20 Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

twentieth century’s most important intellectual luminaries by those outraged by a regime that encouraged numerous auto da fés (in the later sense of that term) is his own submission to a spectacle of public confession and the sacrifice of his thought and texts to a very public ‘burning’.

Heidegger’s remarks on the Holocaust

Few efforts are made to think carefully about Heidegger’s ‘silence’ on the Holocaust or the context of when and where he made his most explicit remarks concerning the essence of the Holocaust. Instead, commentators are quick to point to the disgrace of comparing the mechanized harvesting of crops, for example, with the efficient production of corpses in the concentration camps. Again, it is noteworthy that commentators generally tend to suggest that Heidegger wants to compare the mecha-nized harvesting of crops with the Holocaust as opposed to the mass production of meat on factory farms. Furthermore, within the same tirades, there is often little mention of the dropping of the bombs in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, or the block-ading of countries since the aim is to scandalize as much as possible. We are typically reminded of the irreducibly ‘singular’ nature of the Holocaust. To compare it, to refer to it outside of the discursive parameters permitted, is ‘sacrilegious’ and it is taken as further evidence of Heidegger’s fundamental lack of humanity, his hamstrung philosophical outlook, his deeply entrenched commitment to Nazi ideals and an unmistakable identification with the basest kind of antisemitic sympathies. But any variant on this kind of conclusion is grossly inadequate and misses the opportunity for a dialogue between Heidegger’s thinking on technology and our understanding of the Holocaust.

Let us turn, then, to the question as to whether there is a silent entreaty from Heidegger himself to think through his ‘silence’ and his clipped yet massively provoc-ative remarks concerning the Holocaust on the basis of his philosophy, albeit in ways which he had not seen before the Second World War. And this is not to exonerate Heidegger the philosopher or the man. It might indeed be the case that Heidegger is, after all, hamstrung irreparably when it comes to questions of a political nature. It might further be the case that there are dangerous tendencies in some of Heidegger’s work. Not least, we might decide, if we haven’t already, that as a human being, his shortcomings are lamentable in the extreme, all the more lamentable for the suffering they caused many of his friends and colleagues. Nevertheless, is there not still a duty to at least try and think of the ‘silence’ as though it spoke to us on the basis of the ‘hints’ and the vast amounts of words that leave the Holocaust and the Third Reich ‘unsaid’, though perhaps not ‘untouched’?

The fact that his only explicit remarks concerning the Holocaust were made in the context of his lectures on technology at the Bremen Club: does that offer us a clue? Is it possible that Heidegger’s extraordinary meditation on the essence of technology (Gestell) with the concomitant reduction of the entire planet to a coherence of forces and the tendency to look on everything as resource or as standing reserve is