Nazi Germany and the Jews: The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 by Saul Friedländer

gratitude to his Jewish mentor was left in. Contradictions abound, with possibly the strangest of them all being Heidegger’s praise, in the mid-thirties, for Spinoza, and his declaration that “if Spinoza’s philosophy was Jewish, then all philosophy from Leibniz to Hegel was also Jewish.” 59
    On April 22, 1933, Heidegger sent an entreaty to Carl Schmitt, by far the most prestigious German political and legal theorist of the time, pleading with him not to turn his back on the new movement. The entreaty was superfluous, as Schmitt had already made his choice. Like Heidegger—and this seems to have been the first rule to follow—he had stopped answering letters from Jewish students, colleagues, and other scholars with whom he had previously been in close touch (in Schmitt’s case, one of the striking examples is the abrupt end he put to his correspondence with the Jewish political philosopher Leo Strauss). 60 And, to make sure that there was no misunderstanding about where he stood, Schmitt introduced some outright anti-Semitic remarks into the new (1933) edition of his Concept of the Political . 61 In any event, Schmitt’s anti-Jewish positions were to be definitely more outspoken, extreme, and virulent than those of the Freiburg philosopher.
    During the summer semester of 1933, both Schmitt and Heidegger took part in a lecture series organized by Heidelberg students. Heidegger spoke on “The University in the New Reich”; Schmitt’s theme was “The New Constitutional Law.” They were preceded in the same series by Dr. Walter Gross, head of the racial policy office of the Nazi Party, who spoke on “The Physician and the Racial Community.” On May 1, in Freiburg, Heidegger had become party member 3-125-894; on the same day, in Cologne, Schmitt joined the party as member 2-098-860. 62

    Hannah Arendt left the country and, by way of Prague and Geneva, reached Paris; there she soon started working for the Zionist Youth Emigration Organization. The main reason for her early emigration, she later said, was more than anything else the behavior of her Aryan friends, such as Benno von Wiese, who—subject to no outside pressure whatsoever—adhered enthusiastically to the new system’s ideals and norms. 63 Yet, in general, her criticism of Heidegger remained muted.
    The responses of Jewish academics to the new regime’s measures and to the new attitudes of colleagues and friends varied from one individual to another. Within that broad spectrum, a peculiar situation was that of Jews who had been long-standing militant German nationalists but, unlike Felix Jacoby, did not opt for total blindness to the regime’s actions. On April 20 Ernst Kantorowicz, a medieval historian at Frankfurt University, sent a letter to the minister of science and education of Hesse that tellingly expresses the great slowness, hesitancy, and regretfulness—despite the harsh new Nazi policies—of the retreat of such Jews from their former positions. “Although,” Kantorowicz wrote, “as a war volunteer from August 1914 on, as a frontline soldier throughout the war, as a postwar fighter against Poland, against the Spartacists, and against the Republic of the Councils [of workers and soldiers] in Posen, Berlin, and Munich, I am not obliged to expect dismissal because of my Jewish origins; although in view of my publications on the Hohenstaufen Emperor Frederick II, I do not need any attestation from the day before yesterday, yesterday, or today regarding my attitude toward a nationally oriented Germany; although beyond all immediate trends and occurrences, my fundamentally positive attitude toward a nationally governed Reich has not been undermined even by the most recent events; and although I certainly need not expect student disturbances to interrupt my teaching—so that the issue of unhampered teaching at the level of the entire university need not be considered in my case—as a Jew, I see myself compelled nonetheless to draw the