The Last Hand: Restrictions on Martin Heidegger's Papers in the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach

Abstract

Martin Heidegger, one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers, left very specific but publicly inaccessible instructions when he bequeathed his considerable legacy of unpublished papers, lecture notes, and correspondence to the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach, Germany. This essay considers the interesting case study of Heidegger's sequestered writings by examining how issues of archival access and publication are affected by questions of privacy and publicity, history and responsibility, collective memory, the author's intentions, the demands of scholars, and general archival policies.Questions of legacy and of the author's and his or her family's degree of control over the author's own works raise interesting challenges for archivists. Archival institutions may have crystal-clear policies regarding access restrictions, but what archivist would not be tempted to bend such rules to accommodate the special requests of a major intellectual figure? There are numerous cases in which archives have allowed donors and family members to have "undue control" over who is allowed to access collections (O'Toole and Cox, 2006, p. 127). Such, apparently, was the case when Martin Heidegger bestowed his collected works on the Deutsches Literaturarchiv. His son, Hermann Heidegger, became his literary executor, but with only rare and seemingly arbitrary exceptions, Hermann has not allowed any scholars to view unpublished materials within the archives. Restrictions on the Heidegger collection stipulate that no scholar can view Heidegger's unpublished texts until they are published, and the publishing house, Vittorio Klostermann, affirms "the will of the author to bring his life's work into the collected form that he himself outlined": by his own decision, Heidegger's collected works "should be an edition of the last hand," unedited and un-indexed (Klostermann 2009, italics in original). To complicate matters, the publication schedule is incomplete, exceedingly protracted, and prone to long delays. Meanwhile, scholars of Heidegger bemoan the fact that thousands of pages of his philosophy remain "still unpublished, and not even planned for publication, but just gathering dust at the Marbach Archives" (Eldred, 2007).Martin Heidegger may have had specific reasons to want to restrict his own legacy. Although he is widely regarded as a groundbreaking and visionary philosopher, during World War II when he was serving as the rector of Freiburg University he made compromises with Hitler's regime and supported Nazism. Although his publicly available texts suggest that he never explicitly espoused anti-Semitism in writing or endorsed any of Hitler's most abhorrent policies, Heidegger's 1933 address delivered on his assumption of the rectorship of Freiburg University speaks of German students' obligation to create a national destiny, asserting, "it is our will that our Volk fulfill its historical mission" (Heidegger, 1933, p. 38). Heidegger resigned from the rectorship less than one year later, but he remained a member of the NSDAP until 1945. Although Heidegger later claimed that he had supported party ideology merely to soothe tensions between Freiburg University and the government, his involvement in such a widely despised and controversial system continues to be a major focus of scholars' biographical inquiries. In these investigations, researchers have often been thwarted: "What we can call 'the facts' about Heidegger's Nazism ... are still not fully known since despite strenuous efforts by a small group of writers, ... efforts are under way to protect Heidegger, or his reputation, by hindering the release of factual material known to exist, above all in Marbach, where the Heidegger Archives are still closed to scholars" (Rockmore, 1992, p. 374).But the restrictions on Heidegger's texts are not limited to potentially defamatory materials. For example, Professor Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, director of the Marbach Archives, has repeatedly denied scholars permission to view items such as the manuscript of a lecture on technology that Heidegger delivered in Bremen in 1949, on the grounds that such materials were not intended to be seen before publication (Rockmore, 1992, p. …