A Nazi Philosopher: martin Heidegger Poem by Paul Hartal

Born in Messkirch, in the Black Forest region,
the German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1884-1976)
studied philosophy under the phenomenologist
Edmund Husserl, a Jewish scholar at the University
of Freiburg. In 1933 Heidegger became the rector
of Freiburg University. He delivered an inaugural speech
in which he praised Hitler. Heidegger remained
a committed Nazi to the very end of the Third Reich.
As a Nazi rector, according to record,
he humiliated his former teacher Husserl
and banned him to use the university library.
Heidegger identified the central
problem of philosophy in existence, why do things
exist, rather than nothing? His term for human life
was Dasein, being there. Humans come to the world
arbitrarily, he observed, and their birth precedes essence.
Heidegger saw human life
as a process of events, stretching out
between birth and death. The basic mode of
being in the world, he believed, was sorge, concern
with participation and personal involvement with survival.
Our life is inseparable from the community's existence,
he said, and authentic life involves participation in the shared
human heritage in order to realize a communal destiny.
At the same time Heidegger also connected existence
with nothingness, which he reified and made into
a concrete thing.
Although he had a wife and was the father of two children,
Heidegger became involved in an extra-marital affair
with a Jewish student who was half of his age. The student,
Hannah Arendt, later rose to eminence as a political scientist,
author of The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) , The Human
Condition (1958) , as well as of other volumes.
Arendt traveled to Jerusalem and attended the Eichmann trial.
She found Eichmann, a major perpetrator of the Holocaust,
appearing as a thoughtless character, a common man and
an ordinary bureaucrat who represented the 'banality of evil'.