Heidegger explained his Nazism away as mere stupidity and unworldliness

Evidence

In 1945, he wrote just one short piece dealing with the matter, entitled ‘The Rectorate 1933/34: facts and thoughts’. There he admitted that he briefly saw the party as offering ‘the possibility of an inner self-collection and of a renewal of the people, and a path toward the discovery of its historical-Western purpose’. But then, he said, he saw his mistake and extricated himself. The message of the essay can be summed up as ‘oops, I didn’t mean to be a Nazi’. It suited Heidegger to make himself sound this naive. When, also in 1945, the French writer Frédéric de Towarnicki weakened Heidegger’s defences with a bottle of good wine before asking him ‘why?’, Heidegger responded by leaning forward and saying, in the tone of someone solemnly confiding a secret, ‘Dummheit.’ He repeated the word again, with emphasis. ‘Dummheit.’ Stupidity. The implication was that his worst failing was unworldliness. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 297

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader existentialist-era treatment of Heidegger’s Nazi past in this same book, and to the later Husserl/Arendt reckonings with Heidegger. — connects to: Arendt excused Heidegger’s Nazism with the Thales metaphor of an unworldly thinker — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 950
• SEED: The ‘oops, I didn’t mean to be a Nazi’ framing plus the confessional ‘Dummheit’ could anchor an essay on how intellectual giants narrate away complicity via supposed naivete.

Broader Connections

• Arendt excused Heidegger’s Nazism with the Thales metaphor of an unworldly thinker #expands (0.85) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 950