Heidegger and Nazism: On the Relation between German Conservatism, Heidegger, and the National Socialist Ideology

Since the publication of Victor Farias' book in 1987, Heidegger and Nazism, Heidegger's Nazism has become a point of attention for Heidegger scholars. In this paper, Karademir claims that those scholars--for example, Karl Löwith, Victor Farias, Richard Wolin, Tom Rockmore, Emnanuel Faye--who thought there was a close connection between Heidegger's philosophy and Nazism, mostly assumed that it is warranted to identify the Nazi ideology with nineteenth- and twentieth-century German conservatism, more precisely, with what we might call the Völkisch ideology. They assumed that pointing out Heidegger's Völkisch affinities would be sufficient to read Nazism into his philosophy. Karademir claims that such identification is wrong for several reasons. In the first two sections of the paper, Karademir describes the conservative world Heidegger was thrown into and the Völkisch ideology that reigned in it; then, Karademir claims that Heidegger was a Völkisch philosopher. In the last section, Karademir shows why it is wrong to question the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and the National Socialist ideology through identifying Völkisch conservatism with the Nazi worldview.