Heidegger delivered his rectoral address on 27 May 1933, on the occasion of the ceremonial transfer of the rector’s office. In his opening statement, Heidegger outlines his thought on the nature of the German university and its historical mission. The assumption of the rectorate is the commitment to the spiritual leadership of the university. His following of teachers and students can grow strong only in a true and joint rootedness through the transformation of the German university. The university should help the German people to fulfill their historical mission, that is, the retrieval of the awakening of Greek philosophy. This beginning still is; it does not lie in the past, but stands before the German people. Greek philosophy is the source from which all sciences have sprung.
The National Socialist revolution is the great awakening of the German people. The university teachers must take the lead and advance to the most extreme posts of danger amid the constant uncertainty of the world. The essential will to knowledge requires that the people be subjected to the greatest inner and outer danger in order to enjoy their true spiritual world and be admitted into the world-forming domains of art and philosophy. Only by abiding and dwelling within these domains can human beings take “ownership” of their historical being-there, and thereby become receptive to the truth of being. The German students are on the march. The academic freedom of the old university will be replaced by a new series of obligations: the labor service, the military service, and the service in knowledge. Teachers and students must form a fighting community in service to the people in their state. All capacities of the heart and the body must be unfolded through struggle, intensified in struggle, and preserved as struggle. Heidegger closes his address with a quotation from Plato: “everything great stands in the storm,” and thus indicates that the project of a renewal of both the university and the being-there of the German people is threatened from all sides.