Arendt and Heidegger, the postwar 'friendship"

[Markekohut]

Dear Herr Doctor Professor Heidegger, 

What ethnicity was I before I fell into reading Holderlin? 

Shabby Peasant

Sent from my iPad

On Dec 6, 2013, at 8:37 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de> wrote:

> 
> Actually Heidegger does not use the term 'race' in an affirmative sense. And where he discusses ethnicity it's never about biology or blood. Not only is Heidegger's notion of people (Volk) strictly culturalistic, it does not even refer to the concrete German people of his time. With a grain of salt you could say that Heidegger's 'Germans' are the future readers of the poet Hölderlin! He even writes in the mid 1930s   - vgl. Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), # 196: "Da-sein und Volk" - that one's people can never be goal or purpose and that such a traditionally ethnic understanding is just an extension of the liberalist ego-concept and the economic struggle (right, that manuscript had to be hidden by Heidegger's brother Fritz, because SS-men were already sitting in the lectures). Those future readers of Hölderlin are the coming people ("die Zukünftigen") of the last god (another idea of Hölderlin which Heidegger tried to develop). So to become German à la Heidegger you don't have to be born in Germany or have a German passport or like to eat sauerkraut or anything like that. All you need - "Language is the house of Being" - is to learn the language and to read Hölderlin in original. In this sense Heidegger called Hölderlin "the most German of all Germans" in 1934. For Heidegger the study of Hölderlin's poetry is the only (!) way to get an understanding what being German means and who the real Germans are. It is obvious that Heidegger does here - Hölderlin became psychotic in later years and did not exactly match Hitler's ideal of German toughness - not imply ethnic cleansing, 'euthanasia' or others ways to 'improve the people's body'. In fact, the close reading of Hölderlin led Heidegger to a decidedly European thinking, since Hölderlin nourished the idea of a mutual reference of ancient Greek and modern German culture ("vaterländische Umkehr"). This also (co)inspired Heidegger's interest in Asian thought.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friedrich_H%C3%B6lderlin
> 
> And here you can hear Heidegger reading Hölderlin's poem "Der Ister":
> 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQk060lcA2M
> 
> On 05.12.2013 18:46, Joseph Tracy wrote:
>> The strain in Heidegger's thinking that seems most dangerous to me was something very common to his time. It is the idea of race , of some essential unique identity of a "people" which was becoming synonymous with nation. This identity generally turns out to be the master race, the chosen ones, the exceptional nation, the smartest kids in the room, the true faith, the royal rulers of land and sea. Purity ain't easy; there is all that cleaning to do: ethnic cleansing ...
> 
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