A charitable reading of Heidegger here might be: "You ask how I could have supported Hitler—seen him as the better road of those open. I ask how you can—as your are—still support Stalin as the better road of those open". But I see no reason to read Heidegger charitably: he is best classified as one of the most awesome examples of puerile and destructive whataboutism anywhere or anywhen:
Robert Kaufman: Poetry's Ethics? Theodor W. Adorno and Robert Duncan on Aesthetic Illusion and Sociopolitical Delusion: "On August 28, 1947, Marcuse writes Heidegger to say that he is sending a care package to his former teacher in war-ravaged Germany, although 'my friends have recommended strongly against it and have accused me of helping a man who identified with a regime that sent millions of my co-religionists to the gas chambers.... I excuse myself in the eyes of my own conscience, by saying I am sending a package to a man from whom I learned philosophy from 1928 to 1932.' Marcuse's letter at several points renews earlier requests that Heidegger dissociate himself more clearly from (if well after the fact of his involvement with) the Nazi regime, and that Heidegger "expres[s his] current attitude about the events that have occurred...
...Heidegger's January 20, 1948, response reads in part:
To the serious legitimate charges that you express "about a regime that murdered millions of Jews, that made terror into an everyday phenomenon and that turned everything that pertains to the ideas of spirit, freedom and truth into its bloody opposite," I can merely add that if instead of "Jews" you had written "east Germans" [i.e., Germans of the eastern territories], then the same holds true for one of the allies, with the difference that every thing that has occurred since 1945 has become public knowledge, while the bloody terror of the Nazis in point of fact had been kept a secret from the German people...
Marcuse replies:
You write that everything that I say about the extermination of the Jews applies just as much to the allies, if instead of "Jews" one were to insert "east Germans." With this sentence don't you stand outside of the dimension in which a conversation between men is even possible—outside of Logos? For only outside of the dimension of logic is it possible to relativize [auszugleichen], to "comprehend" a crime by saying that others would have done the same thing.
Having anticipated from figures of great cultural stature in the postwar period just the sort of attitudes that Heidegger here displays, Marcuse and his colleagues are hardly taken by surprise when they actually encounter them; but that lack of surprise hardly tempers the genuine outrage and disgust generated from on-the-pulses experience of those attitudes. Yet that anticipation says a good deal about the ground from which the Frankfurters' later comments will emerge; those comments (about what culture, art, poetry, and "life" itself will mean in a presumably postfascist environment) are inseparable from personal experience and political analysis of a postwar sociocultural dispensation where sentiments like Heidegger's are frequently all but official—or, simply, official. Some of Adorno's own most-considered ruminations on the subject had already been written during the war, as in this passage from the "Part One: 1944" section of Minima Moralia:
The idea that after this war life will continue "normally" or even that culture might be "rebuilt"—as if the rebuilding of culture were not already its negation—is idiotic. Millions of Jews have been murdered, and this is to be seen as an interlude and not the catastrophe itself. What more is this culture waiting for? And even if countless people still have time to wait, is it conceivable that what happened in Europe will have no consequences, that the quantity of victims will not be transformed into a new quality of society at large, barbarism?
What's coming appears almost fully present in these words.... Adorno's hint—certainly anticipating the coming aphorisms on poetry and Auschwitz—that life now has been made the realm of the impossible, somehow making barbaric the attempt to have art (even tragic art) still proceed in accord with prewar desiderata about aesthetic semblance's ability to offer, toward the development of our capacity for critical agency, the probable impossible or credible impossible. Also already present are thoughts tending toward the need for an art that would be humane precisely in its relentless dedication to conveying the inhumane....
These motifs come into their own in Adorno's "Cultural Criticism and Society," written at a moment (1949) still terribly charged by the war's immediate aftermath (and, apparently, before Adorno had any knowledge of Celan's poetry). Because the essay's near-final sentences are the ones so often quoted, it is worth noting that the entire piece is permeated by an exponentially heightened recoil from almost all versions of official or consolatory (including much programmatically oppositional and socialist) culture and cultural criticism...
#noted
