“Nobody knows Heidegger’s texts from 1933 to 1945 as well as Trawny does nor has done more to establish guidelines on how they should be read. Only Trawny, at this point, has offered the kind of sustained interpretation of the anti-Semitic passages in Heidegger’s Black Notebooks that we need if we are to determine for ourselves just how far his thought is compromised by these revelations. In the present book, he shows in precise and rigorous ways the specific challenges that these passages present to those readings of Heidegger that attempt to minimize the role his association with National Socialism should play in the assessment of his thought.”

Robert Bernasconi, Penn State University

“A failure in one part of the system can suggest a failure everywhere. And so, earlier this year, in a book called Heidegger and the Myth of a Jewish World Conspiracy, Trawny asked the inevitable question: could Heidegger’s philosophy as a whole be ‘contaminated’ by Nazism? . . . I find myself agreeing with Trawny. It’s impossible to disavow Heidegger’s thinking: it is too useful, and too influential, to be marginalized. . . . You don’t spend years working your way through Being and Time because you’re idly interested. You do it because you think that, by reading it, you might learn something precious and indispensable. The Black Notebooks, however seriously you take them, are a betrayal of that ardency. They make it harder to care about—and, therefore, to really know—Heidegger’s ideas. Even if his philosophy isn’t contaminated by Nazism, our relationship with him is.”

Joshua Rothman | New Yorker, on the German edition

“The goal of this book is not to impugn Heidegger, but rather to persuade Heidegger’s devotees that his anti-Semitic remarks matter…Trawny’s own bottom line—‘whoever will philosophize with Heidegger must be clear about the anti-Semitic implications of certain specific traits of his thought’ (English 94; German 132)—hits the mark.”
 

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