Heidegger’s Nazi incrimination enhanced rather than damaged his postwar academic reputation.
Evidence
Even if someone like Heidegger, who had incriminated himself during the Nazi period, was not given a chair again, it did not tarnish his reputation, but on the contrary increased it in both academic and non-academic circlesafter the ban on him expired, Heidegger was still active as an academic teacher up to and after his retirement with emeritus status in 1958, and he had given sensational lectures even before 1951. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 472
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: Inverts the expected denazification logic: the very complicity that should disqualify a philosopher became a source of prestige, a claim about how intellectual charisma resists moral accounting.
- XREF: connects to: Heidegger’s Nazi past and obscure late prose drove away former admirers — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 603; Postwar reception of a philosopher’s work tracks perceived political distance from Nazism. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 605
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Heidegger’s Nazi past and obscure late prose drove away former admirers — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 603; Postwar reception of a philosopher’s work tracks perceived political distance from Nazism. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 605
Broader Connections
- Heidegger’s Nazi past and obscure late prose drove away former admirers
#complicates(0.78) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 603