Peter Trawny

The 2014 publication of the first three volumes of Martin Heidegger's Black Notebooks, the philosopher's private writings from the war years, sparked international controversy. While Heidegger's engagement with National Socialism was well known, as were a handful of his private anti-Semitic comments, the Black Notebooks showed for the first time that this anti-Semitism was not merely a personal resentment.The notebooks contain not just anti-Semitic remarks but anti-Semitism deeply embedded in the language of his thought. In them, Heidegger tried to assign a philosophical significance to anti-Semitism, with "the Jew" or "world Judaism" cast as antagonist in his project.