Introduction to Martin Heidegger’s “The German Student as Worker” and “The German University”*

Under the Third Reich, the true meaning of the pseudo-revolutionary concept of Arbeit was best demonstrated by Heidegger. Taking his cue from Ernst Jünger, Heidegger exalted work “existentially.” He demanded that his students surrender their academic insularity for the more demanding and risky life of Arbeitsdienst or “labor service.” Emblematic of these developments was the unspeakable motto that greeted prisoners as they entered the Arbeits- and Todeslager at Auschwitz: “Arbeit Macht Frei.”

 Frank Trommler, „The Nationalization of Arbeit” 

I

The publication of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks has provoked a wide-ranging reassessment of his philosophy as well as a re-examination of the philosophical motivations that catalyzed his support for National Socialism during the early 1930s. The Notebooks reveal that Heidegger attributed to National Socialism a pivotal ontological-historical role in the transition from the “Greek beginning” to “another beginning” (anderer Anfang). In his eyes, National Socialism prefigured the overcoming (Überwindung) of “European nihilism” as diagnosed by Nietzsche, Spengler, and other Zivilisationskritiker. This accounts for Heidegger’s encomium, in his 1936 Schelling lectures, to Europe’s reigning fascist dictators, Hitler and Mussolini, for having “introduced a countermovement to nihilism.” ^[i]

Heidegger consistently imputed unique eschatological significance to what he termed the “metaphysics of German Dasein.” ^[ii] As he declaimed in the Black Notebooks circa 1933: “Only someone who is German [der Deutsche] is capable of poetically articulating Being in an originary way” – an avowal which confirms that Heidegger articulated his commitment to the ideology of “German exceptionalism” in ontological-historical terms. ^[iii] Heidegger reiterated this view toward the end of the 1930s, maintaining that, “The anticipatory and essential moment of decision concerning the essence of history is reserved to the Germans.” ^[iv]  

With the publication of Heidegger’s correspondence with his brother, Fritz, it became clear that Heidegger’s commitment to National Socialism dated not from 1933, but from 1931. Heidegger’s letter to Fritz of 13 December 1931 attests that, so enamored was Heidegger with Mein Kampf that he sent a copy of the “Hitler book” to Fritz as a Christmas gift. The missive to Fritz clarifies that Heidegger’s “enlistment” for National Socialism was, in no small measure, motivated by his fascination with Hitler’s charisma. Toward the end of the letter, Heidegger’s reflections on contemporary politics devolved into a panegyric to the Führer’s spellbinding leadership qualities:  

No one who is insightful will dispute the fact that, whereas often the rest of us remain lost in the dark, this is a man who is possessed of a sure and remarkable political instinct. In the years to come, many other forces will fuse with the National Socialist movement. It is no longer a question of petty party politics. Instead, what is at stake is the redemption or destruction [Rettung oder Untergang] of Europe and Western Culture. Whoever fails to grasp this fact today will succumb to the gathering chaos. Reflection on such matters does not stand in opposition to the peace of the Christmas season. Instead, it leads us directly to the essence and mission of the Germans – that is, to the ‘origin’ of this wonderful celebration. ^[v]

Three years later, in “The German University” (1934), Heidegger restated his view of Hitler as a contemporary roi thaumaturge, claiming that, “The essence of the National Socialist Revolution derived from Adolf Hitler’s elevation and implementation of the new Spirit of Gemeinschaft as the determinant power of the new order of the Volk.” [302] 

The December 1931 letter to Fritz is significant, since it demonstrates that, for Heidegger, the stakes of National Socialism were not merely “political” in the narrow sense. Instead, they were metaphysical, insofar as they concerned “the redemption . . . of European and Western Culture.”

II

The two Heidegger texts that follow – neither of which, heretofore, has been available in English – are indispensable for clarifying the philosophical and ideological bases of Heidegger’s engagement for National Socialism. 

The first text, “The German Student as Worker,” was presented by Heidegger as a radio talk on 25 November 1933. Although Heidegger delivered the address in Munich, it was simultaneously broadcast on six regional stations: Frankfurt, Freiburg, Kassel, Trier, Cologne, and Stuttgart – a circumstantial aspect that attests to its importance. At the time, Heidegger was engaged in a struggle for the philosophical leadership of the Nazi movement; in the words of Otto Pöggeler, he was seeking “to lead the leader” (den Führer führen). ^[vi] Apart from Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” “The German Student as Worker” contains Heidegger’s most detailed and thoroughgoing philosophical justification of National Socialism as a movement that portended the “total transformation of German Dasein.” 

“The German Student as Worker” reflects the immense impact that Ernst Jünger’s theories of “Total Mobilization” (1930) and The Worker (Der Arbeiter: Gestalt und Herrschaft; 1932) had on Heidegger’s political thinking at this point.^[vii] In Zu Ernst Jünger (GA 90), Heidegger commented on Jünger’s importance for his understanding of contemporary politics as follows: “Ernst Jünger was the only figure to produce an interpretation of World War I that grasped the war’s military essence [seinem kriegerischen Wesen] . . . Jünger’s account is unequalled in the way that it grasps the metaphysical precept that defines this age . . . : Nietzsche’s ‘Will to Power.’ Jünger replaces . . . Nietzsche’s principle with a term that is more adequate to our century, one that stems from the tradition of German metaphysics since Leibniz: ‘Arbeit.’” ^[viii]

During his rectorship, Heidegger repeatedly addressed the ontological value of “work” or “Arbeit”: in “Labor Service and the University” (14 June 1933), “The Call to Labor Service” (23 January 1934), and other texts. ^[ix] In “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” Heidegger stressed the importance of “Labor Service” (Arbeitsdienst), in addition to “Military Service” (Wehrdienst) and “Knowledge Service” (Wissensdienst), as the central pillars of his planned university reforms: as part of his program to reestablish, as he put it, “the spiritual world of the Volk [through] . . . forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of the Volk [erd- und bluthäftigen Kräfte].” To reconceive “the spiritual world of the Volk” in this manner would allow Germany to “overcome” (überwinden) the idea of “spirit” as a free-floating “cultural superstructure” which predominated under liberalism. ^[x]

For Heidegger, the ontological significance of “Arbeit” transcended “politics” in the customary and narrow sense. To judge by Heidegger’s treatment of “Arbeit” in Logic as a Question Concerning the Essence of Language (1933–34), he was at pains to re-conceptualize “Arbeit” as an expression of “authenticity” (Eigentlichkeit). Heidegger viewed “Arbeit” as being on a par with other the “existentials” of Being and Time: “formal indications” such as “Care” (Sorge), “Decisiveness” (Entschlossenheit), and Historicity (Geschichtlichkeit). Heidegger’s reassessment of “Arbeit” as a modality of “Being-ready-to-hand” (Zuhandenheit) signified a rethinking of his seminal discussion of “tools” (Werkzeuge) and “equipment” (Zeuge) in Being and Time, Division I. 

Additional evidence suggests that Heidegger, under the influence of the Third Reich’s Arbeitsideologie, viewed “Arbeit” as an autonomous mode of ontological “unconcealment” (Unverborgenheit) whereby the “Being of beings” is revealed. Thus, in Logic as a Question Concerning the Essence of Language, Heidegger exalted Arbeit “existentially” as a capacity that “transports Dasein into the openness of what is.” As Heidegger explained: “Arbeit = the Present [dieGegenwart]. The present is not the ‘Now’ [das Jetztige]; rather, it is the Present insofar as it transposes our Being into the work-related emancipation of beings [werkgerechte Befreiung des Seiendes]. As someone who works [Arbeitender], man is transported into the openness of what is. This Being-transported toward things belongs to the essence of our Being.” ^[xi]

National Socialism’s “ideology of work” – the initials NSDAP stood for the National Socialist German Workers’ Party – had a profound influence on Heidegger. It is well known that, in the aftermath of the November Revolution (1918), which brought World War I to an end and precipitated the collapse of the Kaiserreich, the German Right viewed the challenge of winning the working class over to the cause of German nationalism as a matter of extreme political urgency. In this respect, Spengler’s political tract, Prussianism and Socialism (1919) – a pendant to The Decline of the West (1918) that celebrated the merits of “German Socialism” as opposed to Marxian “international socialism” – established an important precedent. Following the Nazi Machtergreifung, the Third Reich’s Arbeitsideologie escalated into full gear. Within the first few months of the regime, the Social Democratic trade unions were crushed and the Reichsarbeitsfront (RAF) was established to indoctrinate German workers with the Nazi credo. Reichsarbeitsdienst(national labor service), Arbeitslager (labor camps), and Schönheit der Arbeit (Beauty of Labor) were set in motion to convince the German working class that the Nazi dictatorship had its best interests foremost in mind – a claim that, needless to say, was little more than propaganda.  

Following the important precedents established by Spengler and Jünger, Heidegger perceived Nazism, first and foremost, as an Arbeitswelt and an Arbeitergesellschaft. His understanding of National Socialism as a “totally mobilized” Arbeitersstaat represents a crucial thematic link between “The German Student as Worker” and “The German University.” 

Heidegger’s assertion in “The German University” that “German socialism demands hierarchy, unconditional service, and the irreproachable honor of Arbeit” coalesced with Spengler’s definition of socialism in Prussianism and Socialism in terms of the Prussian values of “duty” (Pflicht), “authority” (Herrschaft), and a “readiness for struggle” (Kampfbereitschaft). ^[xii] In keeping with Jünger’s claims in Der Arbeiter, Heidegger regarded the universalization of the Arbeiter “Gestalt” as an invaluable “metaphysical” blessing: at a stroke, the National Socialist Arbeitergesellschaft had eliminated the lacerations and divisions of political liberalism; thereby, it paved the way for a unified and militarized Volksgemeinschaft: a renascent “national community” that was united in Arbeit and Kampf. (Nazi Arbeitsideologie – in what seemed to be a tacit nod to Jünger’s thesis in Der Arbeiter – frequently referred to “workers” as Soldaten der Arbeit, or “soldiers of labor.”) As Heidegger commented in “The German University”: “On what basis does the Volk attain its true composition and unity?  Only insofar as the actions and reactions of every individual, group, and social stratum are conceived as Arbeit. Thanks to the new spirit of Gemeinschaft, Arbeit, for the first time, attains its authentic meaning. ‘Der Arbeiter’ is not, as Marxism would have it, a simple object of exploitation … whose salvation lies in class struggle. Arbeit is neither a commodity, nor does it merely serve to produce goods for others.” ^[xiii]

Heidegger insisted that, in contrast to Marxism’s “degraded” understanding of the worker as an “object of exploitation” and capitalism’s base utilitarian approach to work, National Socialism endowed Arbeit with a “spiritual” meaning. Hence, Heidegger held that with the advent of the Third Reich, Arbeit had, for the first time, become “something spiritual” (etwas Geistiges.) Thereby, Heidegger acknowledged another key component of Nazi Arbeitsideologie: its exaltation of the “nobility of work” (Edel der Arbeit). ^[xiv]

III

Heidegger presented “The German University” to a summer course for foreign students that was held at the University of Freiburg on 15 and 16 August 1934, some three months after he resigned as rector. Although the text was written with a specific occasion in mind, it occupies a unique niche in Heidegger’s oeuvre.  

In “The German University” Heidegger presented a succinct interpretation of the course of German history from the Wars of Liberation (1812–13) to the Nazi seizure of power. Although the German university’s “spiritual mission” had been formulated by Wilhelm von Humboldt in conjunction with the founding of the University of Berlin in 1810, Heidegger maintained that, until recently, that mission remained woefully unfulfilled. Heidegger disparaged the course of German historical development during the nineteenth century as an age in which “technics,” materialism, specialization, and the fragmentation of the Volk into warring “classes” and “parties” predominated. At the same time, he insisted that, despite this condition of acute disunity and “inner disintegration” (innerer Verfall), the redemptive promise of “secret Germany” (geheimes Deutschland) consistently shone through.  

In Heidegger’s chronology, the First World War signified a major turning point in Germany’s spiritual and historical development. Although the German defeat of 1918 represented a low point of national self-abasement, Heidegger, unambiguously alluding to Hitler, claimed that, out of the ashes of catastrophe, there miraculously emerged a man of providence: a “Führer,” who reawakened the Volk’s “existential Will” (Daseinswille) and redirected it toward its historical “calling” (Bestimmung). As Heidegger explained, “The real preparation for the National Socialist Revolution began, unwittingly, during the [First] World War. At the Front, there emerged an entirely new experience: an entirely new idea of Gemeinschaft. The new Spirit of the Front bore within itself the Will to become, in the years that followed, the defining power of the Volk’s Dasein.” 

Heidegger interpreted the Fronterlebnis, as did many radical nationalists at the time, as a prefiguration of the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft. In the “War Memorial” address that Heidegger delivered a few months earlier in May 1934, he took this argument a step further by insinuating that Germany’s two million war dead, “whose tombs encircle the Reich and German-Österreich like a mysterious [geheimnisvoller] wreath,” had risen from their graves to make common cause the “National Awakening” (Nationaler Aufbruch) of 1933. On these grounds, Heidegger insisted, “It is not we who . . .summon the memory of our dead through remembrance. Instead, it is the dead themselves who summon us toward decision and put us to the test.” ^[xv]

Heidegger reassured his audience that the spiritual liaison between the Frontgeneration and the National Socialist Volksgemeinschaft portended neither the advent of “militarism” nor the preparation for a “new war.” Instead, the “Frontgeist” (sic) signified “the spiritual conquest and creative transformation of war.” Whereas other nations remained hopelessly mired in the technological entrapments of modern warfare, the German approach to war was spiritual, insofar as it was conducted in the name of the Volk’s exalted “mission” and “destiny.”

Heidegger’s prodigious efforts to “spiritualize” the Kriegerlebnis reflected the German philosophy guild’s attempt, twenty years earlier, to exalt the war as a “spiritual struggle,” thereby refuting the charge leveled by Germany’s opponents that German “war enthusiasm” (Kriegsbegeisterung) was merely the logical culmination of the spirit of “Prussian militarism.” With the outbreak of war, renowned German philosophers such as Max Scheler, Rudolph Eucken, and Paul Natorp rose to the occasion, claiming that the war was being waged on behalf of the higher precepts of “Kultur” and “deutsche Innerlichkeit,” in opposition to the instrumentalist–utilitarian mindset that was characteristic of Anglo-Saxon Zivilisation. Thus, in The Genius of War and the German War (1915), Scheler maintained that Germany was fighting the war in order to emancipate Europe from “alien, neo-capitalist forms of life” that had been unleashed by the Anglo-Saxon powers. ^[xvi]Similarly, in “Der Tag des Deutschen” (1915), the Marburg neo-Kantian Paul Natorp argued that, “[As Germans,], we feel ourselves to be warriors of God against a ‘world of devils’: as those whose appointed task it is to fulfill the sublime prophecies of humanity.” ^[xvii]

Following the lead of Scheler and Natorp, German mandarins insisted that Germany’s war effort reflected the attributes of “German national character” (die deutsche Art). In support of these claims, leading German philosophers cultivated a “Deutschland Metaphysik” – a “sacralization” of German spiritual and historical traditions – in their quest to ennoble the Second Empire’s war aims, and thereby, to spread the gospel of “German exceptionalism.”

Heidegger’s own Deutschtümelei – his boundless metaphysical enthusiasm for “things German” – reflected the “Deutschland Metaphysik” that was contrived during the Great War by influential predecessors such as Scheler, Natorp, Werner Sombart, and Ernst Troeltsch. Thereby, his attribution of a salvific, eschatological “mission” to “secret Germany” coalesced with the paradigm of “metaphysical nationalism,” whose origins may be traced to Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (1808).^[xviii] As Fichte cautioned his fellow Germans at the time: “Should the German not assume world government through philosophy, the Turks, the Negroes, the North American tribes will finally take it over and put an end to the present civilization.” ^[xix] “If you go under, all humanity goes under with you, without hope for any future restoration.” ^[xx]

Heidegger’s assertion in the Black Notebooks that, “The essence of the German calling [Berufung des Deutschen] is not merely something conditional. . . It is unconditional, insofar as, through the Germans, the essence of Being itself becomes an object of struggle” was entirely consonant with this tradition of metaphysically imbued German national chauvinism. ^[xxi] His cynical attempt, in the previously cited December 1931 letter to Fritz, to reconcile the brutality of National Socialism with “the peace of the Christmas season” exemplified the distinctive amalgam of “barbarism and civilization” that, in so many respects, defined the essence of Nazi rule. ^[xxii]

One of the central problems of Heidegger’s metaphysical glorification of “German exceptionalism” – an orientation that was based on Heidegger’s conviction that Deutschtum possessed privileged access to the “sendings of Being” (Schickungen des Seins) – was that it denigrated other Völker, ex hypothesi, as ontologically inferior. Hence, Heidegger’s reprehensible claim in Logic as a Question Concerning the Essence of Language that, “Although Negroes [Neger] are men, they have no history.” ^[xxiii] Similarly, in Nature, History, and State (1934), Heidegger proposed that, “The nature of German space is revealed in a distinctly different manner to a Slavic Volk than it is to us. In the case of Semitic nomads, it will perhaps never be revealed at all.” ^[xxiv] It was but a short step from Heidegger’s celebration of the existential uniqueness of “deutsches Raum” to his racial condemnation of “Negroes,” “Slavs,” and “Jews,” whose cognitive incapacities were, according to Heidegger, the mark of a more deep-seated, ontological inferiority. 

Heidegger’s repeated indictment of other peoples as “rootless” (bodenlos), “worldless” (weltlos), and “unhistorical” (geschichtslos) was not merely a regrettable lapsus or “one-off.” Instead, they went to the very heart of Heideggerian Seinsgeschichte itself, which, as the Black Notebooks attest, was predicated on a doctrine of Germanmetaphysical superiority. To wit, Heidegger’s assertion, circa 1940, that“The anticipatory and essential moment of decision [Entscheidung] concerning the essence of history is reserved to the Germans.” ^[xxv] Heidegger’s exaltation of Germanentum qua Herrenrasse was ontologically-historically conditioned. True to the ideology of German exceptionalism, he held that the Germans displayed an inborn, existential capacity for ontological insight that had been denied to other peoples. As he argued in An Introduction to Metaphysics, the Germans’ status as the “most metaphysical Volk” (das metaphysische Volk) corresponded to Germany’s Mittellage, its geopolitical situatedness in the European “middle.” ^[xxvi]

*We would like to express our immense gratitude to the late Hermann Heidegger for granting permission to translate the two texts that follow, “The German Student as Worker” (1933) and “The German University” (1934) into English.  

Richard Wolin is Distinguished Professor of History and Political Science at the Graduate Center, CUNY. His books include The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger and Heidegger in Ruins: Between Philosophy and Ideology, which is forthcoming from Yale University Press.

Notes

^[i] Heidegger, Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, GA 42 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1995), 40-41.

^[ii] „Mein liebes Seelchen!“ Briefe Martin Heideggers an seiner Frau Elfride, 1915-1970, Gertrud Heidegger, ed. (Munich: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 2005), 116.

^[iii] Heidegger, Überlegungen II-VI, GA 94, 27. In Politische Philosophie in Deutschland: Studien zu ihrer Geschichte (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1974), Hermann Lübbe describes the emergence of a dogmatic “Deutschland Metaphysik” as an integral component of the “Ideas of 1914.” As the epitome of this mentalité, Lübbe cites Marburg neo-Kantian Paul Natorp’s (1854 – 1924) dictum: “The German aims to conquer the world, not for his own sake, but instead for that of humanity; not in order, thereby, to gain something, but instead as an act of generosity” (194). Lübbe traces the development of this “Deutschland Metaphysik” back to J. G. Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation (1807-08). According to Lübbe, Fichte, by elevating “German thinking, German philosophy, and German science” to the status of a metaphysical summun bonum, endowed “what was merely factual with the character of necessity.” Hence, Fichte’s demarche is only “comprehensible as the metaphysical doubling of what is merely factual, thereby transforming it into an inner essence” (196 – 97).

^[iv] Heidegger, Überlegungen XII-XV, GA 96, 235; emphasis added. 

^[v] Heidegger und der Antisemitismus: Positionen in Widerstreit. Mit Briefen von Martin und Fritz Heidegger, W. Homolka and A. Heidegger, eds. (Freiburg: Herder, 2016), 21-22. 

^[vi] See Pöggeler, “Den Führer führen: Heidegger und kein Ende,“ Philosophische Rundschau 32 (1985), 26–67.

^[vii] Jünger, “Total Mobilization,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, Richard Wolin, ed. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991), 119–139. Jünger, Der Arbeiter: Gestalt und Herrschaft (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982). 

^[viii] Heidegger Zu Ernst Jünger, GA 90 (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2001), 226-27. 

^[ix] Heidegger, „Labor Service and the University” and “The Call to Labor Service,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, 42-43 and 53-55; “Der deutsche Student als Arbeiter,” in Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 2000), 198-208. 

^[x] Heidegger, “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, 33-34.

^[xi] Heidegger, Logik als Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, GA 38, (Frankfurt: Klostermann, 1998), 153. 

^[xii] Heidegger, „25 Jahre nach unserem Abiturium,“ Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, GA 16, 281-82. 

^[xiii] Heidegger, „Die deutsche Universität,“ Reden und andere Zeugnisse eines Lebensweges, 302-03. 

^[xiv] For an excellent discussion of the “nobility of work,” see Joan Campbell, Joy in Work, German Work (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989): 327-28.

^[xv] Heidegger, „25 Jahre nach unserem Abiturium,“ 280.

^[xvi] Scheler, Der Genius des Krieges und der deutsche Krieg (Leipzig: Verlag der Weissen Bücher,1915), 74.

^[xvii] Natorp, Der Tag des Deutschen: Vier Kriegsaufsätze (Hagen: Otto Rippel, 1915), 55. Natorp (1854-1924) was instrumental in bringing Heidegger from Freiburg to Marburg in 1923. Also see Hermann Lübbe, „Die philosophischen Ideen von 1914,“ Politische Philosophie in Deutschland: Studien zu ihrer Geschichte, 171-235. See also, Nils Bruhn, Vom Kulturkritiker zum „Kulturkrieger“: Paul Natorps Weg in den „Krieg der Geister,“ (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2007). 

^[xviii] On this lineage or vector, see the important study by Kurt Flasch, Die geistige Mobilmachung: die deutschen Intellektuellen und der erste Weltkrieg (Berlin: Alexander Fest, 2000). 

^[xix] Fichte, Nachgelassene Werke III (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1962), 265. 

^[xx] Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, Gregory Moore, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 48, 195. 

^[xxi] Heidegger, Überlegungen VI-XI, GA 95, 372. 

^[xxii] See Ulrich Sieg, Geist und Gewalt: Deutsche Philosophen zwischen Kaiserreich und Nationalsozialismus (Munich: Hanser, 2013). Also see Ernst Troeltsch’s remarks in “Naturrecht und Humanität in der Weltpolitik” (1922): “The political thought of Germany is marked by a curious dualism that cannot help but strike every outside observer. On the one hand, you will see in abundance remnants of romanticism and lofty Idealism. On the other hand, you will see a realism that verges on cynicism and utter indifference to all morality and ideals. But, above all, what you see is . . . an astonishing combination of these two elements: an effort to brutalize romanticism and to romanticize cynicism.”

^[xxiii] Heidegger, Logik als Frage nach dem Wesen der Sprache, GA 38, 81. 

^[xxiv] Heidegger, „Über das Wesen und Begriff von Natur, Geschichte, und Staat,” Heidegger-Jahrbuch 4 (Freiburg: Karl Alber, 2009), 82.

^[xxv] Heidegger, Überlegungen XII-XV, GA 96, 235; emphasis added. 

^[xxvi] Heidegger, Einführung in die Metaphysik, GA 40 (Frankfurt: Klostermann,1983), 41.