He broke ties to Jewish friends, teachers, and colleagues, of course, and fired Jewish scholars as Rector of Heidelberg in the mid 1930s. He could not, however, everey finally break with his Jewish ex-lover and student Hannah Arendt, who also could not disengage from Heidegger despite his Nazism. People are full of contradictions and love can short circuit everything else -- even that apparebently impassible obstacle.
As has been often noted in various places, Heidegger's Nazism was not the industrial mass-murder aspect of "our movenent," which represented everything his philosophy attacked -- not ethically as evil or unjust of wrong, but as involving a wrong-headed merely instreumental attitude towards the world. Heidegger liked the Nazis' blood-and-soil beautiful Ayran Volk nature worship stuff, going on hikes, skinny dsippying in clear streams in the Black Forest, that sort of thing. There seems to be no reason to doubt that he was a real anti-semite, but that doesn't make you an advocate of genocide.
It is additionally troubliung that he failed to repudiate "our movement" and its genocide, but a lot of ex-Commies who stayed on the left have had an ambigious attitude towards our movement (no scare quotes) and its little ethical problems, like the purges and the Gulag.
--- On Wed, 7/9/08, B. <docile_body at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From: B. <docile_body at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] Heidegger
> To: "LBO Talk" <lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org>
> Date: Wednesday, July 9, 2008, 6:05 PM
> If Heidegger repudiated the Nazis, then someone should
> write a letter posthaste to John Gray, who is not a
> Marxist, socialist, or PoMo, and from whose book I
> quoted (_Straw Dogs_) about, and I quote,
> "Heidegger's never-renounced engagement with
> Nazism."
>
> _Straw Dogs_ also mentions Heidegger's breaking of
> ties to Jewish students and colleagues, like his
> former teacher and friend Edmund Husserl. Page 50 of
> the 2007 Vintage paperback edition of _Straw Dogs_,
> which was initially released in 2002, is where it's
> at. In the 5 years since the book's first appearance
> Gray hasn't changed his story. Gray is Prof. of
> European Thought at the London School of Economics. I
> would *think* he would know what he is writing about,
> though one never knows by virtue of academic
> appointment alone (e.g. Douglas Feith as professor at
> Georgetown). Gray isn't the kind of person to
> unnecessarily slime Heidegger from what I can tell; he
> admires Schopenhauer.
>
> -B.
>
>
>
>
> Chris Doss wrote:
>
> "Wait a second here. Heidegger did in fact repudiate
> the Nazis, as I am sure you know, with the statement
> (paraphrasing from memory) that they had vulgarized
> and corrupted the essence of National Socialism,
> turning in into something bad."
>
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