Die äusserste feindschaft: Heidegger, anti-judaism, and the war to end all wars

The aim of this paper is three-fold. First: to outline the characteristic features of a dynamic that works itself through and shapes the philosophical landscape in Germany during the 1920s and 1930s, and which Heidegger, in his own manner, channels and re-configures. Second: to explore the sense in which the "great war" for Heidegger as a spiritual conflict did not end in 1918. My argument here is that Heidegger internalizes this continuation of the war by other, philosophical means into his own thinking such that his own search for another beginning for thinking during the 1930s understands itself as the pursuit of the great war by other means, namely, through the means of a think¬ing of being. Third: to demonstrate that it is in this dual context, the first inter¬nalized within the second, and the second the externalization of the first, that Heidegger's confrontation with Judaism and his anti-Semitism must be situated. Heidegger's thinking repeats in his own way of historical repetition the confron¬tation between Judentum and Deutschtum during the First World War, and that this repetition structures Heidegger's Davos Disputation with Cassirer. The con¬frontation at Davos, as the failure to confront explicitly the question of Judentum and Deutschtum, represents an after-effect of the First World War: the dynamic of a violent confrontation without genuine encounter.