically have pointed out that in his work on "being-towards-death" we can recognize a much more salient criticism of what was wrong with the mass-produced murder of a people. Thinkers as diverse as
Giorgio Agamben and
Judith Butler have made this point sympathetically. It might be worth pointing out that the SS physician
Josef Mengele, the so-called "Angel of Death", was the son of the founder of a company that produced major farm machinery under the name Karl Mengele & Sons. This side of Heidegger's thinking can be seen in another controversial lecture from the same period,
Die Gefahr ("The Danger"): Hundreds of thousands die en masse. Do they die? They succumb. They are done in. Do they die? They become mere quanta, items in an inventory in the business of manufacturing corpses. Do they die? They are liquidated inconspicuously in extermination camps. And even apart from that, right now millions of impoverished people are perishing from hunger in China. But to die is to endure death in its essence. To be able to die means to be capable of this endurance. We are capable of this only if the essence of death makes our own essence possible. involved
gang-rapes and looting throughout East Germany, East Prussia, and Austria, and harshly punitive de-industrialization policies.
Der Spiegel interview On September 23, 1966, Heidegger was interviewed by
Rudolf Augstein and
Georg Wolff for
Der Spiegel magazine, in which he agreed to discuss his political past provided that the interview be published posthumously (it was published on May 31, 1976). At his own insistence, Heidegger edited the published version of the interview extensively. In the interview, Heidegger defends his involvement with the Nazi party on two points: first, that he was trying to save the university from being completely taken over by the Nazis, and therefore he tried to work with them. Second, he saw in the historic moment the possibility for an "awakening" (
Aufbruch) which might help to find a "new national and social approach" to the problem of Germany's future, a kind of middle ground between capitalism and communism. For example, when Heidegger talked about a "national and social approach" to political problems, he linked this to
Friedrich Naumann. According to Thomas Sheehan, Naumann had "the vision of a strong nationalism and a militantly anticommunist socialism, combined under a charismatic leader who would fashion a middle-European empire that preserved the spirit and traditions of pre-industrial Germany even as it appropriated, in moderation, the gains of modern technology". == The Farias and Faye controversies ==