In 1926: living at the edge of time - Monoskop

BEING-IN-THE-WORLDS OF 1926 443
Heidegger-in employing some of his arguments in the book without
any further explication (that is, without explicitly eliminating potential
alternatives)-followed the orientation of a specific set of prevailing
cultural codes. This constellation of codes has everything to do with the
intellectual phenomenon that Hugo von Hofmannsthal, in 1927, termed
the konservative Revolution.28 Both this contextualization and the comparisons
that I shall make between Heidegger's text and the novels by
Blunck and Van Vechten are well within the bounds of my experiment
in historical simultaneity. Still, we cannot-and should not-avoid the
classic question (with its diachronic dimension) of whether Heidegger's
position in 1926 predestined him to assume a specific role during the first
year of the Nazi regime. My reading will, at least indirectly, confirm what
has become general knowledge since the debate provoked by Victor
Farias' book:29 Heidegger's attempt, in 1933 and 1934, to influence the
Nazis' cultural and educational politics, together with his grotesque
endeavor to become "ein Fuhrer des Fuhrers" ("a leader of leaders"),30
was grounded in certain motifs that his philosophy shared with the
ideology of the National Socialist Party. Although I agree in principle
with those scholars who state that this contamination does not tarnish
the philosophical importance of Heidegger's thought (because the structure
in which Heidegger brings the motifs together is more complex
than-and intrinsically different from-that of the Nazi ideology),3! I
cannot help being troubled, to say the least, by such a contiguity.
These mixed feelings may well come from a lack of experience in
dealing with perspectives of simultaneity as it is endemic to our ways of
viewing and using history. Sein und Zeit cannot of course be identified
with Nazi ideology-though it shares multiple motifs and concerns with
a 1926 novel by Hans Friedrich Blunck, who in 1933 was to be appointed
president of the Reichsschrifttumskammer (National Commission
on Writing). On the other hand, Heidegger's central argument
shows a much more surprising but equally clear affinity with a narrative
as culturally remote as Nigger Heaven, one of the most sympathetic and
popular literary depictions of the Harlem Renaissance. The problem that
intrigues me here is therefore not so much one of observing and identifying
phenomena which, at least in Western culture, attest to homogeneity
in the year 1926. Rather, the challenge lies in seeing what conclusions
I can draw from the abundance of such observations.