54 Heidegger, History and the Holocaust

derivative or to detract from their originality in any way, but in order to designate the direction out of which an understanding is to be gained and to show where the place of the confrontation proper lies.24

And, Heidegger will conclude, the prevalence and influence of this type of cultural diagnosis indicates the emergence of a kind of high journalism as a substitute for the type of work which needs, so Heidegger believes, to be undertaken:

We now ask anew: What does the fact that diagnoses of culture find an audience among us – albeit in quite different ways – tell us about what is happening here? What is happening in the fact that this higher form of journalism fills or even altogether delimits our ‘spiritual’ space? Is all this merely a fashion? Is anything overcome if we seek to characterize it as ‘fashionable philosophy’ and thus to belittle it? We may not and do not wish to resort to such cheap means.25

This may sound conciliatory, but we know from Heidegger’s frequent pejorative remarks concerning newspapers and journalism in both his philosophical texts and indeed in his correspondence, that he was rather chary of the press and journalism itself as an intellectual medium. In his correspondence with Jünger, for example, he makes some rather unflattering comments concerning Jean-Michel Palmier’s philosophical efforts suggesting that the author is better suited to journalism than to thinking and that he has already written far too much for someone so young.26 Heidegger is essentially then rejecting these four interpretations of the contemporary situation, which have shaped the cultural and literary understanding of the present age as an age of decline, as weak derivatives of Nietzsche’s philosophy and, fundamentally, as based on a misinterpretation of that philosophy:

It does not require many words to see that here in Nietzsche an opposition was alive that in no way came to light in the four interpretations provided of our situation, but merely had a residual effect as material passed on, as a literary form. Which of the four interpretations is the more correct in Nietzsche’s sense is not to be described now. Nor indeed can we show here that none is correct, because none can be correct, insofar as they all mistake the essence of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which for its part rests on strange foundations. These foundations indeed show themselves to be based on a quite ordinary and metaphysically highly questionable ‘psychology’. Yet Nietzsche can afford that. Nevertheless, this is no carte blanche.27

Oswald Spengler – Man and Technics

It would be disingenuous in the extreme, of course, to suggest that Heidegger was inured to the powerful cultural, political and intellectual influences which were percolating in Germany following the First World War up to and through the Weimar period. There was a surge of conservative revolutionary thinking along with a general sense of disaffection and betrayal characteristic of the Dolchstoßlegende mentality