DER SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH MARTIN HEIDEGGER
certain: History will take revenge upon us if we do not understand.” We do not know in what year you wrote that. We guess it was in 1935.
[679] H: H: The quotation probably belongs to the Nietzsche lecture “The Will to Power as Art,” 1936-1937. It may have been spoken in the following years.
S: So, would you like to clarify it a little? After all, it leads us from generalities to a concrete determination of the Germans.
H: I could rephrase what was read in the quotation in the following way: It is my conviction that any reversal of the modern technological world can only occur from out of the same location in which it originated. It cannot take place through the adoption of Zen Buddhism or other Eastern experiences of the world. In order to achieve a shift in thinking [Umdenken], one needs the European tradition as well as a new appropriation of it. Thinking will only be transformed through thought that has the same origin and determination.
S: At precisely this location where the technological world arose, it must, you think, also ...
H: ... be sublated [aufgehoben] in the Hegelian sense. Not set aside, instead sublated—but not by humans alone.
S: You particularly assign the Germans a special task in this?
H: Yes, in the sense of the dialogue with Hölderlin.
S: Do you believe that the Germans have a particular qualification for this reversal?
H: I have in mind the special inner relationship of the German language with that of the Greeks and with their thought. The French continually confirm this for me nowadays. When they begin to think, they speak German, assuring that they could not get by with their own language.
S: Do you take this as the explanation for why you have had such a strong effect on the Romance countries, especially the French?
H: Since they see that they can no longer get by in today's world with all their rationality, when it [680] comes down to understanding the world in the origin of its essence. One can translate thinking no more than one can poetry. One can circumscribe it at best. As soon as one takes to translating literally, everything is transformed.
S: A discomforting thought.
H: We would do well to take this discomfort seriously and on a large scale, and to finally consider the momentous transformation that Greek thought underwent through its translation into Roman Latin. This is an event that still today prevents us from adequately reflecting on the fundamental words of Greek thought.
S: Professor, we would actually always begin with the optimistic assumption that anything can be communicated and even translated. For if this optimism about the communicability of thought-contents across linguistic boundaries were to cease, we would be threatened by provincialism.