Heidegger's Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism and the Greeks

DOI10.1177/1474885107070833
Date01 January 2007
Published date01 January 2007
Subject MatterArticles
Friedrich Hölderlin (1994) Poems and Fragments, tr. Michael Hamburger, pp. 482–3.
London: Anvil Press Poetry. Heidegger cites these lines in ‘The Question Concerning
Technology’, in Heidegger (1977) The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, tr.
William Lovitt, pp. 4–35. New York and Cambridge: Harper & Row. And in ‘The
Turning’, ibid. pp. 36–49.
4. Martin Heidegger, ‘Only a God can Save us: Der Spiegel’s Interview’, in Heidegger
(2003) Philosophical and Political Writings, ed. Manfred Stassen, p. 38. London:
Continuum.
5. ‘If every apolitics hides a politics, let us concede that the historical-destinal politics of
“Heidegger II” is a politics of expectancy’. Janicaud (n. 1), p. 110.
6. Martin Heidegger (1961) Introduction to Metaphysics, tr. Ralph Mannheim, p. 166.
PLACE: Anchor Books.
7. Janicaud (n. 1), p. 103.
8. Ibid. p. 123.
9. Ibid. p. 83.
10. Heidegger (n. 4), p. 24.
11. Martin Heidegger, ‘What for Calls Thinking?’, in Heidegger (1993) Basic Writings,
pp. 365–391. London: Routledge. The phrase occurs repeatedly throughout this essay,
e.g. p. 370.
12. Martin Heidegger (1999) Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), tr. Parvis Emad and
Kenneth Maly. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
13. Ibid. p. 89. The German refers to Machenschaft ‘als Wesen der Seiendheit in neuzeitlichen
Denken’: Martin Heidegger (1989) Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis), Gesamtausgabe,
65, p. 127. Frankfurt-am-Main: Vittorio Klostermann.
14. Janicaud (n. 1), p. 2.
eliane escoubas University of Paris XII
Charles R. Bambach Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche, National Socialism and the Greeks.
Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. DOI: 10.1177/1474885107070833
With the publication of Charles Bambach’s Heidegger’s Roots we encounter an astute
reading of Heidegger’s philosophically charged engagement with National Socialism from
1933 to 1945 via his continued confrontation with Nietzsche and the Greeks. The con-
tinuous profusion of such research has been steadily appearing over the last 30 years or more,
at times bordering on self-satisfied moralizing or what Bambach refers to as ‘a liberal
academic politics of self-congratulation’, and was most famously brought to light in 1987
with the French publication of Victor Farias’s Heidegger et le Nazisme and more rigorously
analysed a year later in Hugo Ott’s Martin Heidegger: Unterwegs zu seiner Biographie. When
reading Heidegger’s Roots with these two influential works in mind we can clearly see what a
truly tempered, well-rounded and informed reading Bambach has given us. Completely free
of idle moralizing, but not devoid of significant ethico-political questioning, Bambach walks
the reader through every twist and turn of Heidegger’s slippery intellectual postures from
1933 to 1945 whilst simultaneously giving us ample bibliographical points of reference so
that the informed reader can make up his own mind on crucial issues. The way in which
Bambach candidly and patiently pieces together his clearly well researched findings, whilst
European Journal of Political Theory 6(1)
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