Debate

University Philosophy and National Socialism

1933–1945 · How much responsibility does university philosophy bear for National Socialism?

In 1933 Martin Heidegger was elected rector of Freiburg University and joined the NSDAP, Alfred Baeumler received a new chair of political pedagogy in Berlin, and the educationalist Ernst Krieck became rector in Frankfurt, the first National Socialist rector of a German university; Erich Rothacker and Arnold Gehlen also joined the party that year. At the same time the regime drove colleagues from their posts or out of the country with the civil service law of 7 April 1933 and later measures: of the 214 university teachers of philosophy George Leaman counted for 1933–45, 40 emigrated by 1940; of the 174 who stayed, 78 – 45 per cent – were party members. Whether this was a failure of individuals faced with a regime hostile to thought or a matter of the discipline itself – and how philosophy afterwards told its own history – has been argued over since 1945.

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Positions

Pseudo-science, not philosophy

On this view, what the regime offered as philosophy – Alfred Rosenberg’s The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), the writings of Ernst Krieck – was ideology below the standards of the discipline, and philosophers took part as individuals, from ambition, adaptation or error. Postwar accounts often went further, as George Leaman (1993) records: real philosophers had emigrated or withdrawn into “inner emigration”, the Nazis among them were propagandists, and others joined party organisations only to protect family or colleagues – here he cites letters from Otto Friedrich Bollnow and Hans-Georg Gadamer. Heidegger’s own account, written in 1945 and published in 1983, presents his rectorate as an attempt to check the party apparatus.

Participation under the cloak of scholarship

George Leaman (1993), formerly of Wolfgang Fritz Haug’s Berlin research group on philosophy in German fascism (Haug, ed., Deutsche Philosophen 1933, 1989; Thomas Laugstien, 1990), traced the careers of all 214 university teachers of philosophy: of the 174 who did not emigrate, two thirds belonged to the NSDAP or its organisations for lecturers and teachers, and no one, he stresses, was forced to join the party. Many offered the movement philosophical justifications of their own, Heidegger’s rectoral address among them. Emmanuel Faye (2005) sees National Socialism introduced into philosophy itself in Heidegger’s seminars of 1933–35. Gereon Wolters (2004) found mostly silence about colleagues’ conduct after 1945, and compromising works quietly revised in second editions.

Differentiating views: a shared discourse of crisis

Hans Sluga (Heidegger’s Crisis, 1993) argues that philosophers of opposed camps – conservative heirs of Fichte as well as Nietzschean “radicals” such as Heidegger – shared a discourse of crisis, nation, leadership and order. Their engagement was thus not merely a product of individual choices; yet for Sluga the relation of philosophy to politics is historical and can be grasped only case by case. Christian Tilitzki’s archival study (2002) finds no uniform Nazi philosophy and a smaller break in appointments in 1933 than usually assumed. Reviewers objected: for Norbert Kapferer (NZZ) the lack of a uniform doctrine did not prove a real pluralism; for Frank-Rutger Hausmann (SZ) the files miss unwritten reasons, and unaffected colleagues accepted the expulsions without comment or with approval.

As of 10/2026. Summaries for orientation – the sources give the full arguments. · How Agora is made