such as Oswald Spengler and Arthur Moeller van den Bruck—his narrative of European “decline” became an essential pillar of what Fritz Stern denominated the “politics of cultural despair.”37 The imagery of negative apocalypse reinforced Heidegger’s “inverted Hegelianism”: his view of modernity as heightened catastrophe as opposed to Hegel’s “progress in the consciousness of freedom.”
Heidegger’s hyperbolic Zeitdiagnose accentuated the eschatological tendencies of his doctrine of Seinsgeschichte. His understanding of the “destiny of the West” as a history of “decline”—a “Fall” from pristine “Origins,” or the Greek Anfang—was ontologically tied to a metapolitical vision of the German Volk as “redeemer.” Consequently, Heidegger characterized Seinsgeschichte as a process of “decline, darkening, and devastation: a movement away from the ontological rootedness of the pre-Socratic archē.” The “Fall” from “Origins,” which resulted in the perdition of Seinsverlassenheit (abandonment by Being), could only be rectified by the redemptive powers of the German Volk: by appealing to “verborgene Deutschheit,” or “hidden Germanness.”38 Heidegger maintained that “only the Germans, the Volk of thinkers and poets, had the power to retrieve the force of the first Greek beginning and prepare the path for the arrival of another Beginning.”39
A similar Nietzschean leitmotif, emphasizing the benefits of cataclysm and upheaval, underlay Heidegger’s enthusiasm in the Black Notebooks for the Spenglerian trope of Untergang (downfall).40 “Untergang,” declared Heidegger, “is not something that should be feared.” Instead, insofar as it anticipated “the transition to another Beginning,” it should be welcomed as “the essential precondition for historical greatness.” “Man’s truth for Being [Seyn],” declaimed Heidegger, “first manifests itself in Untergang.”41
Thus, in fidelity to Nietzsche, Heidegger endorsed the idea of a “purification of Being” (Reinigung des Seins), notwithstanding the fact that, as Heidegger acknowledged, this eventuality was destined to culminate in “the self-obliteration of the earth and the disappearance of contemporary humanity,” hence in the wholesale annihilation of life as we know it. Heidegger was quick to add that this anticipated catastrophe should neither be “feared” nor construed as a “misfortune” (kein Unglück [ist]). Instead, he insisted that humanity should welcome this act of “self-obliteration,” since it portended the “purification of Being from the thoroughgoing distortions resulting from the predominance of ‘beings.’”42 As Black Notebooks editor Peter Trawny has noted, Heidegger’s glorification of the “purification of Being” paralleled National Socialism’s obsession with racial