Heidegger on Americanism: Ruinanz and the End of Modernity

Ermarth, Michael.
Modernism/modernity, Volume 7, Number 3, September 2000, pp. 379-400 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/mod.2000.0056

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/mod/summary/v007/7.3ermarth.html

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Heidegger on Americanism: Ruinanz and the End of Modernity

Michael Ermarth

MODERNISM

/ modernity

What philosophers are in the habit of doing is adopting a popular prejudice and exaggerating it. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil1 Human beings today no longer know what to do with themselves. They therefore believe everything is at an end and become the fools of what the present day happens to bring. Martin Heidegger to Elisabeth Blochmann, 20 December 19312

VOLUME SEVEN, NUMBER THREE, PP 379-400.

2000 THE JOHNS

HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS

This exploration of a broadly revealing strand of Martin Heideggers thinking is intended, at least tangentially, to rehistoricize the debate about the shift from the modern to the postmodern. If ongoing discussions of the postmodern have a central issue at stakea discernible core rather than a perpetually evasive uncentering or diffuse unfounding in the cause of ineffable Otherness or unnamable diffrancethen Heidegger will continue to be invoked there. As Karsten Harries has observed, postmodern theory is unthinkable without his questioning.3 French critics Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut are even more adamantly encompassing: The Heidegger controversy merely stands in the foreground of a controversy that has a quite different impact, involving nothing less than the significance attributed to the logic of modernity.4 The logic of modernity is a large subject and Heidegger, who did not shrink from the largest and most indefinite of all subjects (Being as such), endowed the otherwise intangible logic

Michael Ermarth teaches modern European intellectual history and German history at Dartmouth College. He has published on Wilhelm Dilthey, Karl Jaspers, historicism, and hermeneutics. He is currently completing a two-volume study entitled Germanys Inner America: Americanization, Counter-Americanism, and Transmodernity in the Twentieth Century.

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380 of modernity with a palpable shape, historical telos, and easy comprehensibility by associating it with the most venerable, renewable, and clichd concept in German (and European) thinking about modernity. I am referring to the tandem notions of Americanism and Americanization, which served in Heideggers thinking to convey the recent phase of mankinds fateful course of Ruinanzthat is, the total but unrecognized ruination of the world through the occlusion of Being by way of putative progress. As both ordinary way of life and blockage of the sense for Being, Americanism came to incarnate modern humanism run lethally amok. In its blind, pragmatictechnological frenzy, it was utterly inhuman and at the same time all-too-human. In a compound logical and eschatological sense that combined fulfillment, perfection, and extinction, Americanism came to stand for the end of human history, as it did for other classical thinkers of the twentieth-century posthistoire, including Heideggers contemporaries Alexandre Kojve, Ernst Jnger, and Arnold Gehlen.5 Heideggers account of the logic of modernity served his unique ontological aims, but his choice of these particular terms of reference was anything but idiosyncratic; rather the choice was foreordained by received ideas. For over a century before Heideggers main writings, German thought had characterized the most modern by the catchphrases Americanism and Americanization. Over the long term, these prepotent epithets have exerted a deeply formative influence on the German understanding of modernity as a demonic-dynamic trajectory of mass civilization, running automatically amok beyond all proper bounds and measures toward the consummately inhuman. More than all others, these two terms have served to encapsulate the dreaded common way of the liberal-democratic, capitalist-industrialist West against which the German special way (Sonderweg) was, until 1945, held up as the heroic exception and exalted alternative. Even today, after the great transformations following upon 1945 and 1989, these twin shibboleths continue to impart the sharpest critical edge to lingering German doubts about most modern (and postmodern) civilization as a potentially inhuman, inverted world of mans own making. These two habitual terms continue to serve as the most compelling master tropes (or commonplace conceits) for distilling the otherwise elusive, self-surpassing dynamic of modernity. They are the ambivalent residue when more innocent conceptions of Promethean progress have been demythified, deconstructed, or even ironically inverted by the searing calamities of the twentieth century. Moreover, as spectral self-clichs of modernity, these twin terms continue to figure at the forefront of almost all attempts to think beyond the modern, whether to overtake and steer it along different lines or to transcend and supersede it altogether with some radical otherness, be it countermodern, postmodern, or transmodern. For multiple reasons, a careful historical exploration of Heideggers unique and yet commonplace employment of these fateful terms promises to be timely and illuminating. My chief argument is that the notion of Americanism assumed an axial position in Heideggers writings that was sustained from the mid-1930s to the late-1960s. Indeed it loomed larger and more luridly in the period after his avowedly Nazi period and after his resignation from the rectorship of the University of Freiburg in April 1934.

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His usage continued unabated but not unmodified through the surrender of Nazi Germany in May 1945 and persisted thereafter throughout his later thinking on global technology. To phrase it succinctly, Heidegger increasingly essentialized the entire destiny of modern Western civilization into the reductive catchword Americanism, which served as a holistic, homeopathic mass clich for the totalizing trajectory of mass civilization itself. As such, this commonplace term became indispensable to his evolving perspective upon the entire destiny of human history and the human project itself. More graphically and handily than all other terms, Americanism served to embody the ever-more convenient but ultimately catastrophic way of being human in the modern world. As the most concrete and convenient term for human-centered convenience as such, it was interpreted as fulfilling eons of unwitting anthropomorphism and centuries of modern self-conscious humanismwhile allegedly obliterating all residual appreciation for Being itself. Heideggers reductive and essentialist use of the term was not static; after World War II and the American occupation of Western Germany, this ingrained but now politically touchy appellation was diffused into less sensitive terms, including generic humanism and even vaguer notions of planetary technicism and the primordial will to will.6 But the barbed original term Americanism explicitly continued to play a crucial diagnostic and prognostic role in Heideggers writings and addresses. Among all his notoriously arcane archaisms and vatic neologisms, the term Americanism remained an intellectual Archimedean point in the unfathomable flux of time, history, and Being; it was as close as Heidegger comes to a conceptual constant or ide fixe, perhaps appearing circumstantially under other names but ontically and essentially still the same. As the most familiar antithesis and most readily understood dialectical foil to his core notion of Being, Americanism remained central to his thinking through all its confounding turns and reversals. As with many other European thinkers of his generation, Americanism served Heidegger as a pop historical apriori, a ready-made ide reu for easily eliciting and projecting the ultimate meaning of modernity. Heidegger is often said to have radically de-essentialized both Being (Sein) and mans own concrete way of being in the world (Dasein); but by the same token, he just as certainly and radically essentialized modernity into the correspondingly formulaic and hackneyed stereotype of Americanism. These two tendencies of his thinking remained reciprocally and, in his sense, essentially related: the radically deconstructive or essence-naughting tendency in his thinking necessitated the patently schematic and reductive tendency embodied in his caricature of Americanism as Western and then planetary destiny. Heideggers sustained effort to dethingify the Being of all beings entailed the correspondingly relentless reification of the thingified mindset dubbed Americanism. The present exposition constitutes a sustained response to Hugo Otts question: When are we finally going to see a study of stereotypes in the writings of Martin Heidegger?7 The approach adopted here may seem thoroughgoing to the point of being overbearing, but it is only in keeping with the relentless tenacity with which Heidegger himself framed the issue; Americanism remained the most absolute and encompassing of his stereotypes, reverberating loudly and sometimes tediously

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382 through his writings as the conventional, plebian mass mantra for modernity. His defamiliarization of practical-functional things in the higher cause of Being required a corresponding instrumental use of Americanism as the most familiar and functional of modern clichs for modernity itself. There is a great irony here, to say the least, but only the reader can say whether it ultimately works for or against Heideggers standing as one of the great thinkers of modern times. Heideggers use of Americanism necessarily cuts across the prophylactic cordon sanitaire erected by some interpreters between his philosophy, which is deemed profoundly original and immensely suggestive, and his quirky politics, which are just as often considered a repugnant but brief lapse that he quickly moved beyond but never clearly renounced. Wherever and whenever Heidegger turned, he continued to carry with him his dark vision of Americanism as the culmination of Ruinanza constant and final end to what has aptly been called his politics of Being.8 His relentless instrumentalization of Americanism demonstrates more clearly than any other facet of his thinking that his dialectical metaphysics (at odds with all previous metaphysics) cannot by its own lights be quarantined from the mundane realm of the political, the ideological, and the worldly. A special interpretive economy or intellectual trade-off obtains in the effort to understand Heidegger on Americanism that derives from the reciprocal relation between the critical (or deconstructive) and reductive (or stereotypical) vectors of his thinking. As a radical metaphysician-against-metaphysics, Heidegger is notoriously difficult to understand in his own terms, but Americanism is easy to understand since almost everyone already understands what it means by an implicit, unreflective preunderstanding. This habitual familiarity and tacit taken-for-grantedness of America and Americanism as nearly everybodys latent stereotype of modern life was slyly spoofed in Bertolt Brechts 1929 work From a Reader for City Dwellers, which also carried a self-parodying, self-ironizing effect characteristic of Brecht but hardly of Heidegger:
I can hear you saying: He talks of America He understands nothing about it He has never been there But believe you me: You understand me perfectly well when I talk of America And the best thing about America is That we understand it.9

For Heidegger, by contrast, the absolute worst (yet best) thing about Americanism was precisely that nearly everyone in the West was coming to understand it not merely as the dominant modern way of life but simply as life itselfat the incalculable and unrecognizable cost of the loss of Being itself. Americanism perfected mankinds anthropomorphic urges to doing, making, having, and knowing, while at the same time obliterating the true thinking of Being. Heidegger pressed the odd quasi-familiarity of Americanism as the quintessence

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of modernity to the limit. He emphasized repeatedly its superficial, thoughtless matter-of-courseness (Selbstverstndlichkeit) and its deeper, hidden power to convey the staggering paradox of the fully humanized yet somehow also dehumanized world. In his earliest writings, he expostulated on the woeful aura of an inverted human/inhuman world before finding the upper-case proper name for such an abject condition. In 1910, while still a theology student in Freiburg before World War I and on the verge of his tortuous rift with Catholicism, Heidegger railed against modern decadence and the destructive influences of modernism.10 In an address at the dedication of a monument to the seventeeth-century Augustinian monk-preacher, Abraham a Sancta Clara, the young Heidegger denounced modern ways of living and being:
The ground-destroying rage for the new, the crazed distraction from the deeper spiritual content of life and art, the modern sense of life directed toward continually self-annulling stimulations, the self-enclosed hermetic spacesometimes to the point of suffocation in which contemporary art of every sort movesthese are elements which point toward a decadence [Dekadenz], toward a sorry falling away [Abfall] from the healthiness and the transcendent value of life.11

By the logic of his own developing ideas, Heideggers term for modernitys grievous falling away would soon undergo a hypostatization into first Ruinanz and then eventually Americanism. In the wake of World War I and his reading of Oswald Spengler, Ludwig Klages, and Georg Simmel, Heidegger coined his own solecistic yet infinitely synthetic term Ruinanz to encapsulate the deeper metaphysical/ontological dynamic concurrently at work in the widely discussed decline of the West.12 As both essence and process, this gerundive term was supposed to connote much more than merely an end (Untergang) of the spiritual-idealist high culture of the once-Christian, Eurocentric West. Rather Ruinanz was meant to convey the intrinsic movement of debasement or preternatural falling away from Being through mans peremptory formulation of things, concepts, and entities. Foremost among his many terms for this ontic falling from Being toward thingness, Ruinanz remained more inexorable and more imponderable than mere civilizational Untergangin the same way that Being itself must remain more primordial than all things at mans behest or disposal. Transitive, selfsurpassing Ruinanz became for Heidegger the darkening shadow of the human will to Transzendenz.13 In Heideggers evolving thought, these two equally primordial tendencies of human strivingtoward transcendent Being and toward cognizable, manipulable things-other-than-Beingbecame so mutually implicated and intertwined that they threatened to become tragically indistinguishable, like the two sides of a Mbius strip. In this confounding circularity, the commonplace catchphrase Americanism came to serve as his all-purpose, familiar trump-term for rendering the ontological difference both more commonly recognizable and more radically diagnostic.14 Apart from unique, ulterior ontological allegiances, Heideggers conception of Americanism as wholesale Ruinanz masquerading as ersatz Transzendenz was similar to that of many contemporary culture critics, including Spengler, Klages, Werner Sombart, Hans Freyer, Hans Zehrer, the Jnger brothers, and others often grouped

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384 under the rubrics of radical conservatism or conservative revolution. They too viewed Americanism as a vulgar hyperhumanism or instinctive animalism of the uncultured masses, at once cravenly conformist and wildly amok, potentially inducing by its very excesses a dialectical backlash or leap forward toward some redemptive kingdom come of super- or transmodernism. Declaring total cultural war and a decisive struggle to the last to redeem the German spirit and culture from the coils of anomic Western liberal civilization, these radicals urged the manly, hard voluntaristic course of direct action and revolutionary deed (literally, die Tat) in response to the pervasive aura of cultural pessimism.15 Calls for hard action stemmed from an underlying mood of darkening despair; Heidegger proved susceptible to both summons. The manichean and masculinist posture of Weimar culture warriors was given softer, more poetic expression by Rainer Maria Rilke in a letter of 13 November 1925, lamenting the transformation of real things into commodities and counterfeit substitutes. In a passage often cited by Heidegger, Rilke cast the genuinely human sense of substantial Being against the encroaching American sense of fungible, disposable, commodifiable things. The ontological difference was rendered palpable in Rilkes phrasing:
For our grandparents a house, a spring, a familiar tower, yes, even their clothes, a cloakthese were infinitely more, infinitely more intimate; almost every thing was a vessel in which they found and conserved something human. Now, coming from America, there surge empty, indifferent things, fake things, dummy-life [Lebensattrappe]. . . . A house, an apple, a grape vine, in the American sense, has nothing in common with the house, the fruit, the grape into which our forefathers poured their hope and solicitude. . . . Things living, experienced, and communing are going under and cannot be replaced. We are perhaps the last ones who will have known such things.16

After World War I, even soberly rational minds not surrendering to poetic melancholy were nevertheless given to sweeping prophetic pronouncements regarding the spread of such Americanism. In his famous address Science as Vocation in 1918, Max Weber equated modernization and Americanization, insisting broadly that [I]n very important respects German university life is being Americanized, as is German life in general.17 Writing in 1925 amid the pandemic craze of Weimar Americanitis, the liberal journalist Rudolf Kayser urged semantic caution, Americanism is the new European catchword. Like all catchwords it is subject to the same fate: the more one uses it, the less one knows what it means.18 For Heidegger and other cultural critics of left, right, and center, however, the best thing about Americanism was precisely its ubiquitous popular meaning as the perpetually self-stoking dynamic of modern mass civilization, accompanied by the paradoxical, uncanny tendency to mean the loss of meaning altogether. As in Heideggers subsequent writings, Americanism in Weimar Germany was used more and more loosely as a wild-card catchword; but rather than the term undermining its own meaning through flagrant and exaggerated overuse, it continued its boundless hypertrophy even through the Great Depression, owing to its singular capacity to mean the end of meaningand

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for many commentators, the end of history, nature, culture, and even the world itself. Moreover, Americanism carried this paradoxical premonitory meaning not merely for an elite of intellectuals and cultural critics but for many anxious little people, who in the turbulent interwar years cared more about a loss of practical livelihood, savings, and jobs than about any loss of ontological Being. Like the German Reichsmark, Americanism in the Weimar period lent itself to stupendous hyperinflation without an accompanying semantic deflation so that subsequent Nazi usage of the term might best be called a caricature of a caricature. For his part, Heidegger prepared to impel this modern slogan toward absolute ontological dimensions by his path-breaking exegesis of human existence and its concrete historicity. Heideggers great unfinished work of 1927, Being and Time, sent shock waves through German and continental philosophy. The work was hailed widely as another epochal Copernican turn in thinking, on a par with Kants earlier transcendental turn. Ironically, Heideggers rich but elliptical work soon established his stature in the wider realm of public fame that he scorned in the work itself as inauthentic. Neither Ruinanz nor Americanism appeared explicitly in the work itself, but both notions were implicit in much of Heideggers interpretation of everyday human existence. As a phenomenology of everydayness and ordinary, quotidian life, this dense work laid down lines of interpretation that would clearly converge a few years later in his formulaic use of Americanism as the prevailing worldview of modern man. Being and Time set out to provide a philosophy of radical reflection upon human existence as a unique form of Being as such. More technically, the work undertook a hermeneutic phenomenology of concrete human Dasein in its immanent experiential horizon of temporality and finitude. Under the universal categories of existence, temporality, and historicity in general, it presented a certain mode of human life in a certain period of human historywhat could be called modern Dasein or modern Western life under urban-industrial conditions. Apart from this underlying tension between its universal phenomenological claims and its restricted historical range of evidence and specific areas of concrete lived experience, the work adumbrated an even more ambitious general ontology or hermeneutic of Being as such. Abjuring the transcendental departure of much modern thought from the abstract human subject or pure consciousness, Heidegger began within concrete existence and the experiential human situation. But his exposition of purported universal structures of human existence in terms of familiarly and recognizably modern usages presumed what needed to be demonstrated.19 As some mildly skeptical commentators noted at the time, Heidegger prejudicially conflated the exegesis of human existence as such with a slanted interpretation of modern life under current conditions as refracted through the biased categories of Kierkegaard, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, Graf Paul Yorck von Wartenburg, Spengler, and other thinkers hostile to modern civilization. One might go a step further to argue that the metaphysical opening to Being adumbrated in Being and Time (and reserved for future elaboration) constituted the opening for his subsequent deployment of Americanism as the stereotypical essence of Western Ruinanz. Human Dasein came to its ruination-cum-perfection through its own immanent logic of being modern.

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The normal everyday world of inauthentic human existence presented in Being and Time consisted of humdrum routine, daily praxis, and publicnesssuperficial sociability, collective conformity, and thoughtless compliance with the anonymous rule of the other as them (das Man), whom Heidegger called everybody and nobody. Existence tends to slide toward an inauthentic life of averageness, homogeneity, conformity, publicity, busyness, and business-as-usual; it also tends to become ridden with boredom, empty talk, distractions, newspapers, comfort, security, sensationalism, and a host of other forms of life that were habitually associated with Weimar Americanitis. Heidegger insisted that this unthinking normalcy of daily existence entailed not only the loss of a sense of Being but also of the active and manly qualities of heroism, risk, autonomy, decision, vitality, tradition, and hierarchy, as well as the passive, nurturing capacities to reflect, to keep silent, to listen, to revere, to thank, and to be capable of awe or wonder. Entwining human-historical and ontological modes of comprehension, Heidegger discerned a double trajectory consisting of the deepening loss of Being concurrent with growing self-alienation among human beings; the authentic I tends to become lost in the they, just as Being becomes obscured in practical things regarded as entities, commodities, and instruments at the disposal of human beings. Surrounded by the ever-ready tools of technology, Dasein tends toward the average, anonymous mass being of public conformity rather than toward authentic selfhood: By publicness [ffentlichkeit] everything gets obscured and what has thus been covered up gets passed off as something familiar and accessible to everyone.20 Significantly, it seems to require an average templated idea like Americanism to convey the full dimensions of mans own intrinsic tendency to a templated average consciousness. The esoteric notion of ontological Ruinanz, so to speak, averages out most intelligibly for nearly everybody as vernacular Americanism. Heidegger indicated that the specifically modern mode of existence annuls metaphysical awe and questioning in favor of scientific knowledge and technological mastery; these dispositions of mind in turn flatter mans wishful self-image of sovereign control even as they shatter cherished illusions of human specialness. A modern form of self-conscious anthropomorphism trumps the traditional form of nave anthropomorphism; but in any case, man remains fixated upon himself and his own designs. The ultimate driving force in the obliteration of Being through mans abiding selffixation turns out to be the Moloch of modern technology. Immediately after Being and Time, Heidegger began in 1928 to realign his exposition of human existence by emphasizing the growing powerlessness of Dasein in the face of the boundless domination of technology which rages about in the world like an unchained beast (G, 26:215, 279). Man was being irrevocably overpowered by his own instrumental power; what man has brought into being reacts reflexively upon him to obliterate all bonds with primordial Being, leaving man estranged and homesick, sprung out of all original bounds and bonds into a groundless and homeless world of his own devising. The world (of true Sein and Dasein) was becoming the world (in lethal quotation marks) and worldview. In 192930 Heidegger repeated Novaliss pronouncement that genuine philosophy was always in essence homesickness, while

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adding a sharp jab at the unrecognized normal sickness of contemporary existence: Homesicknessis there something like this in general today? Has it not become an incomprehensible word, even in everyday life? For have not contemporary urban man and the ape of civilization (Zivilisationsaffe) long since abolished homesickness? (G, 29/30:71) The specter of modern man, stylized as the anonymous das Man or the subhuman Zivilisationsaffe, was progressing toward its end point in Ruinanzthe robotic homunculus of homo americanus. In On the Essence of Truth (1930) Heidegger escalated his critique of the blind subjectivism and anthropocentrism of modern thinking, He [man] is all the more mistaken the more exclusively he takes himself, as subject, to be the standard for all beings.21 Subjectivism bred its logical reciprocal in doctrines of objectivismand vice versa. The seemingly (but superficially) antithetical worldviews of marxism and modern Catholicism revealed themselves on deeper inspection as bankrupt kindred forms derived from the same modern anthropocentrism, differing only in degree rather than in kind. In a letter of 22 June 1932 to Elisabeth Blochmann, a liberal-democratic Jewish friend who had recently converted to Protestantism, Heidegger was at pains to differentiate among modern intellectual horrors: Communism, among other things, may well be horrible, but it is a clear affair, whereas Jesuitism ispardon me for saying thisdiabolical.22 On 30 March 1933, two months following Hitlers assumption of the chancellorship, Heidegger wrote in the same manner of a new German twofront war against the insidious twin specters of materialist antispirit and expiring exspirit, The confrontation with Marxism and with the Center Party would slacken away from its true sense, if it did not ripen into a confrontation with the antispirit of the Communist world and no less with the moribund spirit of Christianity.23 The crises of present day politics assumed real meaning only in reference to the even more urgent metapolitics of Being; the acute emergency of human values self-evident in the death throes of the Weimar Republic counted for nothing in relation to the perpetual emergency of human blindness to Being. Modern civilization had to be overcome to clear the way for something other than mere things. During his notorious tenure as Nazi rector of the University of Freiburg for nine months during 1933 and 1934, Heideggers previous dire warnings about mans narcissistic hubris and maniacal self-apotheosis did nothing to inhibit his own apotheosis of Hitler as the exalted, superhuman heroic standard-bearer of all things German and authentic, as the sole remaining earthly agent to combat modern degeneration. With his own special hopes of leading the leader toward Being, Heidegger bestowed upon Hitler the unique historical-ontological status of total incarnation of German (and European) destiny, who might invert the inversion and re-turn Ruinanz toward authentic Transzendenz.24 Not just historically, for the passing moment, but ontically and eternally, Hitler was Germanyas the stock phrase wentand Hitler was thereby the incarnate, existential vessel of Being itself: Let not propositions and ideas be the rules of your Being [Sein]. The Fhrer alone is the German reality, present and future, and its law.25 A reopening of human access to Being thus remained the purpose of political engagement, but only as a self-sublating politics to end all politics.

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In Heideggers unabashedly National Socialist phase, it was not politics in any usual sense but rather Being itself that constituted the supreme stake in Germanys revolution: This revolution brings with it the total transformation of our German being.26 Heidegger thought that the Nazi revolution would accomplish the practical activist equivalent of the philosophical epoch, the deliberate, reflective rupture of thoughtless, daily routine for the sake of authentic existence and Being. In a private letter of December 1933 to his confidant Erik Wolf, Heidegger transmuted authentic individual Dasein into invincible collective Deutschsein, with both personhood and nation-state conscripted in the supreme service of Being itself: The individual, whatever his place, counts for nothing. The destiny of our nation within the state counts for everything.27 The authentic personal selfhood of Being and Time was transcended in the tide of destiny. In view of Heideggers abbreviated but total public engagement for Nazism, the bitterest irony would come in the form of censure from several Party superzealots who complained that Being and Time remained a fundamental ontology which looked at man in his passive role rather than in his active one.28 What these critics left out of their cavil was that Heidegger had embraced Nazism precisely to force the turn from normal conformist passivity to voluntarist decision on behalf of Being. This critique notwithstanding (which in hindsight may seem somewhat prescient but was unfounded in view of his publicly stated position), Heidegger remained vehement that a concerted radicalism of thought and deed was necessary to overcome the pervasive meaninglessness of modern existence. His subsequent use of Americanism at so many turns offered a singularly effective rhetorical and philosophical way to reclaim an ideological orthodoxy and ready-made intelligibility while also retaining his reputation for unabashedly radical thinking. He could use familiar old wine in familiar old bottles with old labels and old stoppers to refer to the newest installment of Ruinanz. It is noteworthy that Heidegger wrote the first recorded passages concerned expressly with Americanism in the period following his resignation from the Freiburg rectorship on 23 April 1934. (He remained a member of the Nazi Party until the end of the war.) If his own affiliation with Nazism was turning more heterodox and even idiosyncratic in its ontic orientation, he couched his opprobrium against Americanism in far more conventional, worldly terms. In a report urging university reform dated 28 August 1934, he saw the American menace already lurking inside the temple of German learning and Wissenschaft. Echoing Weber on the Americanization of German learning and life, Heidegger urged a counterstrategy leading to a final cultural showdown, If the American influence in contemporary academic and scientific life, already far too powerful, is to be effectively countered and eradicated in the future, it is essential to allow the restructured academic disciplines to grow in accordance with their own inner exigencies.29 In another university documenta confidential report filed with the National Socialist Professors Organization at Gttingen opposing the candidacy of his former student Eduard Baumgarten, who had studied the pragmatism of John Dewey in the United StatesHeidegger judged Baumgarten (who happened to be a nephew of

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Max Weber) to be dangerously unreliable in view of the urgent national imperative to meld philosophy, culture, and politics into a total unity. Heideggers report was alternately pointed and elliptical regarding Baumgartens shortcomings: His stay in the United States, during which he was Americanized, no doubt allowed him to learn much about the country and its inhabitants. But I have solid reasons to doubt the sureness of his political instincts and his judgment.30 Even if privately Heidegger was rethinking the necessary congruity of politics and metaphysics, he began publicly to deploy the inveterate catchphrase Americanism as a cultural tocsina call to arms in the service of authentic Being and becoming truly German. In a well-known passage from his Introduction to Metaphysics of 1935, Heidegger posed the question Is Being a mere word and its meaning a vapor, or is it the spiritual destiny of the Western world? He went on to insist:
This Europe, in its ruinous blindness forever on the point of cutting its own throat, lies today in a great pincers, squeezed between Russia on one side and America on the other. From a metaphysical point of view, Russia and America are the same; the same dreary technological frenzy, the same unrestricted organization of the average man.

He proceeded to lament the fact that under the global impact of technology, time has ceased to be anything other than velocity, instantaneousness, and simultaneity and time as history has vanished from the lives of all peoples. All this frenzied haste raises the question what for? Whither? And what then?31 Heidegger was capable of seeing all the difference in the world between Being and beings but no difference worth considering between Bolshevism and Americanism. The supreme ontological difference between Being and beings gave rise to a sovereign indifference regarding worldly distinctions and values. Just as he had recently excoriated Jesuitism as more diabolical than Communism, however, Heidegger would similarly denounce Americanism as far more sinister than Communism precisely owing to the formers thoughtless convenience, ready familiarity, distraction, and sly dodge away from firm ideological explicitness. Henceforth Americanism loomed larger and larger as the unrecognized telos of matter-of-courseness in modern human existence, which takes itself and all Being for granted. In this sense, Heideggers pathway of ever more radical and encompassing Destruktion represented a homeopathic disclosure (and, faintly but potentially, a rearguard reversal) of the fateful Ruinanz exemplified in commonplace Americanism. In a gesture of supreme radicality, Heidegger insisted that all human-centered categories and values remained utterly fatuous. The childish anthropomorphic categories of hope and despair, like the everyday human categories, practical forms of life, and ordinary practices generated out of mans mundane concernsall these remained distorting mirrors and blinders, diverting man from the sense of Being. Americanism remained unmatchable in endowing the ontological difference with an intrinsically powerful anthropomorphic and ever catchy popular meaning. The German spirit, as embodied in the German language, became the redemptive response to American-

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390 izing Ruinanz. Germanys double vocation of politics and metaphysics required it to confront its identical-twin antagonists by fighting fire with fire: the concerted total mobilization of National Socialism (and allied European fascist movements) were required to counter the enveloping technological mania of Americanism and Bolshevism. Heidegger continued to portray contemporary developments in the later 1930s entirely in terms of his primordial ground-category of Ruinanz, which was now protracted not only beyond childish optimism and pessimism but beyond any residual element of human recognition or recollection whatsoever. The falling away from true spirit culminating in the modern age degenerated into the uniform, standardized mass mind and mass existence of the twentieth century as institutionalized in the interchangeable Molochs of Americanism and Bolshevism. In his summer 1936 course on Schelling given several months before formation of the Rome-Berlin Axis, Heidegger held out both Mussolini and Hitler as having learned from Nietzsche and as having begun a countermovement to nihilism. Democracy represented not freedom but a kind of cultural death: Europe tries to cling to democracy and will not admit that this democracy will be Europes historical death. For democracy is, as Nietzsche clearly saw, only a kind of nihilism.32 In terms again redolent of Max Webers famous Munich address, Heidegger went on to pinpoint the problem of the universities and their conception of science, We have long since slipped into the most sterile Americanism, according to whose principles the truth is merely the successful and everything else is speculation, that is, irrelevant dreaming (G, 45:545). Perhaps heeding his own call to courage for the absolute, Heidegger also ventured some cautiously veiled reproofs of the dogmatic rigidity and racialist delusions of National Socialism. (He was under Gestapo surveillance at the time.) But at the same time he continued to denounce Americanism in terms far more damning than those of Nazi officialdom, which was at this critical juncture still hoping to preserve American neutrality by dampening precisely such propagandistic diatribes. Heidegger began to hint gingerly that all mundane isms and discrete worldviews were fated to resolve into the same fundamental, twisted transformative will-to-power intrinsic to modernity. Whatever signs of doubt about Nazism one can find in Heidegger in this period, they remain entirely of a piece with his much more adamantly forthright opposition, indeed total resistance, to the Ruinanz that was most fully evident (but not necessarily intellectually reflected) in what he never stopped calling Americanism. Heideggers critique of Nazism consisted of reassigning it from the role of sole practical redeemer to one of partaking vaguely in the same Ruinanz as the totalizing destiny of Americanism. In the recently much-studied Contributions to Philosophy, Heideggers censure of Nazi science and its racialist mania centered not on its overtly inhuman values but on its deeper, unrecognized Americanism of technological power over things and persons: The folk-based organization of science moves on the same path as the American, and the question is simply which side will most quickly and fully have at its disposal the greatest force and means (G, 65:149).33 Heideggers erstwhile effort to lead

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the leader resolved itself into understanding Nazism better than it understood itself, resolving it into a latter-day variant of power-besotted anthropomorphism. He thereby assigned functioning or operational Nazism to the sprawling camp of modern civilization and its core dynamic of unlimited Americanism. What had formerly recommended itself as National Socialist rescue was being co-opted (from the standpoint of Being) into the pan-Ruinanz of Americanism. In The Age of the World Picture of 1938, Heidegger again singled out Americanism by way of a discussion of the disproportion between mans measure (which must always remain anthropocentric) and the gigantic (which manifests both the hypertrophy of the man-made but also in some oblique, awestruck way the vestiges of Being itself). He underscored the inevitable failure of purely quantitative means to comprehend the staggering quality of the gigantic. A new note of ironic metareflection resounded in several key passages. Heidegger seemed to press the issue of Americanism beyond the childish and churlish level of popular understanding by using the customary term with the caveat of distancing quotation marks, We do not think at all, if we believe we have explained this phenomenon of the gigantic with the catchword Americanism.34 The new note of irony did not, however, invalidate the notion of Americanism as the uniquely proper name for the dynamic propelling the world to total Ruinanz; rather this new typographical gesture of deeper self-consciousness served to underscore the claim that Being remained the real issue at stake. An appendix to the lecture elaborated on this passage in an even more thought-provoking way:
Americanism is itself something European. It is an as-yet uncomprehended variety of the gigantic, and the gigantic itself is still inchoate, still not yet capable of being understood as the product of the full and complete metaphysical essence of modernity. The American interpretation of Americanism by means of pragmatism still remains outside the metaphysical realm.35

Just as the immanent self-understanding of Nazism and Communism missed the mark, so the immanent or inside understanding of Americanism in its own practical terms was destined to remain a misunderstanding that necessarily missed Being. As elsewhere, Heidegger plays here upon a seeming paradox in order to provoke deeper thinking. The passage leaves unclear whether the European character of Americanism concerns the actual practical dynamic of Ruinanz itself, which he is presumably trying to avert (or deflect), or its proper metaphyscial understanding by Europeans, which he is presumably trying to promote. The new note of deeper reflection suggests that Americanization could no longer be regarded as something alien, encroaching from afar, but rather should be seen as a process, now relocated by reflection, at the very core of Europes essence. So relocated by deeper reflection, Americanism would serve to lead Europeans back to Being and out of their Babylonian captivity in civilizational progress and the commodious thing-world of instrumental functionality. After the outbreak of war in 1939 and amid the escalating maelstrom of human and inhuman events, Heidegger continued to present all history as the ontological

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392 encounter of Being versus (but also Being as) Ruinanz; the destiny of human beings seemed rather beside the point. At the same time, however, he continued in public lectures to couch the ontic stakes of the struggle in terms of actual specific events and clearly designated adversaries. Human beings and their collective groupings served as unknowing and unwilling vessels of ontological disclosure; nations became emanations of Being. Thus, the defeat of France in June 1940 fulfilled a mysterious law of history whereby the culture that nourished Descartes was crushed by a people, the Germans, who have pressed the machine economy to its utmost but who at the same time miraculously remain most spiritual. As both the fulfillment and dialectical overcoming of Western tradition, Heidegger invoked the notion of total mobilization borrowed from the maniacal pan-productionism of Ernst Jngers The Worker: only the superman is capable of an unconditional machine economy and vice versa: the one needs the other in order to establish an unconditional domination over the earth (G, 48:205).36 As the war against Britain shifted to the gigantic war upon Russia, Heidegger identified the redemption of Being with Europe as a whole becoming fully German in spirit. For its own authentic well-being and the sake of Being, Europe must cast its collective existential decision for German spiritual culture. This conjoined EuroGerman destiny entailed doing battle not only against the Bolshevik East but against the most advanced civilization of the West. With American entry into the war in December 1941, Heidegger removed the hedging quotation marks around Americanism; active battle was called for by world destiny, not reflective or ironical problematization. At this critical juncture, Germany, as the homeland of spirit, must purify itself and stand fast against its own inner America. Heidegger warned expressly against a peculiar German susceptibility to inner, self-inflicted Americanization as the worst form of craven cultural capitulation, Unfortunately for itself, the surrender of German being to Americanism goes so far at times that Germans are ashamed that their people was once called the people of poets and thinkers (G, 52:134). In the Hlderlin lectures of summer semester 1942several months after Americas entry into World War II but prior to the decisive battle of StalingradHeidegger restated the ontological difference between Being and beings by insisting that such a question of questions remained entirely at odds with mankinds worldly concerns, measures, values, categories, events, and self-centered plans. Now even metaphysics itself ceased for Heidegger to be a meaningful response, or even a revealing clue, to the loss of Being. Western metaphysics no longer figured as Gegenruinanz but rather as a veiled auxiliary of pan-technology; Western metaphysics resolved itself into protoAmericanism raised to a higher power. What had been total mobilization was now given over to Heideggers radical program of total deconstruction (Destruktion or Abbau). The whole edifice of Western thought had to be entirely undone to make way for the first and last things: now only poetic language was deemed to offer a fragile clearing or hospice for Being. Actual ruination remained the only proper homeopathic means of Gegenruinanz.

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The war in Heideggers rendering proceeded in a hybrid mannerpartly as the Clausewitzian extension of politics by other means but also as a paradoxical kind of total mobilization of poetic language by its own means, redirecting language against its own inertial Ruinanz into all-too-worldly, reified uses. Heideggers position echoed that of Rilke and the followers of Stefan George, whose motto was Language is the innermost bastion of the spirit in a world of things.37 At this same time, efficacious means in the sense of worldly aims were becoming gravely compromised for Heidegger, as they all conspired to occlude Being. The spiritless tide of Americanism, as the hypertrophied essence of the West, was bent upon the destruction of any vestigial hospice of Being. Americanism remained bent upon besting all its variants before completing the obliteration of the homeland of Being itself. Hlderlins homesickness was taken to portend the obliteration of the German homeland and of all homelands of rooted cultures and peoples. Heideggers new ontology of poetic refuge however radical its turn from power-politics or will-to-power toward poetrywas still ideologically consonant with Nazi New Order Europe. Heidegger warned with a tone of dire emergency and of hope against all odds:
Today we know that the Anglo-Saxon world of Americanism has decided to destroy Europe, and that means the homeland, and that means the incipient origin of the West. What is origin is indestructible. The entry of America into this planetary war is not the entrance into history, but is always already the final American act of American historylessness and self-destruction [G, 53:68].

In perhaps the most surprising of his many convoluted turns, Heidegger asserted in 1942 that Bolshevism was merely a derivative offshoot of Americanism; the more advanced and boundless Western pincer had already subsumed its Eastern counterpart in preparation for engulfing Germany and all Europe:
This primacy of quantity is itself a quality, an essential mode, that of measureless [Masslosigkeit]. This is the principle of that which we call Americanism; Bolshevism is only a variant [Abart] of Americanism. This is the truly dangerous form of the measureless, because it appears in the form of democratic citizenship, mixed with Christianity and all of this in an atmosphere of pronounced history-lessness [G, 53:86].

Language, like human Dasein itself, harbored the latent potential for both the greatest promise of homecoming and the greatest danger of ruination. This deep duplicity of language was evidenced in the fact that modern Germans could say German words but really speak American meanings.38 Shifting away from the Western front, Heidegger instanced Japan as Germanys equally hard-pressed far-Eastern ally that was also waging battle against ruination through American-style civilization. There, too, language could be more dangerous and devastating than man-made bombs falling on ancestral homelands. These bombs showed the sudden, visible horror of the Ruinanz of all Being when Being is deployed instrumentally in man-made systems and categories. There remained, however, an

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394 even more essential danger: the final Ruinanz of language itself as venerable hospice of Being: We [Germans], like the Japanese, learn the English-American language. This has its own technical-practical necessity that no one in their right mind would question. The question remains whether beyond the utility of such language capacities, we also recognize their essential danger (G, 53:80). As the house of Being, language showed a double tendency and double meaning, akin to the German homeland in its precarious middle position [Mittellage]. Deprived of its useless poetic use, language can be deployed to serve the world of pragmaticpractical business and distraction, especially when language becomes shackled to the alien forms of quantity, number, and commensuration. Echoing Hegel, Goethe, and other German thinkers contra numeros, Heidegger insisted that sheer quantity had assumed a unique quality all its owna fundamental condition of modern life that obtruded everything genuinely qualitative. In the Contributions, Heidegger dilated on the superhuman scale of this quintessentially modern Ruinanz, What transformations are taking place [within the industrial economy]? Manipulation and business. The big number, the gigantic [das Riesige], sheer spatial extension, and growing superficiality and hollowness. The inevitable fall into kitsch and the inauthentic (G, 65:392). In its anthropomorphic ambition to make history entirely in the human image as things for disposal, Americanism forfeited any trace of the being of authentic history, culture, and nature: Nature is history-less. [But] Americanism is history-less and therefore catastrophic in a way that nature itself could never possibly be (G, 53:179). In the Heraclitus lectures of 1943, delivered during and after Stalingrad and after Goebbelss call for total war, Heidegger juxtaposed the climactic catastrophe of current events with the consoling serenity of a continuing German destiny in Being projected far beyond the fray of current history. Trumping the Americanism he despised, Heidegger could find consolation in an alternative or counterhistory-lessness of a timebeing of postmodernity and even a kingdom come of posthumanity. If Germanys selfappointed National Socialist mission in the world was ending in utter destruction, her surpassing destiny beyond this all-too-worldly world of worldviews was not thereby finished. In the dire winter of 1944, Heidegger wrote of opportunity vested in calamity, of reversal implicit in Ruinanz,: Decline is not the same as death. Every decline remains secure within the ascent.39 Heideggers famed ontological difference provided the primordial engine for an oddly paradoxical kind of progress after all, not in the banal, anthropocentric American sense but rather in a superhuman progress beyond progress. While expressing these rarified superhuman hopes, Heidegger was already looking beyond the physical destruction of Germany to an even greater danger: the impending planetary Ruinanz that refused to recognize itself as such. For Heidegger, the darkest night was arriving en masse as enlightenment, reeducation, and the prospect of further Americanization. The world had fallen so far into Ruinanz as the absolute humanization of all Being that any alternative to mankinds narcissism was precluded. Indeed, the grand tradition of Western metaphysics was henceforth the deepest problem rather than any kind of possible solution: metaphysics is anthropomorphism the formation and apprehension of the world according to mans image.40

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With French occupation of southwestern Germany, Heidegger fell under a partial denazification ban from 1945 to 1951. He was forbidden to teach at the university level but not forbidden to publish or to lecture. During the ban from 1945 to 1951, Heidegger continued his turnings and re-turningsbackward again to Greco-Germanic origins but also outward toward French and Eastern thought while deepening his reflection upon the Western tradition. His turn toward the East included reading and attempting to translate Lao Tsu. As West German society of the Wirtschaftswunder was said by many critics to be lapsing more and more into Americanization (indeed, becoming more American than America), Heidegger took up his homely dwelling in steadfastly regional, Alemmanic folk culture.41 He took solace from and pride in the fact that he was becoming as deeply interesting to the French and the Japanese as he was embarrassing to the Germansand anathema to the Anglo-Americans. His reputation, at low ebb at home, soared abroad. Heideggers exegesis of mankind and its anthropomorphic systems and centrisms always resolved itself simultaneously into a gnosis of Being and a diagnosis of Americanism; the two were inextricably entangled and mutually dependent. His notion of Being remained so altogether different, so ex-centric and ec-static, yet so relentlessly all-encompassing and beyond human concerns as to permit staggering conceptual equivalences pitched far beyond the categories and values of any mere worldview, whether Americanism, Communism, positivism, or other variants of humanism. Heidegger insisted that Americanism belonged alongside Bolshevism, Communism, and National Socialism as variants of collectivist massification, You can also say Americanism in this regard. It is exactly the same thing.42 The Ruinanz of Being remained the implacable outcome of mankinds modern way of thinking even more than of its ways of doing, having, and existing. Heideggers final testament came in the famous Spiegel interview of 1966, which was not published until ten years later, on 31 May 1976 (four days after his death) under the telling title Only a God Can Save Us. The title was especially revealing in light of his apothegm that modern man remains too late for the gods and too early for Being. For this final Heidegger, mankind has become quite beside the point while still fancying itself to be the only point. It may at first seem incongruous that Heidegger chose the allegedly most Americanized magazine of German popular opinion in which to leave his final message, but in a sense his entire homeopathic counterlogic of Gegenruinanz required such a mass forum. Heideggers interviewers, publisher Rudolf Augstein and his associate Georg Wolff, assumed the role of common citizens, who, as quasi-devils advocates, tried to wrest some satisfaction from the miracles of German recovery and the fact that in the present Federal Republic everything is functioning. But for Heidegger, of course (i.e. the of course of the logic of Ruinanz), that condition was the very essence of the most profound problem. In modernity, sheer functioning has displaced wondering and reflective thinking. Ruinanz has run its disastrous course, with the expected losses: practicality precludes profundity, efficacy eliminates epiphany, and mastery dispels mystery. The ever-salient, self-reconstituting term Americanism cropped up obliquely but crucially as the two interviewers

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396 pressed Heidegger further on his notorious reaffirmation of the inner truth and greatness of National Socialism as residing in the encounter between technicity on the planetary level and modern man (G, 40:208). The Spiegel interviewers asked Heidegger if he included the Communist movement among those who misunderstood the meaning of technology. He answered, Yes, definitelyas determined by global technology. The interviewers then added: Americanism also? Heidegger answered, Yes, I would say that too. Meanwhile, the last thirty years it should have become clearer that the global movement of modern technology is a force whose scope in determining history can scarcely be overestimated (OG, 104). The all-encompassing breadth of meaning that his interviewers gently challenged in Heideggers promiscuous use of the habitual term nihilism actually applied far more aptly to his reflexive use of Americanismespecially as nihilism and Americanism stood for the same implacable thingification of Being. In the Spiegel interview, the ever-salient term no longer carried the ironically questioning quotation marks that Heidegger had seen fit to apply thirty years before, when, paradoxically, he still believed there was some possibility of altering the course of Ruinanz. Later in this final interview, Heidegger returned to the theme of American ways of thinking and alluded briefly to an exceptional element within the otherwise desolate American scene:
I see the task of thought precisely in this, that within its own limits, it helps man as such achieve a satisfactory relationship to the essence of technicity. National Socialism did indeed go in this direction. Those people, however, were far too poorly equipped for thought to arrive at a really explicit relationship to what is happening today and has been underway for the past 300 years.

The interviewers asked, Do the Americans today have this explicit relationship? Heidegger replied,
They do not have it either. They are still caught up in a thought that, under the guise of pragmatism, facilitates the technical operation and manipulation of things, but at the same time blocks the way to reflection upon the genuine nature of modern technicity. At the same time, here and there in the USA attempts are being made to become free from pragmatic-positivistic thinking. [OG, 111]

One can only wonder what Heidegger meant in this coyly tantalizing reference; most likely it referred to the growing interest in phenomenological, existential, and hermeneutical thinking, most notably including his own body of writings. Given his ontological catch-22 that mankinds every effort at transcendence has worked ultimately to reinforce its servitude to technology, it seems implausible to find any redeeming element in American efforts at becoming free by way of self-criticism. Would not the American self-critique of Americanism remain wholly within the terms of Americanism, just as Heidegger had shown ad infinitum that the Western critique of Western thinking remained, ultimately, within that thinking and fell short of Being? In

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the final analysis, Heideggers unremitting use of Americanism as know-how and instrumental ratio remained the necessary polar antithesis to his vision of Being. Increasingly, Heidegger turned far back in time but also beyond the Western tradition for the rescuing power from the East. In the Spiegel interview, he looked eastward after glimpsing only the faintest trace of hope from America: And who of us would be in a position to decide whether or not one day in Russia or China very old traditions of thought may awaken that will help make possible for man a free relationship to the technical world? (OG, 111) The same deep thinker who aspired to dehabitualize and to de-clich Being with successive radical turningsfirst of thinking, then of acting and willing, and then of un-willingwound up harping on one of the most hackneyed stereotypes and shopworn rhetorical tropes of modern times. Excepting one or two elliptical passages, Heidegger did not question or deconstruct this rampant master-clich; rather, he hypostatized and totalized it into a veritable planetary mode of un-Beingthe most palpable, empirical-historical form of mans fateful Ruinanz. Heideggers polemic against Americanism was an integral and unwavering element of his critique of modernity, humanism, and the whole Western intellectual tradition. Throughout his thinking and rethinking, Americanism represented the totalization or absolutization of anthropocentric will to will that, in the cause of mastery over all beings and things, produced only Ruinanz. In his deposition in 1945 to French military authorities, who were vetting him for the right to teach, Heidegger declared with disarming candor, Nietzsche did me in (Nietzsche hat mich kaputt gemacht).43 Nowhere did Nietzsche, whom Heidegger designated as the first of the last metaphysicians, strike closer to Heideggers radical way of thinking through Being than in the mordant observation: What philosophers are in the habit of doing is adopting a popular prejudice and exaggerating it. Heidegger adopted and exaggerated Americanism as the arch-avatar of all modern deformations of Being and of being human; it remained his habitual incantatory mantra for modernity. He used it so massively and so promiscuously, however, that he came close to using it up altogetherironically, somewhat akin to the historical fate of Being itself, done in by its own implacable Ruinanz.

Notes
Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), 25. 2. Martin Heidegger-Elisabeth Blochmann Briefwechsel, 19181969, ed. J. Storck (Marbach: Schiller-Archiv, 1989), 46; hereafter abbreviated MH-EB. 3. Karen Harries, introduction to Gnter Neske and Emil Kettering, eds., Martin Heidegger and National Socialism: Questions and Answers (New York: Paragon House, 1990), xi. Lutz Niethammer avers, he increasingly appears as the foster-father of postmodernity (Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End? [New York: Verso, 1992], 97, n. 79); see also Richard Palmer, The Postmodernity of Heidegger, Boundary 2, 4 (winter 1976): 41132.

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4. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, Heidegger and Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 53. For a readable intellectual-biographical study, see Rdiger Safranski, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998). More strictly ontological is Herman Philipse, Heideggers Philosophy of Being: A Critical Introduction. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); see also James Ceaser, Katastrophenhaft: Martin Heideggers America, chap. 8 in Reconstructing America: The Symbol of America in Modern Thought (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 187213. 5. See Niethammer, Posthistoire, for these fascinating and dense affiliations. 6. See Martin Heidegger, Letter on Humanism (1947), and The Question Concerning Technology (1953), in Basic Writings, ed. David F. Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 193242 and 287317; and idem, Holzwege, 5th ed. (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1972), 78ff. 7. Hugo Ott, Martin Heidegger: A Political Life, trans. A. Blunden (New York: Basic Books 1993), 295. Americanism is hardly the only stereotype in his thought, but it is the only stereotype that did not undergo radical transformation in the course of his development. Karl Lwith, a former student who broke with his teacher, has offered a concise summation of this tortuous development: A Jesuit by education, he becomes a Protestant through indignation; a scholastic dogmaticist by training, he became an existential pragmatist through experience; a theologian by tradition, he became an atheist in his research, a renegade to his tradition cloaked in the mantle of its historian (Lwith, Mein Leben in Deutschland vor und nach 1933 [Frankfurt a.M: Metzler, 1989], 45). 8. See Richard Wolin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990). Another thoughtful treatment is Michael Zimmerman, Heideggers Confrontation with Modernity (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990). The wider German philosophical context of the interwar years is the emphasis of Hans Sluga, Heideggers Crisis: Philosophy and Politics in Nazi Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995). 9. Bertolt Brecht, Aus den Gesngen ber die Grossstdte, in Werke (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1967), 8:286. Somewhere between Heidegger and Brecht, a recent British reporter observes, It is the universality of American culture that means we understand it even when we dont know what it means (Financial Times, 910 March 1996). 10. Martin Heidegger, review of Autoritt und Freiheit, by Friedrich Wilhelm Forster, Der Akademiker (May 1910); quoted in Ott, Martin Heidegger, 60. Ernst Nolte, Heideggers student and recent interpreter, has said, The anti-modernism that his theological teacher Carl Braig articulated in a book of 1911 remained the most lasting component of Heideggers thought. (Nolte, Martin Heidegger: Politik und Geschichte im Leben und Denken [Berlin: Propylen, 1992], 19). Americanism was a discrete, controversial doctrinal position condemned by the Vatican at the turn of the century. See Otto Pggeler, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Politics, in Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis, eds., The Heidegger Case: On Philosophy and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 119; see, more generally, Oskar Khler, Bewusstseinsstrungen im Katholizismus (Frankfurt a.M.: J. Knecht, 1972). 11. Martin Heidegger, Denkerfahrungen (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1983), 1ff. 12. See Martin Heidegger, Die Ruinanz, in Gesamtausgabe (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1976), 61:13153; hereafter abbreviated G. Heidegger insisted that the whither of Ruinanz is nothingness (Das Wohin der Ruinanz: das Nichts) but that authentic philosophical thinking also posed the possibility of a potential counterruination (Gegenruinanz) (G, 61:143, 153). On the term and its vastly encompassing valences, see Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heideggers Being and Time (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 114, 242, 490, 507; see also Michael Inwood, A Heidegger Dictionary (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1999), 65, 144. 13. Heideggers Ruinanz continued to carry the peculiarly dual sense of an unnoticed, meaningconstituting intentionality (as the phenomenological sense of being (Seinssinn) of Aristotle, Brentano, and Husserl) as well as the dynamic sense of ever more progressive decadence in Nietzsches degenerence (Degenereszenz); see Nietzsche, Smtliche Werke, ed. A. Baumler (Stuttgart: Krner, 1964), 78:229. Thus, Ruinanz entails the stupefying paradox that the minds intentionality is directed toward a thingness that is also nothingness. But the main meaning of the onto-historical process remains that Being becomes lost in the minds own operations: mans being occludes Being itself.

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14. Other protean, pejorative terms coined in this period for mans way of being in the world included Darbung (emptying), Larvanz (masking), as well as Verfallenheit (fallenness). See Nolte, Heidegger, 578. Nolte observes acutely, In this sense one can also say that [for Heidegger] mans way of Being-in-the world means precisely Being-in-the-Untruth (Nolte, Heidegger, 77). 15. See Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der Konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993); Roger Woods, The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic (New York: St. Martins Press, 1996); and Klemens von Klemperer, Germanys New Conservatism: Its History and Dilemma in the Twentieth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957). 16. Rainer Maria Rilke to Witold Hulewicz, 13 November 1925, Briefe in Zwei Bnden (Wiesbaden: Insel Verlag, 1950), 2:3767; quoted in Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 130. Lwith has observed that certain sentences from Rilkes letters . . . could easily serve as guiding threads to the intellectual achievement of Heideggers oeuvre (Lwith, The Political Implications of Heideggers Existentialism, in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader [Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993], 170). 17. Max Weber, Science as Vocation, in H. Gerth and C. W. Mills, eds., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 131. 18. Rudolf Kayser, Amerikanismus, in Vossische Zeitung 27 September 1925; quoted in Anton Kaes, ed., Manifeste und Dokumente zur deutschen Literatur, 191833 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1983), 265. 19. For a thorough treatment of the context of the work, see Theodore Kisiel, The Genesis of Heideggers Being and Time. 20. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962), 165. See also the original in Sein und Zeit, 7th ed. (Tbingen: Niemeyer, 1953), 127. Using language itself as his metametaphor, Nietzsche had called this process of massification the attrition of the plural against the singular (Nietzsche, Morgenrte, in Smtliche Werke, 73:128). 21. Martin Heidegger, On the Essence of Truth, in Basic Writings, 135. 22. Martin Heidegger to Elisabeth Blochman, 22 June 1932, MH-EB, 46. 23. Martin Heidegger to Elisabath Blochman, 30 March 1933, MH-EB, 52ff, 60. 24. See Otto Pggeler, Den Fhrer fhren? Heidegger und kein Ende, Philosophische Rundschau 32 (1985): 2667; see also Fhrer der Fhrer, Der Spiegel 34 (1986), 1649. 25. Martin Heidegger, Address of 3 November 1933, quoted in Political Texts 193334, in Controversy, 47. 26. Martin Heidegger, Address of 11 November 1933, in Controversy, 52. 27. Heidegger to Wolf; quoted in Ott, Martin Heidegger, 283. 28. The chief critics were Ernst Krieck, Erich Jaensch, and Arthur Rosenberg; the main lines of attack and the quotation are recorded in Ott, Martin Heidegger, 290. Heidegger discussed these attacks in the final Spiegel interview; see Only a God Can Save Us, in Controversy, 102; hereafter abbreviated OG. 29. Martin Heidegger, Report of 28 August 1934, quoted in Ott, Martin Heidegger, 259. Heideggers intent here may have been twofold: to use the specter of Americanization as a means of insulating the university from further Nazification. 30. Martin Heidegger, Report on Eduard Baumgarten, quoted in Victor Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, ed. J. Rockmore and T. Margolis (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 210. The report is reprinted in H. Becker, H.-J. Dahms, and C. Wegeler, eds., Die Universitt Gttingen under dem Nazionalsozialismus (Munich: K. Sauer, 1987), 179ff. 31. Martin Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics (Garden City, N.J.: Anchor, 1961), 389. 32. Martin Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1988), 402. 33. Heidegger also found in Nazism a popularization of the people as flat as that in America or the Soviet Union (G, 65:496). Alexander Schwan insists that Heidegger came, astonishingly and perversely, to understand Nazism as radical liberalism. See Schwan, Heideggers Beitrge zur Philosophie and Politics, in K. Harries and C. Jamme, eds., Martin Heidegger: Politics, Art, and Technology (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1994), 76ff.

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34. Martin Heidegger, The Age of the World Picture, in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. William Lovitt (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 135. 35. Ibid., 153. 36. Only the most radical implementation of total mobilization could disclose underlying Being. Jnger had instanced the United States mobilization in 1917 as the closest approximation of rigorous total mobilization in his sense. See Jnger, Der Arbeiter (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1982), 298ff. 37. See Friedrich Gundolf, George (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961), 1. 38. Daher kann es sein dass wir deutsch sprechen und doch ganz amerikanisch reden (G, 53:80). In the Spiegel interview, Heidegger would insist on the terrible consequences not of doctrines of racial and national purity but rather those of linguistic-cultural translatability, We need to think of the terrible consequences brought on us and still felt in our own days that derive from translating Greek thought into Roman Latin (Heidegger, quoted OG, 113). 39. Heidegger, originally quoted in Georg Picht, Die Macht des Denkens, in Erinnerung an Martin Heidegger, ed. Gnther Neske (Pfullingen: Neske, 1977), 204ff; quoted in Farias, Heidegger and Nazism, 281. 40. Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David F. Krell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987), 4:83. 41. On West German super-Americanization, see Ralph Willett, The Americanization of Germany, 19451949 (London: Routledge, 1989); and Michael Ermarth, ed., America and the Shaping of German Society (Providence, R.I.: Berg Publishers, 1993). 42. Martin Heidegger, Was ist eine Akademie? Tonbandprotokoll von Vortrag und Diskussion in der Abteilung Bildende Kunst, 2 Oktober 1961, in Christine Fischer-Dafoy, ed., . . . . und die Vergangenheit sitzt immer mit am Tisch: Dokumente zur Geschichte der Akademie der Knste (West) 1945/1954 bis 1993 (Berlin: Henschel Verlag, 1997), 258. 43. Martin Heidegger, Vortrge und Aufstze (Pfullingen: Neske, 1954), 917.