- Let me start by making
a brief observation,
trying to link some themes
from the film very quickly
with our topic in the discussions tomorrow
about these mysterious Black Notebooks
that are less mysterious now
that they've been published in Germany,
what's mysterious, and I've
discussed this with the editor,
Peter Trawny, what was Heidegger thinking?
How did he think people would react
when his innermost
thoughts and reflections
on the '30s and the '40s were revealed?
Obviously, he wasn't thinking, in a way,
but that doesn't do
justice to the problem,
because of the coherences
that are multifaceted,
at times tricky, between
his thought which he called,
he renounced philosophy, and
he called his thought thinking,
denken, and its resonances
with the era and the Zeitgeist.
And I just wanted to make a remark first,
before posing a question
to Jeff, our filmmaker,
that I think some of the German voices
we heard in the film
are remarkably upright
and self-critical and reflective,
and it's not just some of the
figures we saw in the film,
Rainer Marten, Bert Marten, and others.
I was extremely impressed last spring,
upon reading the profusion
of reviews, very serious,
the Feuilleton section, literary sections
of major German papers
are something to behold,
in fact, from which we
could learn much over here.
At the objectivity, the seriousness
and profundity and lack of
apologies, on the whole,
with which these issues were treated.
I think this says really something
about a theme in Germany that was taken up
and foisted on the
Germans against their will
very much by the Frankfurt school,
and specifically by Theodor Adorno
in a famous 1959 lecture called,
What Does It Mean to
Work Through the Past,
an allusion to this Freudian concept
of working through the past.
Adorno and the Frankfurt school and others
made this atopos, or
theme, in post-war Germany
and, I must say as someone
who has gone back and forth
between North American and
Germany for 30 years on and off,
first as a German Academic
Exchange Service grant recipient,
this is almost a miracle the way,
not to be apologetic on my own,
the way German democracy has prospered.
We had one commentator,
I think it was Bert Marten,
remark that Heidegger
totally lacked civil courage.
This isn't true of contemporary Germany
and this is a remarkable transformation
that we can't deal with
at length in this context,
but I think that something that's come out
in Jeff's film and is now a
part of German political culture
in the way it was never true before.
This is remarkable, in
many ways, it reveals,
it shows a learning process
that's very impressive
and if one compares this learning process
vis-a-vis the tragedies of the
Nazi era and transgressions
to other nations that have
experienced these events
and are in denial, one often speaks of ...
Karsten Harries is joining us now.
This is quite an impressive development.
With having said that as a frame,
I have a question for Jeff
and then we can get the ball rolling
with the discussion, as it were,
but let me stop quickly to
introduce our panelists.
I wasn't sure with whom we
would be left at the end,
but I'm very pleased to introduce to you
some of our participants
in tomorrow's seminars.
First, Emmanuel Faye from the
University of Rouen in France
whom you saw speaking
eloquently in the film.
To his left, Karsten Harries
who has taught at Yale
for a number of years,
and along with Thomas
Sheehan from Stanford.
I'm full of admiration for both men
as philosophers and as figures
who have used Heidegger's work
in a non-dogmatic way, in a
creative and original way,
and in a critical way on the same token.
To begin the discussion,
let me ask Jeff, briefly,
a question I'm sure you're
often asked to begin with,
what motivated you to make this film
and secondly, do you have
anything more to tell us
about its reception in Germany
after the debacle at the
premiere in Freiburg?
- Okay, thank you.
First, I would like to salute everybody
in this audience for sticking
around for this film.
I apologize for the technical problems.
As my son Jason says, "Dad,
"it's a long, boring, two hour film
"about a humorless German philosopher."
(audience laughs)
So, thank you very much for being here.
(audience applauses)
To start out, very simply, I'm Catholic,
that is, I was born and raised a Catholic,
and as my old Catholic school buddy says,
"Once a Catholic, always a Catholic."
And I first heard about
Heidegger studying philosophy
in a Catholic seminary
with a priest professor
who introduced us to Heidegger,
and then I went on to
study, I left the seminary,
decided the priesthood was not for me,
and I went and got a Bachelors degree
and then a Masters degree in Philosophy
and I was, for many, many years,
a very enthusiastic Heideggarian,
and then something happened,
and what happened was a landslide
of books that came out
around 1989 to 1991,
and that was a book by Richard Wolin,
a book by Hugo Ott, by Tom Rockmore,
and of course, the book by Victor Farias.
And I was really quite upset
to discover forty years after the war
that Heidegger was a Nazi,
and then there were those who said,
"No, he was not really a Nazi,
"he just kind of flirted with it."
And then I read a really key article
in a New York review of books
by my colleague here, Thomas
Sheehan from Stanford,
and that was the straw that
broke the camel's back.
I came home from the library
after reading that article
and I said to my wife,
"I'm going to make a film
"about Heidegger and Nazism."
And so, that's the reason.
And then, of course, I
invited Richard Wolin,
I was teaching at that time
in the Media Arts department
at the University of Arizona,
and I invited Richard
Wolin to come and talk
and if I could do an interview with him
in the television studio.
I was the director of the TV studio
at a PBS station at University of Arizona,
and Richard was very kind to come,
and I had invited him, of
course, because he's written
two or three major works on this topic.
Well, that was 1994 and I remember looking
at the original 16mm
film with the clapboard
and it says March 1994,
and I shot it in 16mm color film.
At that time, my wife's
health took a very bad turn
and I put the film in the cellar
and it sat there for about nine, ten years
and the original negative had decomposed
to such an extent that
when I had it transferred,
Richard's face was dark green and purple.
So, I salvaged it by turning
it to Black and white.
So, I mean, I've seen
this film so many times
that I can't watch it.
I see all the mistakes and
things I would do differently,
but I'm still very, very pleased
at the reception it has gotten
literally around the world.
I've been invited
everywhere to show this film
and to engage in this topic.
So, I'll leave it there,
except to say that in Germany,
the Germans just say, "Hey, Heidegger,
"everybody knows he was a Nazi."
And once the Black Notebooks came out,
Professor Trawny, who published them,
has been on television several times
and German television is very good
at bringing these topics to the floor,
and so I agree with what
Richard Wolin just said,
that German democracy is,
indeed, very, very strong.
Now, having said that, there
are some cultural types
in Germany that hark
back to the good ol' days
and really are devout Heideggerians,
but let's just continue
with some other colleagues
who I'm sure have more
profound things to say.
Thank you very much
for coming, by the way.
(audience applauses)
- I find the evolution of
Jeffrey van Davis empowering--
- I think you probably
need to speak into the ...
- Anyway, I think the best thing should be
to have discussion with ...
have you some question to
Jeffrey van Davis.
- [Richard] As you can see,
there are two microphones placed
on either side of the
seat, so please feel free
to approach the mics with questions.
Please.
- [Audience Member] My
name is Bertha ein Bennett,
I was born in Germany 1945 and
grew up in that long silence,
so thank you very much for
having broken through that
and I think sometimes it
takes 30, 40, 50 years
to breakthrough, if not more
in the third generation, to speak.
I have a question with regard
to the choice of personalities.
Of course, it's understandable
that you would choose people
who knew Heidegger personally,
but I was also wondering if you,
in your listening and
speaking with others,
spoke with the next generation of students
who are students of
Heidegger now in Germany
and if you heard anything
that is not in the film
but that you could share with us.
- Yeah, thank you.
First of all, I spent six
hours with Hermann Heidegger,
the son of Martin Heidegger,
and I have to tell you I liked him.
His life story is, in many ways,
far more interesting
than Martin Heidegger's.
But, he loves his father
and he's out there to
defend his reputation,
even though there's certain
things that cannot be defended.
Having said that, the material that I had
from that long interview,
I was not allowed to use
and almost from the
beginning, it was clear to me
that Hermann Heidegger wanted
to control the project.
He wanted to have a say
in how he was edited and things like that
and as a journalist and as a filmmaker,
that's something I could not allow.
At the University of Freiburg today,
the Philosophy department is headed up
by Figal and another fellow, von Hermann
and they're very pro-Heideggerians,
in fact, when I showed my
film at Freiburg University
for the first time, the
premiere in Germany,
von Hermann came up to me,
I didn't quite know who he
was and I was in the back
and the film hadn't yet
started and he said,
"Who's responsible for this?"
And I said, "Well, I suppose
I am. I'm the director."
And he said, "Well, how
did you get this room?"
And I said, "Well, I've been invited
"by the History department."
And as I was telling
this to another friend,
he said, "Well, why
the History department?
"Your film's about philosophy."
I said, "The Philosophy
department at Freiburg
"didn't want a thing to do with it."
So, these things still go on,
the pro-Heideggerians,
the anti-Heideggerians,
and I have to say that I appreciate it
when there are people
highly critical of the film
because I'm very critical of the film,
but it certainly enhances the discussion
and the give-and-take.
- [Audience Member] Yes, please.
I thought the film was great,
but there are certain things
that I think really bear
some emphasis and examination.
One is Heidegger's notion of authenticity.
I gather that I know something about it,
and I gather that that's accompanied
with this call of conscience,
and the call of conscience,
as I understand it,
is unbidden, involuntary,
an inner, privative insight
whose expression is resolute silence.
Heidegger exhibited this
silence after the war,
and not only does the
call of conscience entail
no overt communication, but
also, as I understand it,
has nothing whatsoever to do
with any explicit code of ethics.
No explicit code of ethics.
Now, the other thing
that I think is curious
is why must we comply with the notion
of existential dread as the inauguration
into authentic being towards death?
There are other ways.
How about the biological approach to death
where death is considered as no survivor?
Death is no survivor, it's
bound to the body's tether.
It's a finite, biological end--
- [Richard] Is there a question?
- [Audience Member] I'll stop
all that, I'll stop talking.
- [Richard] It's okay,
it's all very interesting
and important but I'm wondering
what your question is.
- [Audience Member] Okay, alright.
- I think there was a
quick question in there,
is why I didn't present certain people
or talk about this issue of authenticity.
It's a very important question because
in the beginning of the film,
Victor Farias talks about how Heidegger
talks about authenticity,
or Eigentlichkeit.
The Frankfurter school was highly critical
of Heidegger when they
brought out their book called,
The Jargon of Authenticity,
Jargon de Eigentlichkeit.
And what Farias says is that
Heidegger asked the question,
"How do I know if I, as an
individual, am being authentic,
"and can that question
be applied to das Folk?"
And he turns it, what applies
to the individual person
can also apply to the Folk and
to go on with what you said,
that this authenticity, or this sense,
it's almost a call in and of itself,
independent of everything else.
And, of course, that's what a
lot of German Nazis thought.
But to go back to your other question is,
I grew up in a tradition
of moral philosophy.
I was taught theology and I
was a scholastic for a while,
and the biggest mistake
is to see Heidegger
as a moral philosopher, he is not.
He's totally separate from
those kinds of questions.
- [Audience Member] I agree.
- But, if I can--
- [Audience Member] Please, please.
- I have something to say
about Heidegger's silence,
you spoke about that, and
the agenda of your film,
there is an important
moment about that silence,
especially when you ask to Alfred Denker,
is there anything in the complete works
in which you can find that kind of answer
coming from Heidegger
about what he thought
when he did in '33 and now,
with the end of the complete
works with the Black Notebooks,
the problem is to know is there
something like an answer? Yes!
There is! No more silence!
Coming from Heidegger,
there is an affirmation
of strong, radical anti-Semitism
and he planned to have it
as his last word for his complete works.
He says, "My work ...
"They are not works,
but it's a kind of way,
"nicht, kein nicht Werke, aber ... "
- [Richard] Ways.
- Ways, yes.
And the end of that is that affirmation
of very radical anti-Semitism.
So, it would be, I
think, to pose a problem.
My colleague, Professor Karsten Harries,
thinks that there is no
change with those new books.
I think that, really, the
problem is changing now.
It's not anymore the
problem of the silence,
but the problem of what Heidegger said,
and if I can ... no, okay.
- [Karsten] I would like
to express a certain worry.
I love the film, I want to thank you,
but I'm afraid if this
conference tomorrow is going
to do significant work,
really advance the discussion,
it will have to focus
on the Schwartze Hefte,
not rehearse a topic, which by now ...
I ran a conference 20 years ago
and it was basically the same material
and there's some little mistakes
which craft up here
again, which were cleared,
should have been cleared up years ago.
For example, that name
Baumgarten, the Baumgarten affair.
Baumgarten wanted to join the SA.
That should have been mentioned,
and the letter was written
not to prevent a poor student
from getting a little money,
It was written ...
Heidegger thought he was not
a good candidate for the SA
and I suspect after the war,
Baumgarten would probably have said,
"No, I was really not a
good candidate for the SA."
(audience laughs)
But these little details, and
about many of these comments,
I could add little footnotes,
which would put the context
in a very different light
on a lot of this event.
For example, the expression udentung,
which is place a big ...
(speaks foreign language)
Verudung was a word which was quite common
and was used by Rathenau
famously, much before Heidegger.
It was common, and
Rathenau cannot be accused
of having been somebody who
was particularly anti-Semitic,
but he used that term,
so we should see that
in the context of the time
when these words were spoken.
It's very difficult for us
to put ourselves back into that time.
- [Richard] But look, Karsten,
I don't mean to interrupt you,
but there's a big difference
when Walther Rathenau,
who was assassinated by a
right wing thug in 1922,
and Martin Heidegger uses that term.
They have completely different valences
and in 1922 and in the 1930s,
in the context of the Black Notebooks.
So, this potentially confuses the issue.
Actually, the word Verudung
goes back to Martin Luther.
Luther uses it in his late writing
on the lies and practices of the Jews.
- [Karsten] But I think it's important not
to isolate these and just focus
as if this were the first time
that these expressions were used.
That's clearly false and I think there are
a lot of situations
like that where we need
to contextualize, but
I also hope, as I said,
I ran a conference, where Hugo
Ott was present and so on,
and especially Alexander Schwan,
who does not get mentioned,
but if you want to read
somebody, he's dead now.
But, one of the best books
here, I think on this,
is by Alexander Schwan.
I want to just mention him
as an important person.
- If I could just interject,
I think the greatest service
of all is the service to truth.
And I would like to say
that you're absolutely
correct about Stadinger
and his interest in the SA,
but--
- Baumgarten, not Stadinger.
- Baumgarten, excuse me. Baumgarten.
But, it makes no difference
because Heidegger
thought he was a Jew and
therefore, used the term verudung.
- I don't think that
Heidegger did think ...
He knew that he wanted to join the SA
and he didn't, he couldn't
have wanted to join the SA
if Heidegger knew that he was a Jew.
I don't think that Heidegger
thought that at all.
- No, no.
In fact, with Baumgarten,
you have two episodes.
There is the first episode in '29
when Baumgarten went to have a grant
and then Heidegger is separating him.
Baumgarten is not a Jew, of course,
he's in view of ...
- [Richard] Max Weber.
- Max Weber.
And what is important to
answer to Karsten Harries
is that in '29, when
Heidegger speaks about
wachsenden Verudung in
Deutsche Universitäten,
he says to his correspondent,
"I cannot say it publicly
"or directly, just private later."
I agree with Richard Wolin,
it has nothing to do
with the use of the time
by Rathenau in '22, of course.
And in '33, '34, Heidegger broke
his friendship with Baumgarten.
He had to give advice when
Baumgarten wanted to join the SA,
and then he didn't help him anymore.
He said he had friends,
he was a friend of Frankl
and so, there are two
different moments, in fact--
- Sorry to be brief, but I want to hope
that we'll talk about the Schwartze Hefte.
We are now talking about
something, which as I say,
there is an endless
literature on these issues.
All of that has been talked over and over,
and if we are going to
have something to say
which advances the discussion,
then let's look at what has just come out.
These three volumes,
these Schwartze Hefte,
which are hard to read,
but they are definitely worth discussing--
- [Richard] Well, we have some--
- Instead of going back over material
which we have gone over so many times,
at least those of us who have participated
in conferences of this sort--
- You know, I think
you're absolutely right,
but I think there are several people
in the audience who have maybe
not gone over this
material a hundred times.
We have some questions over here.
- [Audience Member] This question may be
somewhat tangential, I'm
curious about Hannah Arendt,
the degree to which she
was close to Heidegger
and had to know, specifically,
about his Nazi involvement,
yet, after the war, and up to his death,
she seemed to have been devoted to him.
There was this film that
came out, not too long ago,
that showed her to be
completely supportive
and never critical of him.
Can anybody discuss her
continuing support of Heidegger
and why and what that was about?
- I have a little bit to say about that.
- [Richard] Sure, sure.
- If I-- go ahead.
- I would like to recommend to you
a dissertation I directed,
it was for Frankfurt by Tatjana Toemmel.
It was immediately picked up,
Der Liebesbegriff bei Hannah
Arendt und Martin Heidegger.
It was immediately picked up,
just published essay, pocketbook.
And if you can read the German,
this is, I think ...
That has really changed my reading.
That's one of the few things
about Heidegger I've read in recent years
that really has changed
the way I read Heidegger.
So, I recommend, I just wanna make a plea
for that book, not by me,
but by that woman, Tatjana Toemmel.
- [Richard] Well, in fact,
I've written on the subject.
There's a lot to say, there's even ...
Most of which, I won't say for the sake
of not repeating what's out there already,
but I do want to answer
your question briefly.
There's even more to say
now that two weeks ago,
a breakthrough book that's been
discussed in the Times twice
by Bettina Stangneth,
Eichmann Before Jerusalem,
has come out, published
in German three years ago,
which, in a nutshell, totally destroys
the Banality of Evil thesis,
at least vis-a-vis Eichmann.
I've actually written
a review of the book,
actually it was an independent article
that appeared as a review,
a week ago in the Jewish Review of Books.
The one thing I wanna say about this issue
is that, of course, this
was an insuperable conundrum
for Hannah Arendt who had
such profound loyalties
to German cultural, philosophical,
and intellectual traditions,
and excelled at having assimilated,
internalized these traditions.
And then, suddenly in 1933
as we see in Jeff's film,
she realizes, like many other
assimilated German Jews,
Wittgenstein is another
good case in point,
that despite their bold
and concerted efforts
to assimilate, they're Jewish.
Hitler made them Jewish and
nothing would change that.
So, there is a continuous
process on her part,
as I said, almost unmasterable
or insurmountable,
of trying to sort out
her German allegiances.
She abandons philosophy
explicitly in 1933, '34.
She says in an interview
in the early '60s,
"The intellectuals and the
philosophers were the worst.
"I expected poor treatment
from everyone else,
"but not from my philosophical peers."
Subsequently, she called
herself a political thinker.
She only came back to philosophy
proper in her last book
on thinking and willing,
The Life of the Mind.
So, this is a process
that wasn't only peculiar
to Hannah Arendt, of course,
but to a whole series
of very gifted German-Jewish emigres
who had to come to terms with something
that was almost instinctual or intuitive.
Instinctual or intuitive, this attachment
to German cultural ideals and traditions.
Thomas Mann, who went
into exile wisely in 1933,
said, shortly after the war,
"There are not two
Germanys, a good and a bad,
"but one Germany that threw
a pact with the Devil"--
He's the author of Doctor
Faustus, of course--
"threw a pact with the Devil",
managed to realize it's worse.
There's been a longstanding
process of sorting this out.
Even Herbert Marcuse, whose--
Tom, you have a remark?
- [Tom] No, you go ahead, plase.
- Just quickly, even
Herbert Marcuse has come up
toward the end of the film,
who writes Heidegger this
impassioned letter in 1947,
imploring him, "You're the person ... ",
Marcuse wrote his second
dissertation under Heidegger,
he implores him in this letter
which is extremely moving,
"You're the person from
whom I learned philosophy
"at Freiburg University.
"What I and my fellow students
would like to hear from you
"is a word of contrition,
a word distancing yourself
"from this terrible regime,
which, if examined closely,
"was the negation of everything
"Western philosophy has stood for."
Heidegger responded in a very
dismissive and arrogant way,
and this is a profound
indictment of this--
- But, if I could just say, two books.
If you're interested in the
love relationship or affair,
the intellectual and sexual relationship
between Hannah Arendt
and Martin Heidegger,
Antonio Grunenberg who directs
the Hannah Arendt Center
at Oldenburg University
has written a book
called, Martin und Hannah,
and then there's this
woman from Yale University
who wrote a short little book
about that relationship, as well.
And just go on the internet
and you can find it.
- Okay, we have a question
over here, please.
- [Audience Member] Right,
I assume that the movie
was made before the Black
books were discovered?
- Yes.
- [Audience Member] So, first of all,
I don't really know what
the Black Books are.
No one has really explained here,
in the podium here, what are they?
Are they diaries? Are
they something manuscript
that he intended to have published?
Or is it hidden for years, or what?
Secondly, would you have
made the movie different
if the books were discovered first,
would you have made anything
different in the movie?
- I would have added a few
things, that's for sure.
But, Richard, you should
answer that question
because you wrote about it as well.
- Yeah, just briefly,
and ideally, the editor
of the Black Notebooks,
Peter Trawny from Wuppertal
was supposed to be here.
But, who knows?
Yes, these were intended to
be the final eight volumes
of the collected works edition
which will run to 102
volumes now in the spring.
Heidegger's publisher in
Frankfurt, Klosterman,
published volumes 94, 95, 96
and these volumes take us,
there's one volume missing from 1931,
but from 1931 to 1941,
and this is kind of a
philosophical notebook,
more sophisticated than a diary.
People have compared them
with Nietzsche's controversial
testament, The Will to Power.
They are polished entries,
it's a philosophical ...
In Germen, you'd say denkbuch,
or book of thoughts.
So, it's a series of bonafied
philosophical reflections
that have Heidegger constantly in dialogue
with the Zeitgeist and
these cataclysmic events
that are taking place during the '30s
with Germany's conversion to Nazism
and then the build-up to war,
and so you have this entwinement
of high-philosophizing a la Heidegger
and an attempt to make
sense from the standpoint
of what he called the Question of Being,
or the History of Being,
of aktualitäten, current events,
in light of his philosophy.
And there have been some translations
of the most disturbing
passages from the books.
There are 1,300 pages,
but the extent to which he's in ...
He's critical of specific
practices of the regime,
but he's, when all is said and done,
very much in solidarity
with the regime's goals,
and he has this conviction,
as it comes out in the film,
that the German Folk is the solution
to the decline of the West
if it realizes, if it
heeds the call of being.
And we've had the motif
that's come up earlier
of Heidegger's delusion as expressed
by a colleague who knew him,
that he could play, that
he could lead the leader.
"Dein Führer," Hitler,
of course, "führen."
Analogous to Plato's misguided attempt
to play philosopher king
to the tyrant Dionysius in Syracuse.
Would anyone like to
supplement what I've said?
Then, we have another question.
- [Audience Member] Thank
you, I'm not sure what
to conclude from your documentary.
On the one hand, you make Heidegger seem
like a philandering, sleazy opportunist.
Is that what to conclude from this?
Secondly, there was
enormous turmoil going on
in Germany and Eastern and Central Europe
for the three decades up to this time.
You don't provide any context.
It seems as if the German University
was filled with so many elitists
that they were simply right
above all of the chaos
that was going on below
them. Is that true?
- To answer your first question
about the sleazy aspects,
you know, sex sells, I don't
mean to be glib about it,
but I had a beautiful part in that film
with the Princess von Podeville
who had this absolutely wonderful,
intellectual relationship
with Heidegger, which was also sexual,
and I had this fabulous
interview, it was serious,
it deals with the vagaries
of the human heart,
human beings, after all, fall in love,
they have affairs, they do bad
things, they do good things,
but I couldn't use it
because, as Richard said,
the story of making this film
is much more interesting than the film.
My raw cut was six hours.
I had some of these things
in that you mentioned,
but I had to cut it down
or I'd never get it on
television in Germany,
and so, yes, there's so many
things that are not there
that could be there and
I made that decision
and I have to stand for it.
But yeah, the relationship
with Hannah Arendt
is truly a remarkable and
important relationship
and how can I say?
We've all had serious
love affairs with somebody
when we were 19 or 20, and I'm in my 70s
and I can still vividly
remember when I was 17.
(audience laughs)
I can't make a judgment against the woman,
but the fact is he was the
great love of her life,
and she was just one of many.
He was manipulative in this
relationship, in my opinion.
- [Karsten] Perhaps a small footnote,
since we're onto the sleazy
part of Heidegger's life.
We shouldn't forget
that Hermann Heidegger,
who was mentioned repeatedly,
his son, was not his son.
His wife had had an affair
before the whole thing started
and you could imagine that
somebody of the self-esteem
that Heidegger presumed,
he was probably not
altogether happy to have his
marriage start on that note.
Just as a small footnote
if you're interest
in the sleaziness.
- [Richard] I have
another sleazy footnote.
(audience laughs)
So, stay in your seats for
a minute. We mentioned ...
This will only take a second
and it's not irrelavent.
I mentioned a minute ago that
strangely the first volume
of the Black Notebooks are missing.
Lo and behold, another
illegitimate son of Heidegger
came forth this Winter
and said, "I got it!"
There have been some ...
The general point here has to do
with the editing of
Heidegger's collected works.
There's so much at stake here
for Heidegger as a philosopher
and for the German past,
and this has been a real scandal,
and affects the way we view those
who are in charge of
perpetuating his legacy.
There are pages missing.
In Peter Trawny's little
book, which I have here,
there's a passage that
is heinously anti-Semitic
that has been eliminated
from one of the lecture
courses from the 1930s
on Concept of Being that
Trawny has put back in.
It was taken out by
one of Heidegger's son,
actually the good son,
not Hermann, but ...
Tom Sheehan has met these people.
The other son's name, Tom?
- [Tom] Jörg. Jörg.
- Jörg, Jörg.
So, we're forced to deal
with some very selective
and willful editorial
practices at the same time.
Question.
- [Audience Member] Yes, one
quick comment, one question.
The comment is it only
seems to me dangerous,
ultimately Heidegger's philosophy
is a philosophy without psychological man,
and I think one of the
dangers in evaluating him
and evaluating the Black
Notebooks, which I've not read yet,
is to take him, in a sense, at his word
as if he were not a psychological man,
and I think that a bit of the interviews
in the film come across that way,
that it's all a matter
of his philosophical
thought, of his conviction,
sometimes people go as
far as his background,
but there's not much in his work
that really welcomes psychological man.
You could make some analogy
between sein and Freud's
system unconscious and dasein,
and consciousness and get somewhere,
but it's a system that
his self really avoids
any kind of interiority, one might say,
and I think you risk evaluating
him on his own basis.
The question I really
have is about the film,
which I think is a great film,
and so many of these
documentary films fall apart,
and I think whatever your modesty is,
there's no need for it on the film.
I think it's really a terrific film.
The question really is
about making it, in a sense,
without the blessing of the family
and I'll tell you why
the question comes up,
and it comes up because of
what's going on this Fall
in New York at the Metropolitan Opera,
which will be The Death of Klinghoffer,
and without getting into
the merits within merits
of that work, which I think is dreadful
from a librettist's point
of view and Alice Goodman,
who deserves a Hannah
Arendt award of a kind,
leaving that aside,
one of the difficulties
of the making of the opera
is that they didn't get the
consent of the children.
So, you have people who go
on with the historical view
without the consent of the family,
and I wonder if you
might say something more
about your censor dilemma,
he's a public figure
where Klinghoffer was not,
of making a film and
going into investigation,
obviously totally without the support
of a lot of people around him.
I'd be very curious to see
how you felt about that.
- Yeah. Remember the scene?
It's unforgettable, it's
a gift for a filmmaker,
where I ask Alfred Denker the
question, "Is there anything
"that you found in the Gesumpthaus,
"in the collected works
where Heidegger reflects
"about what happened after 1933?"
And Alfred sits there and says nothing.
Now, I was in that interview
and I just threw that question out.
He was answering questions right and left
and I threw that out
and I expected a simple yes or no answer.
The reason why is because Alfred Denker
is one of maybe five
human beings on the planet
that has total access to everything,
both in the Heidegger family,
he's a personal friend
of the Heidegger family,
he's caught between two poles,
Jörg Heidegger and Hermann Heidegger.
Hermann Heidegger is the bastard child,
which is a terrible thing to say,
but when that was brought
up, they went explosive.
They wrote letters to the newspaper
and everything, but Hermann
himself broke the story
and admitted that he was,
and that secret was kept in the family
for almost a half a century.
He was told never to say this
by his mother, Alfreda.
Then you have Jörg, whose
the real biological son,
who's not as smart and
doesn't have the career,
in fact, he was so bad in school,
he couldn't get his Abitur there,
so he went to Stuttgart to get his Abitur,
and there was a woman who directed
the Gymnasium in Stuttgart was one
of Heidegger's girlfriends who had a son
who has the other Black Book
that's been missing for 50 years.
It gets really complicated.
(laughs)
I don't know what I was gonna say,
so I'll just let it go.
(audience laughs)
- [Karsten] It's complicated.
- Please.
- [Audience Member] Two questions,
one is what is the relationship
between Heidegger and Carl Schmitt?
I would be particularly
very interested in that.
Did they talk to each other?
Did they write to each other?
Did they have any type
of, during the Nazi era?
Were they friends? I don't know it.
It would be very interesting to know that,
because we could see some
parallels between both later.
And also, I get the feel,
I saw this film actually
at Oberlin College
when you showed it there--
- Oh!
- [Audience Member] I
was there and I talked
with you at that time, so it was very good
to see it again.
I get the feeling, the second
time, that out of the movie,
and this is connected
to my second question,
but out of the movie, does the feeling,
particularly with the song
and about this kind of sing-song,
silly thing about being,
I get the feeling out of the movie
that the ugliness of
Heidegger, the anti-Semitism,
the whole playboyness of
it destroys the philosophy.
So my question to the panel,
do you think the ugliness of this
really sink the philosophy?
Does it destroy it or not?
- I want to speak very
briefly to the first question,
but to the second question,
I would answer no.
Heidegger and Schmitt did
not know each other well,
however, in August 1933,
this is three months
after Heidegger joins the party
and gives his now
infamous inaugural speech
as Nazi rector Freiburg University,
he writes Schmitt a letter, short letter,
just been published,
translated into English,
asking Schmitt to join in and play a role,
to assist the rise and consolidation
of the Nazi movement as
the most prestigious,
along with his opposite
number and feind, or enemy,
Hans Kelsen, the most
prestigious German jurist
writing during the 1920s.
Schmitt took the bait with alacrity,
I don't think he needed
Heidegger to egg him on,
and made a number of
very severe compromises
praising Gleichschaltung,
writing Gleichschaltung,
legislation early in Hitler's rule,
praising the Night of the Long Knives
with a terrible article called,
The Führer Protects the Law,
etc., until he loses out
in a political struggle, in a way,
not too dissimilar from Heidegger in 1935.
He's marginalized, but certainly
not punished by the regime.
The last thing I want to say
about this, very quickly,
there's some excellent
work, there's a book,
unfortunately not translated in English,
called, The Decision.
Schmitt invents the term in
the late '20s, decisionism.
The German book is called, Die
Entscheidung, The Decision,
and it's a comparative study,
it's by a political
scientist named von Krockow,
of three figures, Heidegger,
Schmitt, and Ernst Jünger,
who's come up in the film already.
It's about political existentialism,
so I would say that the
intellectual affinities
between them are significant
and we have a brilliant essay
by Karl Löwith, Heidegger's
only habilitation student,
called The Political
Existentialism of Martin Heidegger,
which I think very well
explains the nature of these affinities.
- I think Carl Schmitt helped write
the Nuremberg Race Laws, didn't he?
- He was certainly involved, yeah.
- If I can add two more things
concerning Schmitt and Heidegger,
the first is factual,
important later of Heidegger from August.
There is a German biographer of Schmitt,
Reinhard Mehring, who
very recently discovered
that the two Nazi individuals met once
on the 8th of September '33 at Berlin
near the Kaiserhof Hotel
where Hitler was going.
They were both called
for becoming professorship at Berlin.
Schmitt accepted it
and Heidegger declined,
he wanted to stay in his Freiburg.
But in two seminars,
that is a certain point,
it's a more intellectual point,
in two seminars, I was the
first to publish partly
in a book and now it's
completely published,
Heidegger is speaking very precisely
about the Concept of the
Political by Carl Schmitt,
and you know very well, is the concept,
sort of difference between friend and foe,
and Heidegger doesn't deny the pertinence
for him of that concept,
he said, "It's not originary enough,
"on the consequence, the
true concept of the political
"is self-affirmation of the people,
"and then comes the distinction
between friend and foe."
So, the strategy of
Heidegger is always to show
that he is the most original,
the most referential thinker of Nazism.
- (speaks German) Primordial,
always in search of the primordial.
Karsten or Tom, do you have anything
that you would like to add?
- [Tom] Well, if there are more questions,
I'd rather hear questions, but--
- If I could just ...
- [Richard] Yes, please.
- [Audience Member]
I'm not a Heideggarian,
so I hope I will be forgiven
for asking a question that goes
into territory that you think
we should all be familiar with;
however, I found the film very impressive
but at the same time,
it goes in a periodization
that even I have been used to
and that is, you have
the big Heidegger blow,
becoming very, very famous, 1927, 1929,
and then, one eases over in your film,
as in general discussions to
1933, 1934, his rectorate.
And then, at least to
me, there is the silence
between '35 and '45 and onwards.
He certainly has published,
but is there a subtext,
and this is really where I
ask, almost, your forgiveness,
is there a subtext that
would give indication
of what we now need
the Black Notebooks for
in order to put our fingers on?
This seems, the Black Notebooks seem
to be a tremendous revelation,
but Heidegger wrote all along,
and is there a Heidegger whose language
is silent a la Derrida and Derman or what?
That's my question.
- You wanna answer that?
(Tom laughs)
(audience laughs)
- I hope--
- [Richard] That's a very
good question, thank you.
- That's a very good question
and I hope that tomorrow we
will shed some light on it.
What I find most interesting ...
First of all, you're perfectly right,
there're all sorts of text that stretch
through the whole career.
We bring the story up
with these three volumes
to 1941 or so.
And what strikes me is
that it gives us ...
Heidegger always said
that to interpret a poem
or a philosophical text,
the important thing is to first get hold
of the Grundstimmung he called it,
the basic mood out of which the poet
or the thinker is writing,
I think this is terribly important,
I think, even in reading poetry.
There's a good discussion with Steiger
where he really thematized that.
I think it's something well worth heeding
and I think in reading Heidegger,
to get at his Grundstimmung now,
I think there is no better text for,
at least that period that is
covered by the Schwartze Hefte,
than reading the Schwartze Hefte.
So, I don't think it's so much
what gets said there
that I found revealing,
but the shifting mood, and it
is a shifting mood, that is,
there's a descent into sort of
spite, gloominess, nostalgia,
but there's a clear change.
So, if you read that, you cannot
just simply throw together
a text from, let's say
1933 and then from 1941.
Something enormous and
shattering is happening.
And I think in reading the
other texts by Heidegger now,
one reads them with more open eyes
having read the Schwartze Hefte.
So, in that scene, I do think
they make an important ...
But I hope that will
become clearer tomorrow.
- [Jeff] If I could just add one thing
about the Schwartze Hefte.
The volume that was missing
and recently discovered this year 2014
with the illegitimate child of Heidegger,
that is in the archive in Marberg
and there are only about a few people
who can actually read Heidegger's schrift,
and so that has to be gone through,
but that's a very important book
because that's the book
that covers '45 to '46,
in that area and it should
have stuff in it about
how he reacted to the fact
that he was denied teaching.
Somebody talked about psychology,
my wife, God rest her soul,
she helped me on this film,
she co-wrote it and we edited together.
She was a clinical psychologist
and she made it very clear
that Heidegger was a
narcissist, and as a narcissist,
was incapable of admitting any wrongdoing,
and so that's a
psychological interpretation.
Another thing, too, is Heidegger,
when he had his nervous breakdown in 1945,
at the low point in his life,
he went to a sanitarium where there was,
I can't remember his name,
I'm sure you know his name--
- [Tom] Binswanger.
- Binswanger.
- Yeah, who was an
existentialist psychologist,
whatever that may mean,
so he was involved with
psychology at that time.
So, next question?
- [Richard] Yeah, please.
- [Audience Member] I
have an unserious question
and a serious question.
The unserious question is what's the name
of that wonderful song and who sang it?
But the serious question,
I would like to hear some discussion,
the serious question is given your film
and given the Black Notebooks,
what are people supposed to do who believe
that the question about being,
the question concerning
technology, and other questions
are important and for
those who have all along
thought they were philosophically
meaningless or worthless,
what are they supposed to do
with this information now?
- That's a good question.
To answer the first question
which was frivolous,
Germany today has a fabulous ...
Well, it's gone on since the '20s,
a great tradition of political cabaret,
and there's tons of really
sharp, biting critical attacks
against the German politicians,
against everything and they're very funny,
and there's a group
called Pigor and Eichhorn,
and they write music
and they wrote the famous Heidegger song.
If you go into the internet,
there's even a rock band
that does a version of this,
♫ Was ist sein? Was ist sein?
You know, I was so down
when I was doing this film,
at times, I said, "I
need to have a break."
So, but I need to have
the rights for the music,
so I called them up, they're in Berlin,
and we spent an hour and a half
doing jokes back and forth,
and finally he said, "Kid,
you can have the music.
"We just want to have a
couple of copies of the DVD."
But they're highly critical,
political cabaretists
and they attacked
Heidegger with this song.
- I would like to add a footnote to this.
I hope that you all do listen to the song
on the internet, it's easy to get.
But, you didn't give us the whole song.
I sort of am sorry that you didn't do it.
"Da hat da Heidegger ma wieder recht."
That was one--
- "Heidegger hat wieder recht."
- Yeah, that was one.
- I had it in my six
hour version, I'm sorry.
(audience laughs)
- But, I hope all will
enjoy. It's a very good song.
- It's very clever.
- Yeah, very clever.
- [Richard] Yeah, we--
- We have a question over here.
- [Richard] Well, there
was a serious question.
- Oh, sorry!
- [Richard] You should
have asked that first.
(audience laughs)
- [Richard] I would
expect that Karsten or Tom
would have a good answer
for that question.
- Do you want to answer
the serious question?
- [Tom] Yes, if you wanna, you go ahead.
(audience laughs)
- I think the serious question had to do
with the fact that we
have great difficulty
reading Heidegger because
Heidegger really thinks
that our whole culture,
that culture which has led
to so much that we think very important,
democracy, science as
we have it, etc., etc.,
our modern world, in short,
has missed something crucial.
And that is the key to reading Heidegger,
that's the Seinsfrage
is a question that calls
into question the presuppositions
on which our science rests,
and that means on which
our technology rests,
and that means on the way,
it calls into question the way
our everyday life has unfolded.
And Heidegger, the talk
which will come up tomorrow
because of that one statement
where Heidegger's attack on
using numbers becomes crucial.
Heidegger thinks that
we are no longer open
to the particular in its particularity.
That is, in a way, there's an interesting,
we won't have that symposium,
but that would be a really
interesting symposium,
comparing Benjamin's essay on the feat
of the work of art in the age
of its technical reproducability
with Heidegger's origin
of the work of art.
It's a very interesting topic here
that deserves, really, a symposium.
I think there we could get
at something very essential,
but Heidegger's afraid
that we are so fascinated
by seeing individuals
under a certain rubric
and thereby no longer do justice
not just to individuals, even to things,
that we are no longer as open
to reality as we should be.
That's the key thought.
- [Richard] I need to add
the other bookend here.
As I said at the outset,
I don't know if there's
someone who writes on Heidegger
from whom I've learned
more than Karsten Harries,
so I'm thrilled that he's here
and I appreciate his
very sympathetic remarks
about what we can still
learn from Heidegger
and don't deny them,
but I would just like to add
that one of the problems
of the Black Notebooks
is that we have someone trying
to decipher, and analyze,
and comprehend what the
Germans and the French
call actualities, or contemporary events,
basing himself on a standpoint
that is 2,400 years old,
relying on the Seinsgedanke,
the thought of being,
going back to Heraclitus
and assuming that all philosophy
and thinking beginning with Plato
is a phenomenon of
decline, Verfallsphänomen,
and this is a big mistake,
this is a big fallacy
because it claims that we
really, to speak pointedly,
we have almost nothing
to learn from philosophy
from the pre-Socratics down to Heidegger.
This perspective, Karsten expressed it
in a very user-friendly
way, which I appreciate,
a bit new age, but ...
By the same token, there
is a great potential
for distortion and misunderstanding
and too sharp a dividing line
between imminence, the
imminence of everyday,
and Heidegger's standpoint of the history
of being, Seinsgeschichte, and just think,
those of you who don't read German
can take my word for it or
can see what Karsten has
to say tomorrow morning
in his contribution,
the level of distortion, miscomprehension,
and the elephant in the room is that
'til the end of the war,
even when things start
degenerating and disintegrating,
even when all the Jews have
been removed from Freiburg
and presumably elsewhere in Germany,
there was no secret about this,
you can't keep the disappearance
of half a million people
entirely a secret.
Heidegger's still supporting
the notion of the German Folk
and conceiving of the
notion of the German Folk,
in its particularism, as das Rettende,
the saving power of the West.
So, I think both of these
aspects go hand-in-hand.
- You still didn't get
your question answered.
- [Audience Member] No, both of you
gave very wonderful, succinct
interpretations of Heidegger,
but both of them could have been said
without the film and
without the Black Notebooks.
How does the facts in the
film and the Black Notebooks
affect the interpretation whether its--
- Well, I did mention the Black Notebooks.
I said this is a wealth of evidence
that shows you how the
perspective of being
is incapable of
comprehending current events.
- If I might answer, I think
what you wanted to ask is
how can these people
who have dedicated years
of academic work studying
Heidegger's thought,
how are they going to deal with the fact
of what my film says and
what the Black Notebooks say.
- [Audience Member] Both
on a psychological level,
but much more interesting
on a philosophical level.
- Right.
- [Audience Member] What is the impact
of the facts in your film and the facts
that we'll talk about tomorrow,
the anti-Semitism in the Black Notebooks,
what is the philosophical
impact on either being in time,
which may or may not be affected by this,
or by later questions in Heidegger
that would then either
mean it's worth continuing
to study him or it's no
longer worth studying him
because it infects, which
we'll talk about tomorrow,
infects the whole stuff,
that's the question.
That's what I'd like to hear an answer to.
- And I don't think you've
got an answer to that.
Let me just answer it
with a slight anecdote.
When I showed this film
at Penn State University,
on the panel were distinguished scholars,
including two Heideggerians,
one was Dennis Schmidt,
really a nice guy, very
friendly, very nice,
and I showed the film and he
was the first person to speak,
and he looked at me, and he
said, "I don't know what to say,
"but that's got to be the
worst film I have ever seen."
And then they came ready for bear,
they attacked it right and left,
which is perfectly okay,
but what I saw there was methinks
he doth protest too much.
He came up to me and he said,
"Listen, I'm a serious scholar.
"I've worked 30 years on Heidegger
"and you're coming around
and you're making these glib comments."
He said, "I wanna be taken seriously
"and I think there's more to
this than what your film says."
But the question really is very primal,
and that is what do you do
when you come to the conclusion
that perhaps a great
thinker was also a Nazi
and how do you reconcile that.
- [Audience Member] Or whether
it affects his thinking,
that's the real question.
- It has affected some
people's, but not ...
- We have six hours of conference tomorrow
to address this question.
I just want to, in defense, in
justification of Jeff's film,
there's a confusion that comes up often
which is this is a film,
this isn't scholarship,
it's a narrative, it's a construction,
and it's suggestive so it doesn't presume
to solve any of these problems,
although it does raise
a lot of issues. Yeah.
- [Together] We have a question over here.
- We have to vacate the
room in a minute or two, so.
- Let's have the last two questions--
- What?
- And this lady over here, very quickly.
- Alright, I think two quick
questions with quick answers.
- [Audience Member] 1927,
the year of the birth
of the being in nothingness,
Henry Ford apologized
for his publication of
the International Jew.
Makes me wonder, Hitler
having a portrait of Ford,
Henry Ford, on his desk, makes me wonder
what was Heidegger's views
of United States, Americans,
and the British,
specifically Bertrand Russell
and his colleague, Wittgenstein.
- Very quickly, Heidegger
knew nothing about America,
had no interest in America,
yet was quite ready to criticize America.
He had no understanding of
American culture whatsoever.
- Well, it comes up in
the Black Notebooks,
America is just the representation
of what he calls machination, calculation,
he deals with American in
the most superficial cliches,
and this is another problem.
Some of these insights aren't untrue,
but they're just such partial
and superficial truths
that they really don't get us anywhere.
Last question, please.
- [Karsten] Can I add?
I want to add something
to the Wittgenstein reference here.
The young Heidegger, the
first lengthy publication was
something like Recent Research on Logic,
which shows that Heidegger had
read Russell very carefully,
Whitehead, admired Frege a great deal,
and calls himself then,
in the dissertation,
a mathematician in whom some historian
for the first time awakened a sense
for the importance of history.
But when we talk about the
development of Heidegger,
we should not forget that he
and the young Wittgenstein
come out of the exact same logical milieu,
so that the dissertation is, in many ways,
surprisingly close to the Tractatus.
And they're very interesting,
that's an interesting discussion
so one should not think of Heidegger
as somebody who just didn't look
at Russell or Whitehead or Frege.
No, he knew these inside-out.
- Okay, we have two questions right here.
This man--
- [Richard] I think this
was the last question.
- He was first, I'm sorry.
You're next. Go ahead.
- [Audience Member] Thank you.
You alluded in the film to
the denazification trials
that took place after
the second World War.
Everybody knows that those
trials were basically farcical
and, for example, Globke
who was the principal author
of the Racial Laws, the Nuremberg Laws,
he later became Konrad
Adenauer's assistant.
Kurt Kiesinger later became Chancellor
of the Federal Republic.
How did Heidegger escape denazification?
That's one question, the other--
- [Richard] I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
We have to leave the
building in 90 seconds,
so we'll have to stay
with that one question.
Thank you very much and
we hope to see many of you
tomorrow morning and afternoon.
(audience applauses)
