Sir, – While enjoying my porridge yesterday morning, and reading an article on the restorative powers of oatmeal by Laura Kennedy, I almost choked when I encountered the following astonishing sentence: "Heidegger, a famously nebulous German philosopher, who is often maligned for his brief flirtation with Nazism in Hitler's Germany, popped into my mind" ("Coping – the restorative powers of boring old porridge", Life, July 1st).
Martin Heidegger joined the National Socialist Party in 1933. In the “black notebooks” written in the period 1939-1941, he wrote: “World Judaism is ungraspable everywhere and doesn’t need to get involved in military action while continuing to unfurl its influence, whereas we are left to sacrifice the best blood of the best of our people.”
Still a member of the Nazi party at the end of the war, Heidegger was investigated by the occupying powers and prohibited from teaching until 1951. He never apologised nor offered to explain his involvement.
Heidegger’s relationship with Nazism was not a flirtation, nor was it brief.
To state this historical fact is not to “malign” him. – Yours, etc,
MICHAEL O’LOUGHLIN,
Dublin 8.