Abstract

In view of the debate it continues to generate in Europe, Victor Farias' indictment of Heidegger should be read with special attention. Heidegger et le nazisme is supposed to include shocking revelations about its controversial subject. Contrary to the received opinion that Heidegger only toyed with the Nazis after Hitler's accession to power, Farias claims that Heidegger was always a practicing Nazi. From his Catholic boyhood in the Swabian village of Messkirch, through his ultramontanist education at Constance and Freiburg down to his exposition of an anti-modernist existentialism and his identification with the “German revolution” as rector at Freiburg in 1933, Heidegger, it is argued, clung to a cohesive, nationalist ideology.