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Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

the Nazi movement its inner truth and greatness, as he would later remark in
An Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) in a manner consistent with the doctrines
of Nietzsche and Jnger; that is, as a resurgence of a new heroic ethos, a will
to power, that would place Germany in the forefront of a movement directed
towards the self-overcoming of bourgeois nihilism. Thus, following the argument
set forth by Jnger in The Worker, in which the soldier worker is viewed as a new
social type (Gestalt) who is infatuated with risk, danger, heroism, and, as such,
represents the antithesis to the timorous bourgeois, Heidegger views Nazism as a
Nietzschean-Jngerian Arbeitergesellschaft in statu nascendi.56

It is not clear at all, however, that Heideggers views on Nietzsche were entirely positive
before the end of the 1930s. Heideggers famous Nietzsche lectures provide the first
occasion for us to see his in-depth assessment of Nietzsche and while Heideggers
admiration for Nietzsche is clear, he is also patently critical. Moreover, Wolin tends
to conflate Spengler and Jnger with Nietzsche as though Heideggers flirtation with
aspects of the conservative revolutionaries was indicative of his commitment to a
Nietzschean heroism in the manner adopted by Spengler and Jnger. And yet we
can see clearly enough from Heideggers remarks in The Fundamental Concepts of
Metaphysics that Heidegger saw Spengler, for example, as operating with a rather
superficial conception of Nietzsches philosophy and that Heidegger is already critical
of Nietzsches philosophy in its own right. At the very least, then, Wolin is making
things a little too easy for himself here since Heidegger was already critical of the
misappropriation of Nietzsche in the work of Spengler and others in the early 1930s
and was also beginning to worry over shortcomings in Nietzsches own thought
supposedly when he held the opposite view, according to Wolin.
****

Total mobilization57
In Total Mobilization Jnger is concerned with what came to light specifically in the
First World War which he takes to have been unique amongst all previous wars:
we will try to assemble a number of facts that distinguish the last war our war,
the greatest and most influential event of our age from other wars whose history
has been handed down to us.58

Already then we can see that for Jnger, the Great War is to be distinguished from all
previous wars; as it turns out, the difference is going to relate to Jngers own understanding of the role of technology and the concept of total mobilization. He prefaces
the remarks to follow with an interesting aside which anticipates a famous exclamation
from Heidegger in his own essay on technologys essence:59
Let us leave aside the question of which spirits realm rules over the optical illusion
of progress: this study is no demonology, but is intended for twentieth-century