Conville & Walsh

Philosophy is to Germans what History is to the English, or Law to Americans. So it was no accident that Adolf Hitler regarded himself as the ‘philosopher Führer’. Yvonne Sherratt investigates the political, philosophical and racial ideas that spawned the Nazi movement – and what became of the men and women at the heart of German intellectual life once Hitler came to power.

Philosophers are not necessarily otherworldly. Their lives were fleshed out with prejudice, ambition, politics, love and war. HITLER’S PHILOSOPHERS begins in 1930s Berlin, introducing the most influential thinkers of the era and exploring the lives and ideas of Kant and his disciples, Nietzsche and Husserl, among others. Once the Nazi regime was established, some philosophers continued to lend a cloak of intellectual respectability to Hitler’s racist bigotry.

Yvonne Sherratt reveals how and why Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, the Führer’s legal adviser, and the Christian and eugenicist thinkers sided with the new regime. And while they became ever more deeply embedded in the Nazi hierarchy, others, particularly the Semitic thinkers Walter Benjamin, Huber and Adorno, found themselves hunted down and killed or were forced to flee as refugees. Perhaps the most remarkable personal story is that of Hannah Arendt, Heidegger’s star student – and mistress. How did this Jewess square her lifelong devotion to the Jewish cause and her love for a Nazi, stepping in to defend him at the Nuremberg trials?

Yvonne Sherratt reveals the wildly differing fates of Hitler’s Jewish opponents and victims, and examines the lingering effects of Nazism on philosophy today. The ideas of Schmitt and Heidegger, the father of existentialism, are widely disseminated through European and American universities. Contemporary philosophers seem to be glossing over the awkward Nazi past of many leading scholars of the post-war era. Sherratt will combine accessible intellectual analysis and biography which will compare to John Cornwell’s Hilter’s Scientists and Jenny Uglow’s The Lunar Men.