Martin Heidegger

Rüdiger Safranski studies German, philosophy, and history in Frankfurt and Berlin. He has worked in adult education and was co-publisher of the magazine Berliner Hefte. He is also the author of a widely acclaimed biography of E. T. A. Hoffman. Ewald Osers is the distinguished translator of numerous works of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction from German and Czech, including the correspondence of Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal.

• Preface: A Master from Germany Chronology Abbreviations Translator's Note Childhood and School Idealism and Materialism: German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Career Planning and Career Problems The Outbreak of World War I: Habilitation, War Service, Marriage The Triumph of Phenomenology: Husserl and Heidegger, Father and Son Revolution in Germany and the Question of Being Parting with Catholicism and Studying the Laws of Free Fall while Falling Marburg University and Hannah Arendt, the Great Passion Being and Time: What Being? What Meaning? The Mood of the Time: Waiting for the Great Day A Secret Principal Work: The Metaphysics Lectures of 1929-30 Balance Sheets at the End of the Republic The National Socialist Revolution and Collective Breakout from the Cave Is Heidegger Anti-Semitic? Heidegger's Struggle for the Purity of the Movement Departure from the Political Scene The Age of Ideology and Total Mobilization: Heidegger Beats a Retreat The Philosophical Diary and Philosophical Rosary Heidegger under Surveillance Heidegger Faces the Denazification Committee: Barred from University Teaching What Do We Do When We Think? Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, and Karl Jaspers after the War Heidegger's Other Public Adorno and Heidegger: From the Jargon of Authenticity to the Authentic Jargon of the 1960s Sunset of Life Notes Works Cited Further Reading Index

Rüdiger Safranski’s evenhanded study, Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, is equally successful at illustrating its subject’s pettiness and at displaying the vast power of his imagination. It is the first comprehensive biography of the man, and supersedes both Victor Farías’s Heidegger and Nazism and Hugo Ott’s Martin Heidegger: A Political Life. It reports many facts that these books did not, and it offers a detailed account of Heidegger’s intellectual development—relating his twists and turns, with great skill and remarkable concision, to German intellectual and political life in the first half of this century.