Abstract

Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger rightly count among the signal examples of intellectual complicity with National Socialism. But after supporting the National Socialist movement in its early years, they both withdrew from political activism during the 1930s and considered themselves to be in “inner emigration” thereafter. How did they react to the end of National Socialism, to the Allied occupation and finally to the foundation of the Federal Republic of Germany in 1949? Did they abandon their stance of seclusion and engage once more with political issues? Or did they persist in their withdrawal from the political sphere? In analyzing the intellectual relationship of Heidegger and Jünger after 1945, the article reevaluates the assumption of a “deradicalization” of German conservatism after the Second World War by showing that Heidegger's and Jünger's postwar positions were no less radical than their earlier thought, although their attitude towards the political sphere changed fundamentally.