Good Nazis, “Killable Bodies”, and Guilt By Association
When a Zionist dismissed Hannah Arendt by citing her relationship with Martin Heidegger, the German philosopher who joined the Nazi Party, I replied,
You are indulging in guilt by association, a common trick of people who don’t want to engage with the actual argument.
…As for whether Heidegger was antisemitic, even Nazis thought he was not.
We know this because Karl Löwith, a friend of Heidegger’s who fled Germany when the Nazis came to power, wrote:
The petty-bourgeois orthodoxy of the [Nazi] party was suspicious of Heidegger’s National Socialism insofar as Jewish and racial considerations played no role. [His book] Sein und Zeit [Being and Time] was dedicated to the Jew Husserl, his Kant book to the half-Jew Scheler, and in his courses at Freiburg, Bergson and Simmel were taught.
Arendt and others who knew Heidegger said his membership in the Nazi Party was an astonishing personal failing, but that did not mean he was antisemitic. Heidegger failed to understand the essence of what he had joined. If you think that’s impossible to do, read on.
Researching the reason good people stood by Heidegger got me thinking about the apparent oxymoron, “good Nazi”, which made me remember two people I think of as casual friends.
