You'll forgive me if I don't give you every page reference, it is quite a hefty book.
But it seems pretty straight forward to me that Being and Time is a philosophical working up of the main themes of far right thinking in Germany.
The central themes are these:
1. Germany's deviation from an original and authentic past, its having lost its way and abandoned authenticity, its 'thrownness'. This is the Heidegger philosophising of a central tenet of reactionary thinking that German greatness had been squandered through the years of pusillanimous democratic leadership.
2. A great sense of decline, of a downward path from greatness and nobility. Bear in mind that decline is a relative concept. For most Germans the years after the war were a period of a widening of the franchise, of the limitation of power of the elites etc etc. Amongst the petit bourgeoisie in particular decline was a palpable reality, as a rising working class was pushing them aside. Ilya Ehrenberg recalls that Spengler's Decline of the West was so popular amongst Germany's middle classes that there was even a perfume called 'Decline of the West' marketed. Spengler's book caught the mood of the time but lacked the obscurantism that made Heidegger's version more attractive to academics.
3. Authenticity is concentrated in the simple life of the country and of the craftsman. Inauthenticity is concentrated in 'Das Mann', 'the They' - which is to say the urban proletariat. This is a central theme of German (and American) reaction of the time. As the cities grew the 'authentic' German culture of the black forest felt threatened. Translated this means that the middle classes felt threatened by the growth of the working class. Heidegger associates the They, the inauthentic ones with 'publicness' and 'idle chatter'. As opposed to the stillness and timelessness of the authentic life, the city streets are abuzz with talk and democratic debate - to Heidegger's dismay.
4. The inexorable decline must be arrested by a Stand in History, where authentic being reasserts itself. It hears the Call to conscience, which is non-rational, but intuitive. Authentic being stirs to action after years of silence, it is 'being-in-the-face-of-death'.
This is the fascist ideology that Franz Neumann called 'decisionism'. The Nazis appealed to a middle class that felt its own destruction to be inevitable, and so had nothing to lose. Its activism in the face of destruction was a call to the conscience of the German nation, to stamp out the They (the urban workers movement and the Jews) and to reassert authenticity, or race purity.
5. Other themes include an assault on the dilettantism of intellectuals who had only succeeded in squandering the greatness of original thinking, a need to get back to basics by the 'destruction of ontology', meaning the burning of books of German philosophers who had lost their way.
Heidegger himself had no trouble recognising the correspondence between his own philosophy and fascism. I suppose contemporary philosophers are innoculated against any idea that a writers own view of his work is of any import as 'an intentional fallacy' - but then, that is part of the problem, isn't it: If what we intend is of no moment then it doesn't matter if you join the Nazis or not. Anyway, I am naive enough to think that Heidegger's critical judgement on his own work, that it was fascistic, was a good one.
Elsewhere Christian struggles with the idea that Heidegger's complicity only extended to silence about the holocaust. But that really will not do. After the war he was silent about it. (But then I always followed that advice myself when arrested - say nothing and you can't implicate yourself. It's just common sense really.) But the issue is not his silence after the war, its his noise before and during the war. This was not someone who was only incidentally related to fascism, who might have been obliged to record his attitude to it.
Heidegger was an organiser of fascism in the university where he taught. He reorganised the college along the Fuhrer principle. He had academics who were Jews or conscientious objectors in the last war victimised and sacked. He had his students give him the Hitler salute. He organised Nazi camps for young students in the woods.
He was complicit in the exclusion of Jews from professional life that was preparatory to the holocaust. That is not silence, it is active complicity. He used his authority as a thinker and as Rector to recruit young Nazis to the party. That is not silence.
Like Mein Kampf, Being and Time should be studied, of course. But it should be studied for what it is: a philosophical reworking of the main themes of German reactionary thinking. -- Jim heartfield