Heidegger wavers on which modern movement is the worst, but at no point does he wish Nazism to be defeated by a rival, such as liberal democracy. The moderation and moralism of Anglo-American liberalism only forestall the total catastrophe that is necessary to clear the way for the other inception. All that liberal democracy promises is a half-hearted, prolonged diminution. Democracy lacks the strength for “the step into the consummation . . . from here, no decisions are made.” Democracy is “a barricade that can delay but is incapable of stopping the essential consummation of modernity”; it is modern, “but without the courage for the unfolded essence and for the extreme essential consequences” (GA 95: 406/316–17). These consequences must be brought out in order for modernity to collapse, and totalitarianism is a necessary part of this process.
Although his criticisms of Nazism are substantial, these are the grumblings of a disappointed lover. In 1934, after stepping down as rector, he takes Nazism to be essentially a “barbaric principle,” but claims that this is precisely where “its possible greatness” lies (GA 94: 194/142). Later he writes that although the völkisch worldview is superficial, it also has its necessity for “the task of a historical gathering” (GA 94: 446/324 tm). To “affirm” National Socialism is a sort of amor fati: “The new politics is an inner essential consequence of ‘technology’. . . ‘technology’ can never be mastered by the ethno-political [völkisch-politische] world view. What is already essentially a servant can never be a master. Nevertheless, this birth of the new politics from the essence of technology . . . is necessary, and thus is not the possible object of a shortsighted ‘opposition’” (GA 94: 472/342–43). In such statements, Heidegger edges toward the submission to “fatality” that he had formerly denounced as “Asiatic” (GA 39: 173/158).
Passages such as these shed light on the notion of the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism—its hidden potential that only Heidegger could have properly articulated—which infamously appears in Introduction to Metaphysics (GA 40: 208/222) but is echoed in other texts as well. We can now understand that he was not only distinguishing this “inner truth” from external, superficial manifestations of the “movement,” but also developing a peculiar conception of greatness. In 1953, in a letter to Die Zeit, he endorsed Christian Lewalter’s interpretation of the phrase as “accurate in every respect” (GA 40: 232/250). In Lewalter’s reading, “the Nazi movement is a symptom for the tragic collision of man and technology, and as such a symptom it has its ‘greatness,’ because it affects the entirety of the West and threatens to pull it into destruction.”87 This has always had the ring of a dubious exercise in apologetics, but the Black Notebooks support the claim that it was precisely the global destructiveness of Nazi “machination” that made it “great” and “true,” in a sense: it was the unvarnished expression of modern metaphysics