On March 17 2008 Politicsweb published an article by Paul Trewhela comparing the political thought of, Malegapuru Makgoba, the Vice Chancellor of the University of KwaZulu-Natal and the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. See here. Below is the discussion that followed:

By: Deeply Disconcerted (March 18 2008)
Very interesting, but you may be over intellectualising. Makgoba is a bitter, intellectually insecure, small-minded fool who has destroyed everything he has touched. He might like to forget his years at Wits, but those who witnessed the best of Wits (van Onselen, Sinclair, and, most tragically, Etienne Mureinik) driven out to be eventually replaced by Bundy's Bozos have a slightly longer memory.

Professor Etienne Mureinik
By: Paul Trewhela (March 18 2008)

My obituary of Professor Etienne Mureinik, published in the Independent, London ( 23 July 1996 ), can be found on the net here...

Is there really any comparison?
By: Peter Horn (March 19 2008)

A few corrections. Apart from the fact that Professor Malegapuru Makgoba has nowhere the same intellectual capacity as Heidegger and will be forgotten as soon as he retires, please note: Heidegger did not live "in a wooded area of rural Bavaria." but after his retirement lived in Todtnauberg in the Black Forest . Freiburg is not Freiburg-im-Breslau but Freiburg-im-Breisgau. [[Paul Trewhela has corrected these errors in the revised text as set out above - ed]].

The only comparison is that they both made rather problematic political utterances as rectors of universities.

By the way there are two outstanding analyses of Heidegger's Rektoratsrede and his involvment with Nazism: by Derrida (on the word Geist [spirit -ed]) and Bourdieu.

Response to Peter Horn
By: Paul Trewhela (March 19 2008)

The Nazi politics of a major 20th century philosopher just ...a "rather problematic" political utterance?

[[Trewhela then queried Peter Horn's factual corrections - ed]].

Response by Peter Horn (March 20 2008)
I don't want to belabour a minor point, but it so happens that went to school in Freiburg-im-Breisgau ... and Todtnauberg is in the Black Forest which was never a part of Bavaria , but during Heidegger's life-time of Baden (and now part of the Bundesland Baden-Württemberg). It also so happens that I heard Heidegger who at the time I went to school came down from his retreat once or twice to give a public lecture.

I cannot fully answer your more essential point on Heidegger's Nazi politics. Bourdieu attempts to create a necessary link between his philosophical language and his politics, which I think is tenuous.

The point which I wanted to make and which I still think is valid, is that Makgoba is an íntellectual lightweight while Heidegger is an eminent philosopher in the line of European philsophy from Aristotle, Thomas of Aquino, Kant, Nietzsche. Just as Lukacs has tried to trash Nietzsche (with some justification), Adorno (equally with some justification) has trashed Heidegger in his Jargon der Eigentlichkeit. In both cases these philosphers have survived the critique.

Heidegger and Makgoba re-examined
By: Paul Trewhela (March 20 2008)

After Nazi Germany, no country in the 20th century established racism as the central organising doctrine of the state in such a systemic way as apartheid South Africa . No major thinker of the last century made such direct connection as a philosopher to Nazism as did Heidegger. Peter Horn fails to address this central problematic. One does not have to regard Professor Makgoba as a thinker of equivalent stature in order to analyse the sources of his thought in terms of the best template available. The centrality of this issue in South Africa is also not addressed by Mr Horn.

I am grateful to Mr Horn for his references to further reading about Heidegger. The problem remains, however, of the relation of Heidegger's Nazi politics to his philosophy, as can be seen from many sources, among them the website chronology on: http://www.webcom.com/paf/href.html. The contemporary relevance of this issue in South Africa can be further seen from RW Johnson, ‘Crisis on campus' (March 2008), on Guardian's Comment is Free website (see here.)

I defer to M Horn's first-hand knowledge of Germany . Heidegger's Rektoratsrede of 27 May1933 in which he celebrated Hitler to his students was indeed delivered in Freiburg-im-Breisgau.... I am grateful for the correction of these factual errors, but they are not the crucial point, whether in Heidegger studies or for South Africa today.

Derrida and Bourdieu
By: Peter Horn (March 20 2008)

They are not the crucial point, whether in Heidegger studies or for South Africa today: agreed. It is definitely on the racism as the central organising doctrine of the state in such a systemic way that I would doubt that Heidegger has much to say.

Like many intellectual supporters of the Nazi party, his assent was rather in another area: anti-modernism, resentment of the losers of the First World War etc. Perhaps one should ask why Heidegger resigned as rector one year after his enthusiastic Rektoratsrede, and why he led a rather withdrawn life from 1934 to 1945. Most of his later seminars and lectures were given to a deliberately small audience. I think he realised that the Nazis in no way corresponded to his high ideals of "Germanness".

Heidegger and Bantu Education
By: Sam van den Berg (March 20 2008)

Peter Horn writes that "The only comparison [between Heidegger and Prof Makgoba] is that they both made rather problematic political utterances as rectors of universities."

Heidegger's influence on the politics of race and education in South Africa may have been obscure - but it has been profound - and profoundly depraving. The philosophical bedrock of Bantu Education, Fundamental Pedagogics, was a pseudo-phenomenology which drew heavily on Heidegger's muddled philosophy of Blut und Boden, as exemplified by his infamous Rektoratsrede. It followed in Heidegger's footsteps by perverting Husserl's universal phenomenology into a narrow phenomenology of race, abused to justify racism and ultimately totalitarianism.

As a student of Philosophy in the early sixties at Pretoria University under Prof C K Oberholzer, one of the founding fathers of Fundamental Pedagogics, I grappled at first hand with the tangled prose of this muddled thinker (Heidegger) - part ethereal philosopher, part racist bully. Later as a member, and later head, of a team of editors and translators of tutorial matter produced for tens of thousands of black teachers, I again experienced at first-hand the noxious influence of the man. From the University of South Africa where we worked, this influence had spread into many nooks and crannies of teacher training at former "tribal colleges". When in 1994/5 we finally refused to continue collaborating with this Faculty of Nonsense, and (I believe) struck at the roots of Fundamental Pedagogics, what remained of Bantu Education soon started withering away. I thought then that we had heard the last of Heidegger.

It is ironic -- and infintely sad -- that Heidegger's Blut und Boden philosophy of education is again emerging from the work of some of the "African scholars" claiming to be vigorously opposed to Apartheid and Bantu Education. It has been said that liberation movements often turn into shadow images of the thing they fought against. I suspect that Paul Trewhela - a man with first-hand experience of the liberation struggle (unlike Prof Makgoba in his ebony tower) - has looked into the heart of Prof Makgoba's thinking. And he has recognised the shadows of a new racism and authoritarianism.

It's not a comforting thought.

A poet's experience of Heidegger
By: Paul Trewhela (March 21 2008)

I must ask Peter Horn to have a look at the very fine interpretation by Pierre Joris of the poem by Paul Celan, ‘Todtnauberg', written immediately after the poet's visit to Heidegger in his Hutte in 1967, available on the net here:. The title of the essay is "Celan/Heidegger: Translation at the mountain of death". Celan, who was Jewish, had lost his parents in the Shoah, and took his own life a few years after writing this poem. Heidegger was...what Celan says he is.

If we are to consider a poet's approach to the most complex expression of the Nazi experience, it is good to begin with Celan. Joris is a good guide.

Celan
By: Peter Horn (March 21 2008)

It so happens that I wrote my Ph.D. on Paul Celan at Wits (1970) : Celan had hoped that Heidegger would offer some kind of explanation or apology, which he did not. But is it not interesting that he even went to visit him? There were several attempts to get Heidegger to confront his relationship with the Nazis.

Sharon Janusz and Glenn Webster write "In Defence of Heidegger", Philosophy, Vol. 66, No. 257. (July 1991), pp. 380-385:

If it is true that he accepted the Nazi ideology, then what has it to do with his philosophy? Should we stop reading and teaching Plato because he was an aristocrat, living during an historical period that condoned slavery, as well as misogyny? Far from intending to excuse, justify, or rationalize any inhuman attitudes or behaviours, we do wish someone would explain how the politics inform andlor influence Heidegger's speculative thought. We find no trace of Nazi ideology in his texts. Nor does his philosophy seem in any way blameworthy for Nazi ideology; therefore, his party membership is a puzzling anomaly. Part of the puzzle is that if he accepted the ideology, it should have affected the philosophy. But it did not.

I do not agree with them, I think like Bourdieu that there is a connection between his philosophy and some aspects of Nazi ideology.

It is true that Afrilkaans philosophy departments taught Heidegger (and English philosophy departments tended not to) But then English philosophy departments were and are still to a degree enamoured with a rather sterile positivism.

That Heidegger is difficult to read (but so are most philosophers from Plato to Gadamer) I do not deny. That he is a muddled thinker I would deny. His Rektoratsrede is undoubtedly one of his worst products and is indefensible. But his main work, Sein und Zeit, his astounding analysis of Aristotle, the medieval scholastics, his attack on Descartes and 18th century rationalism, his incredible two volume work on Nietzsche, all this cannot simply be subsumed under "Bantu Education".

I would venture to guess that the muddled thinking came from Prof C K Oberholzer rather than Heidegger.

Heidegger did not really articulate any philosophy of education, and he is not a Blut und Boden philosopher. I think the reduction of Heidegger to a Nazi icon misses most of his contribution.

Peter Horn on Heidegger and Bantu Education
By: Sam van den Berg (March 21 2008)

I must confess that I am unable to pursue the argument about whether Heidegger is muddled. I'm not a trained philosopher and some of the muddle might have been my own. My German is imperfect and my assumption that philosophy should be translatable may be out of line with mainstream philosophical thinking. Indeed this is what the then dean of the Faculty of Education at Unisa told me in a candid moment when I was still under cover as a fellow Afrikaner. How he expected us to translate tuition material written exclusively in Afrikaans for the 95% of his students who expected to receive their material in comprehensible English, remains a mystery. Perhaps Peter Horn can clear up the mystery by explaining how Heidegger can be properly understood in English.

Indeed, this does raise questions about the validity of philosophy as a universal mode of reasoning. I wouldn't know. The Greek word "logos" has a range of meanings, and "rational reasoning" is only one of them. It has other, more slippery meanings. And the meaning of "sophos" is in the mind of the sophist.

Peter Horn is right about at least some of the muddle coming from C K Oberholzer and his school. They also drew opportunistically on a range of other philosophers, from Sartre to Kierkegaard, as well as narrow Calvinist Dutch writers, to concoct their brew. There was method in their muddle - they knew what they wanted to prove before they started. Just as Heidegger knew what he would have to say in the Rektoratsrede long before he came to the closing "Heil Hitlers". No doubt the Sturmabteilung had packed the hall.

It doesn't really matter. The point is that certain "African scholars" are walking the same road, and may be headed for conclusions frighteningly similar to those of Bantu Education and Nazi education theorists.

For light relief, here is an example of how Fundamental Pedagogicians used/abused the licence that Heidegger gave them, or which they thought Heidegger gave them, to indulge in vacuous semantics and formulaic reasoning. I quote it in the original (the English translator managed to improve it marginally before booking himself into an asylum for incurably hysterical laughter):

"Deur slegs aanwesig te wees, kan opvoeding nie verwesenlik word nie. Omgang moet oorgaan in pedagogiese ontmoeting. Die ontmoeting moet egter nie slegs 'n aangename-kennis-situasie wees nie, maar inderdaad 'n aangenaam-om-jou-te-ken-in-jou eksistensiële-verwagting ..."

But the side of Heidegger which Paul Trewhela raised was more sinister than his promiscuous ways with language and semantics.

How Heidegger can be properly understood in English
By: Peter Horn (21.03.08)

As I know [[Professor Charles]] van Onselen and Sinclair (if only in passing) I must say I totally agree about the evaluation of Makgoba by Deeply Disconcerted and Paul Trewhela.

Sam van den Berg remark "Perhaps Peter Horn can clear up the mystery by explaining how Heidegger can be properly understood in English." This is pertinent. The translation of Sein und Zeit is awful, and I admit I would not want to translate Heidegger into English. Before you set me off on my hobby-horse let me just remind you that Freud, who writes the clearest German imaginable, is hardly readable in French and English translations. One needs to remember that translations are always only crutches, which we use because we cannot speak all the languages of the world. But if you want to do any really serious work on Plato it does help if you know ancient Greek well, and I am afraid the same is true about Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger and German.

N.B.
Nie ek moet sê! Nog nooit so gelag!

"Deur slegs aanwesig te wees, kan opvoeding nie verwesenlik word nie. Omgang moet oorgaan in pedagogiese ontmoeting. Die ontmoeting moet egter nie slegs 'n aangename-kennis-situasie wees nie, maar inderdaad 'n aangenaam-om-jou-te-ken-in-jou eksistensiële-verwagting ..."

There are some Derrida-epigones which are equally vacuous. I think neither Heidegger nor Derrida are responsible for their epigones

The relevance of Heidegger in contemporary South Africa
By: Paul Trewhela (21.03.08)

I do think that the words of the French Jewish poet Edmond Jabes, cited by Pierre Joris, should be addressed: "In Heidegger's Germany, there is no place for Paul Celan". Joris places this sentence at the head of his article "Celan/Heidegger: Translation at the Mountain of Death ", available on the internet here.

As to why Celan, who wrote poetry in German but chose to live in Paris, nevertheless then chose to visit the former Nazi Rektor of the University of Freiburg in his Hutte at Todtnauberg in 1967, Joris provides many helpful clues in another valuable essay, "Heidegger, France, Politics, the University" (1989), available on the net here.

Joris comprehensively surveys the literature on Heidegger, and concludes with an attempt to discover in the categories of Sein und Zeit (1927) the threads leading to its author's subsequent Nazi politics and his post-war refusal (inability) to acknowledge the enormity of the Holocaust: a matter Celan perceived, with hurt, in that meeting at Todtnauberg. Joris convincingly locates several of these threads. One of these is Heidegger's concept of existential decline, leading to his call to "battle" in his Rektoratsrede of May 1933, when he looked to "when the spiritual strength of the West fails and its joints crack, when this moribund semblance of a culture caves in and drags all forces into confusion and lets them suffocate in madness". Well, that is what Nazism itself precipitated, and to which Heidegger himself contributed.

In his final paragraph, Joris finds that "essential Heideggerian concepts as first developed in Being and Time lend themselves without ambiguity, and in Heidegger's own practical thinking, to implementation in the context of a fascist university structure. ...[The] time has come to rethink and recontextualize essential aspects of the pre-war European intellectual endeavors, especially those who fell prey to what [Georges] Bataille termed ‘la tentation fasciste' [the temptation of fascism]". It is time this critique took place with South Africa in mind, not forgetting Heidegger's attack in his Rektoratsrede on what he too called "academic freedom". Three months after being installed as rector at Freiburg university, as Joris points out, Heidegger "established the Fuhrerprinzip, according to which the rector would henceforth no longer be elected by the academic Senate of the university but would be appointed by the nazi minister of education and provided with new, sweeping powers." Not just an affair in a far-away country of which we know nothing....

On "Todtnauberg"
By: Peter Horn (March 21 2008)

I think that Pierre Joris's analysis is very fair and describes clearly the ambivalence of both men. It is therefore not surprising to find Celan concerned with the figure of Martin Heidegger. This concern is ambivalent, to say the least, involving both attraction and repulsion. Pöggeler reminds us that as far back as 1957, Celan had wanted to send his poem "Schliere" to Heidegger, but also, that, when somewhat later Heidegger had his famous meeting with Martin Buber in Münich, Celan felt very uneasy and was not ready to give Heidegger a "Persilschein", a "Persil- passport" i.e. did not want to whitewash the politically compromised philosopher. Celan, at that time, was reading Heidegger's Nietzsche as well as Nietzsche himself, and seems to have thought highly of Heidegger's interpretations. Nietzsche's thought is also, albeit liminally, present in Celan's poetry, for example in "Engführung," where the line "Ein Rad, langsam, rollt aus sich selbst", is a formula used by Nietzsche in the chapter "Von den 3 Verwandlungen" in Zarathustra. Heidegger himself was intermittently interested in Celan's work and came, whenever possible, to the rare public readings Celan gave in Germany .

Joris's critique of the two translations is correct. There is a better translation by Michael Hamburger, which is not perfect but closer.

Celan would have liked to become part of the pantheon of German poetry as established by Heidegger: Hölderlin, Trakl, Rilke; and Heidegger admired Celan's poetic genius - as I said before he was not an antisemite, and agreed with Nietzsche: "A Jew among Germans, what a relief"; but he might also have wanted to receive the "Persil-Schein", i.e. to be absolved of his guilt by Celan, the Jew. The problem is that Heidegger does not explain or ask for Forgiveness. "In Lacoue-Labarthe's reading of the poem, the non-arrival of the "coming word" becomes symbolic of Heidegger's refusal throughout the postwar period to explain his involvement with National Socialism." (cf. Mark M. Anderson, "The Impossibility of Poetry: Celan and Heidegger in France", New German Critique, No. 53, Spring-Summer 1991, pp. 3-18.)

Martin Heidegger: Political Texts, 1933-1934
By: Peter Horn (March 21 2008)

Since the political texts from the period 1933-34 are not easily accessible (and they are the only openly political texts) you might want to consult:

William S. Lewis, "Martin Heidegger: Political Texts, 1933-1934", New German Critique, No. 45, Special Issue on Bloch and Heidegger. (Autumn, 1988), pp. 96-114.

They are, admittedly, awful, and there is nothing one can say in defence of them.

It is perhaps interesting that the word Jew does not occur in these texts at all!

Karl Löwith, Richard Wolin and Melissa J. Cox write in "The Political Implications of Heidegger's Existentialism" in New German Critique, No. 45, Special Issue on Bloch and Heidegger. (Autumn, 1988), pp. 117-134:

The petty-bourgeois orthodoxy of the party was suspicious of Heidegger's National Socialism insofar as Jewish and racial considerations played no role. Sein und Zeit was dedicated to the Jew, Husserl, his Kant-book to the half-Jew, Scheler, and in his courses at Freiburg , Bergson and Simmel were taught. His spiritual concerns did not seem to conform to those of the "Nordic race," which cared little about Angst in the face of nothingness.

(You will realise that New German Critique is left rather than right).

On the Führerprinzip
By: Peter Horn (March 21 2008)

This is where I am entirely on your side:

It is time this critique took place with South Africa in mind, not forgetting Heidegger's attack in his Rektoratsrede on what he too called "academic freedom". Three months after being installed as rector at Freiburg university, as Joris points out, Heidegger "established the Fuhrerprinzip, according to which the rector would henceforth no longer be elected by the academic Senate of the university but would be appointed by the nazi minister of education and provided with new, sweeping powers."

Applied to South Africa : The Vice-chancellor at UCT, where I worked was always appointed by the Council (a democratic body) but after intensive involvement of Senate, staff and students. Deans were elected (not selected and appointed) by faculty. I think changes in these procedures have been made to disempower academics and shift power to "management" - what a word for a Vice-chancellor.

I think the concept of "academic freedom" has been eroded dramatically: the university no longer decides who teaches, what is taught, or who gets taught. Anything which is critical of "management" can be the cause of "disciplinary action" (not that different from the Seventies and Eighties).

What is racism? And what is not?
By: Paul Trewhela (March 21 2008)

To address Peter Horn's claim that Heidegger "was not an anti-semite". He certainly had a Jewish lover, a Jewish teacher, Jewish students and Jewish admirers: moths to the flame, as it happened. But how to explain the following?

2 October 1929 : "Heidegger denounces Jewish influence in Germany in grant applications".
April 1933: Heidegger's teacher and mentor Edmund Husserl, a Jewish convert to Christianity, "forced to retire for racial reasons".

29 April: Heidegger "Writes to Husserl".
3 May: 1933: "Joins National Socialist Party".

20 May: "Sends telegram to Hitler...".

27 May: Rectorship address, Die Selbstbehauptung der deutschen Universitat.
30 June 1933 : Denounces "dangerous international alliance of Jews" at home of philosopher Karl Jaspers (who was married to a Jew).
12 July 1933 : "Writes to ministry of education supporting anti-semitism".
September 1933: "Tips off authorities that Chemistry professor Hermann Staudinger (Nobel Prize 1953) was a pacifist.
November 1933: "Expresses support for Hitler at public meeting in Leipzig ".
16 December 1933 : "Secretly denounces Gottingen philosophy professor Eduard Baumgarten".
April 1936: "Stops corresponding with Jaspers".

This is an adequate selection of items from the Heidegger Chronology available on the internet here.

In South Africa that person is called a racist. Nietzsche would never have compromised himself in that way. Unlike Heidegger, Nietzsche openly and publicly separated himself from such words and such behaviour.

[[This account misses a further matter. Heidegger's fellow assistant to Husserl when he was a young man was the philosopher Edith Stein, who was Jewish. She met both Husserl and Heidegger at Freiburg in 1929 on the occasion of Husserl's 70^th birthday, and did not succeed in presuading Heidegger to admit her to his philosophy seminar at a meeting in Freiburg in 1932. She and her sister Rosa were gassed at Auschwitz on 9 August 1942, after she had much earlier converted to Christianity and become a Roman Catholic nun. During this period she had written a critical commentary on Heidegger's philosophy. Edith Stein was canonised as St Teresa Benedicta of the Cross in 1998 by Pope John Paul II. After World War II, Heidegger is not known to have commented on her fate. - Paul Trewhela (March 27 2008)]].

What is racism - and what is not racism?
By: Sam van den Berg (March 22 2008)

What is racism?

Racism is defined not by what we think or feel, but by the things we do of our own free will. For a philosopher saying is doing. Things Heidegger said and did of his own free will condemn him as a racist and (much worse) a treacherous friend and colleague. Denouncing colleagues and, in the Rektoratsrede, going well beyond what was strictly necessary in order to survive, were acts of will - and the will was something which Heidegger himself valued above all things. He was a racist and therefore not worthy of the name philosopher.

He set a dangerous example for half-baked intellectuals in his own circle and in Nazi Germany, who would follow in his footsteps, confident that the Herr Professor Doktor can surely not be wrong.

Those who consider themselves to be scholars - especially those who consider themselves to have exceptional intellectual qualities - have exceptional responsibilities. They should heed warnings of hubris as Heidegger never did.

One thing that even Heidegger would not have said of himself: "I am today a sophisticated man ... who has earned accolades from some of the world's best and leading institutions, mainly because of my unquestioned brilliance as a scholar and pioneering achievements as a [....] scientist, with few equals in my field and even fewer superiors."

Who allegedly wrote this? See here.

What is not racism?

Belonging by birth and upbringing to a group of which some members committed crimes is not racism. Not all Germans were Nazis, and not even all Nazis were complicit in the holocaust. Dr Albert Battel was a member of the Nazi Party from May 1933. He was an Oberleutenant in the Wehrmacht under Hitler. Yet, on January 22, 1981 , Yad Vashem decided to recognize Albert Battel (posthumously) as Righteous Among the Nations. Why? See here.

The majority of whites in South Africa now alive were not willingly complicit in the crimes committed by the authoritarian apartheid regime. Tens of thousands did what they could in their small way to ameliorate the harshness of the system. An overwhelming majority approved the new constitution in a referendum. Many became adults after 1994.

Yet whites are yet again being badgered by silly people to "apologise for Apartheid." Most whites are not racists. Those who believe in their collective guilt are racists. And those who call all who dare to disagree with them racists, are themselves the most dangerous racists of all.

I was unaware of these facts
By: Peter Horn (March 22 2008)

I was unaware of these facts:
1. 2 October 1929 : "Heidegger denounces Jewish influence in Germany in grant applications".
2. 30 June 1933 : Denounces "dangerous international alliance of Jews" at home of philosopher Karl Jaspers (who was married to a Jew).
3. 12 July 1933 : "Writes to ministry of education supporting anti-semitism".

I accept that they are true, in spite of the fact that they sound strange coming from Heidegger. And they do in fact show "anti-semitism". Nevertheless I would like to have the source and the context.

April 1933: Heidegger's teacher and mentor Edmund Husserl, a Jewish convert to Christianity, "forced to retire for racial reasons".

29 April: Heidegger "Writes to Husserl".

Note: that this was before Heidegger became Rector, I would like to know the content of that letter.

Treatment of Husserl: From Wikipedia, quoting Rüdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge, Mass., & London: Harvard University Press, 1998), pp. 253-8:

On April 14, 1933 (thus prior to Heidegger's rectorship), Husserl was given an enforced leave of absence because he was Jewish. It is not true, as is sometimes claimed, that during the rectorate Heidegger denied Husserl access to the university library. He did, however, break off contact with Husserl, other than via a "go-between" (though Heidegger claimed that the relationship with Husserl had already become strained after Husserl publicly "settled accounts" with Heidegger and Max Scheler in the early 1930s.) Heidegger did not attend his mentor's cremation in 1938, and in 1941, under pressure from publisher Max Niemeyer, agreed to remove the dedication to Husserl from Being and Time (restored in post-war editions).

12 July 1933 : "Writes to ministry of education supporting anti-semitism".
September 1933: "Tips off authorities that Chemistry professor Hermann Staudinger (Nobel Prize 1953) was a pacifist.
November 1933: "Expresses support for Hitler at public meeting in Leipzig ".
16 December 1933 : "Secretly denounces Gottingen philosophy professor Eduard Baumgarten".

So one must accept that as Sam van den Berg says: Things Heidegger said and did of his own free will condemn him as a racist and (much worse) a treacherous friend and colleague.

Postscript - Celan
By: Peter Horn (March 22 2008)
Kam, kam.
Kam ein Wort, kam,
kam durch die Nacht,
wollt leuchten, wollt leuchten.

On reason and racism
Paul Trewhela (March 22 2008 )

I am so pleased we have been able to have this high-level, cultured discussion on reason and racism on a South Africa-focused website, by courtesy of Politicsweb. The issues are universal and timeless, as the necessary attention in this discussion to the work and life of Martin Heidegger further illustrates. If there were an epicentre for discussion of this subject in the early years of the 21st century, however, it would probably have to be South Africa . It is appropriate, also, that we have been able to contribute to this discussion when it is a major subject in the early phases of the presidential elections in the United States .
To my knowledge, this is the first time the subject of racism - the defining matter of political and cultural discourse in South Africa - has been able to be discussed in South Africa in terms of the philosophical heritage of one of the most major thinkers of the last century. The extraordinary complexities posed to us by the inter-relation of Heidegger's work and life offer rich scope for much further study and thought, not least because of the hugely respectful reception of Heidegger's thought in France, Celan's adopted home, as Peter Horn has pointed out. The fact we have been able to place discussion of racism in this context is especially important, given the fact that the fate and the future of the universities in South Africa is at stake. The question; "What is racism? And what is not racism?" is a prime issue for our times, in South Africa first of all.

I feel we have helped to clarify the parameters in which matters of reason and racism can fruitfully be discussed in South Africa and elsewhere. I should like to point out that Sam van den Berg was one of three very brave brothers of a white Afrikaans-speaking family who stood out against apartheid in Pretoria , the capital of the racist system, in the late Fifties and early Sixties. I had the honour to share a cell beside his brother Maritz under 90-day detention without trial in Local Prison, Pretoria , with interrogation to match in Compol Buildings, Pretoria , in July/August 1964. Their nephew, Professor John van den Berg, professor of Mathematics at the University of KwaZulu Natal, has now become the subject of allegations of racism as a member of the Senate at the University, in the course of a conflict over issues of academic freedom - notoriously sneered at by Professor Heidegger in his Rektoratsrede at the University of Freiburg in May 1933 - involving the Vice Chancellor, Professor Malegapuru Makgoba. Hopefully, issues relating to Martin Heidegger might help define a context in which this conflict may be resolved.

I must also express my gratitude to Peter Horn for the tremendous assistance he has given to this discussion, especially in the light of his life's attention at a high cultural level in South Africa to the issues which devastated the Europe of his childhood. South Africa should be grateful for the quality of his contribution.

I must also thank Dr Zweledinga Pallo Jordan, the Minister of Arts and Culture and member of the National Executive Committee of the African National Congress, for introducing me to Herbert Marcuse's Reason and Revolution (1941) while we were both in exile in London in 1968. I still have with me my copy from our study with Moeletsi Mbeki from that time.