value of the individual decision. This is the way in which the present requirement of political education is to be understood: it is not a matter of learning maxims, opinions, and forms by heart, but of creating a new fundamental attitude of a willful kind.11
The will of the leader first of all re-creates the others into a following out of which a community arises. It is from this vital solidarity of followers to leader that the will to mutual sacrifice and service arise, and not from sheer obedience and institutional coercion. Political education is a superlative form of the effectuation of the will of the leader and of the state’s will, which is the people’s will. Other forms of putting the will of the state into effect, like the administration of governance and of justice, follow from the will of the people on its way to becoming a leader state (Führerstaat).
The highest actualization of the human being happens in the state. The leader state that we have signifies a completion of historical development: the actualization of the people in the leader. The Prussian state as it was brought to completion under the tutelage of the Prussian nobility is the preliminary form of the present state. This relationship generates the elective affinity and congeniality that prevailed between Prussiandom and the leader. We come from this great tradition and stand in it when we confess to its sense in the words of the royal elector, spoken in the spirit of Luther: “Si gesturus principatus ut sciam rem esse populi non meam privatam.” [To assume the mantle of leadership is for me to understand that the affairs of the people are not my private affair.]
Heidegger tacitly expresses his growing disenchantment with a Führer turning from statesmanlike to coercive ways to persuade his following, and a total state bent on coercively politicizing all walks of life, allowing no room for the independent counsel of his educated coterie of guardians, by way of a reduction, begun in 1935, of the polis to a prepolitical originarity that is the source of not only the political but also the philosophical, poetic, religious, and other creative human endeavors. In the context of the tragic phronēsis of the conflict between family piety and royal ediction in Sophocles’ Antigone, Heidegger finds that polis is not merely a geographically located state (Staat) or city (Stadt) but, more basically, a historical site (Stätte) virtually identical to the ontological site of Da-sein in which a unique humankind (for example, Greek being-here, German being-there) “takes place” (statt-findet, statt-hat), is “granted stead” (gestattet, “permitted”), and in this “leeway” (Spielraum) of allotted time and historical place makes its unique “homestead” (Heimstatt) befitting its historical
11. A rectoral greeting addressed to “German Students!” at the beginning of the Winter Semester of 1933–34 concludes with the following statement: “Neither doctrines nor ‘ideas’ are the rules governing your being. The Führer himself and alone is the present and future actuality of Germany and its law.” GA 16, 184.