Anti-Semitism Was No Sideshow to Martin Heidegger’s Thought

Martin Heidegger was one of the 20th century’s most important philosophers, and his ideas did much to shape existentialism and many other intellectual movements. He also was a member of the Nazi party and for a time an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler—facts that many scholars and thinkers long downplayed or overlooked, treating Heidegger’s political tendencies as separate from his core ideas or as simple cowardice in the face of external pressure. But the publication of his “black notebooks” over the past decade has shown that his commitment to Nazism, and to anti-Semitism, ran deep. Reviewing Richard Wolin’s book Heidegger in Ruins, Jeffrey Herf writes: