Heidegger among the Nazis

Contextualize Heidegger’s politics among the range of competing interpretations of National Socialism in the German intellectual scene

National Socialism did not present itself to German intellectuals as one settled doctrine. In the late Weimar and early Nazi years, it was variously interpreted as a sovereign state revolution, a national-spiritual rebirth, a racial myth, or—by its opponents—a manufactured political mythology and a form of fascist mass manipulation.

Decisionist-statist reading. Carl Schmitt is the clearest case here: his Weimar works attacked parliamentary liberalism, grounded politics in the friend/enemy distinction, and sought a strong executive capable of decisive action in a state of crisis. In that register, National Socialism could appear as the force that ended liberal indecision and restored political unity. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Conservative-revolutionary / national-rebirth reading. A broader right-wing milieu—Moeller van den Bruck, Jünger, Freyer, and others—framed Germany’s crisis as one of Kultur versus liberal-commercial “civilization,” rejected both the capitalist West and the communist East, and imagined a specifically German “third way.” Herf’s reconstruction of this milieu shows how it fused anti-Enlightenment politics with enthusiasm for discipline, technology, mobilization, and sacrifice; Jünger is emblematic as the “ardent militarist” whose wartime and postwar writing made struggle and mobilization spiritually meaningful.

Racial-mythic / völkisch reading. Alfred Rosenberg represents a different pole: Nazism as an explicit doctrine of Nordic racial purity, anti-Semitism, and eastward expansion. In this version, the regime’s essence lay in racial hierarchy and mythic ethnonational destiny, not just anti-liberal revolt or constitutional decisionism. (Encyclopedia Britannica)

Liberal-humanist counter-reading. For Cassirer and, in a different way, Jaspers, Nazism was not a national rescue but a collapse of reasoned politics into myth and domination. Cassirer’s Myth of the State treats modern political myths as manufactured products amplified by mass communication and substituting for rational principles; Jaspers, after the break with Heidegger and his own persecution under the regime, defended the university as a free community of truth-seeking rather than an instrument of political alignment. (Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Marxist / critical-theory counter-reading. Walter Benjamin’s formula is the sharpest: fascism gives the masses expression without rights, preserves property relations, aestheticizes politics, and culminates in war. That critique directly targeted the kind of redemptive militarism and “total mobilization” celebrated on the Weimar right.

Within that spectrum, Heidegger belongs closest to the conservative-revolutionary interpretation, with some proximity to Schmitt’s anti-liberalism, but he is not best understood either as a Schmittian jurist or as a Rosenbergian racial ideologue. The basic facts matter: Heidegger became rector of Freiburg in April 1933, joined the Nazi Party on May 1, and as rector took part in the university’s Gleichschaltung with Nazi aims. Yet the long-running dispute over his case—opportunist, naïf, would-be reformer of the movement, or committed believer—exists precisely because his Nazism was articulated less as party doctrine than as an attempt to endow 1933 with philosophical-historical significance. (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

So Heidegger’s politics are best contextualized as a metapolitical Nazism: he read the movement primarily as an event of historical destiny, collective resolve, and spiritual renewal of a people, rather than chiefly as a constitutional order (Schmitt) or a racial program in Rosenberg’s blunt style. That places him nearer the Jünger/Freyer side of the scene: anti-liberal, anti-parliamentary, hostile to bourgeois normality, attracted to sacrifice and collective mobilization, and receptive to the idea of a German “mission” beyond both liberal capitalism and Marxism.

At the same time, it would be too soft to describe this merely as a “higher” or more refined version of conservatism. The post-2014 debate over the Black Notebooks matters because those notebooks contain anti-Semitic passages, often invoking “World-Jewry,” even after Heidegger’s disenchantment with aspects of actually existing Nazism; scholars describe that anti-Semitism not as a stray prejudice but as something woven into the language of his thought. So the distance from Rosenberg is a difference of idiom and philosophical level, not innocence. (MIT Press)

The cleanest one-line placement is this: Heidegger was the philosopher of National Socialism’s conservative-revolutionary self-understanding—its claim to be not merely a party program or a race doctrine, but a world-historical rupture that would overcome liberal modernity and re-found German existence. That is exactly why Cassirer, Jaspers, and Benjamin matter as foils: they saw, each in a different vocabulary, that this “spiritualization” of politics was not an antidote to Nazism but one of the ways it could be intellectually dignified. (Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

I can turn this into a compact comparison of Heidegger with Schmitt, Jünger, and Rosenberg specifically.