Why did I escape from Germany?

What was I teaching in my classes? I've said: what they made me teach. But that, what was it? Teaching, Martin, tends to strengthen the teacher more than the student. When one teaches something, one has to know it twice. One must know it. And one must know how to transmit it to others. That's where a professor learns. I went years without learning anything because that which I transmitted to my students was a doctrine already decided on, already thought through. One had to recall entire texts from memory. To be able to say them without vacillating, like a machine, emotionless, like a vegetable.

I, son, who had educated himself with Heidegger, taught, in Freiburg, the racist claptrap of Rosenberg. A disciple of Heidegger cannot be racist. His theme is Being, not race, not biology. It's possible we might think that German philosophers - Heidegger's followers - were the most suited for asking about Being. But Dasein had no race. It was not defined by its race, nor by its blood, but by its attitude before Being. Asking after it or forgetting it losing oneself in the whirlpool of entities. That defined the authenticity or inauthenticity of Dasein. Neither did it have sex. We weren't interested in that question. Can you imagine us talking of a masculine Dasein or of a feminine Dasein? I say this because that French hack would accuse Heidegger of not giving Dasein sexuality. The silliness of French pigs. Dasein is Dasein and it's not necessary to say more. We are in the domain of ontology. We are not anthropologists nor psychiatrists deciphering the being-in-the-world of Dasein from its genitals. I can assure you of something: Hannah Arendt, for Heidegger, was a Dasein. Let's not waste any more time.

I know, from misfortune and years of obedient teaching, word for word entire passages from Rosenberg's pamphlet. His book defines itself as a "racial history." One of its central reproaches to the powers that confronted our nation in the First World War, is, consequently, racial. What atrocity, from amongst the main ones, did our enemies commit? Listen, Martin. And pity, here, your father, a man that can transcribe so impeccably these texts. "On the shoulders of our enemies weighs the enormous crime of having mobilized Negros and half-castes against the German people and having driven them, between insults inflicted on Germany, to war against a country of white race. The largest blame falls with a doubt on France, the one that even after the war occupied with men of colors the crucible of European culture, the Rhineland; France, who's powerful military declares, in parliament, that the French are a nation of one hundred million and did not have two armies, one black and one colored, but instead one only army. With this formal declaration French politics equated the black race and the white race and, in a similar way, as one hundred forty years ago France started the emancipation of the Jews, so one finds today the head of racial corruption for the blacks and, if things go on like this, it can hardly be considered as a European state, but better as an offshoot of Africa driven by Jews". I, son, I swear it, said that phrase in a classroom of Freiburg University, around 1938. I said: "An offshoot of Africa driven by Jews". I, who read Hegel, Husserl, and Heidegger.

With Nietzsche, something similar. You know what is said: Whatever your cause, you will find a phrase of Nietzsche to back it. Imagine the feast Baeumler, Rosenberg and the subservient Kruger, had with that possibility.

Labels: The Shadow of Heidegger

¶ 4:17 AM