Death, politics, and Heidegger’s Bremen remarks

The controversy surrounding Heidegger’s remarks on the Holocaust in Bremen in 1949 erupted again recently, owing to some of the revelations concerning Heidegger’s antisemitism in recently published notebooks from the 1930s in particular. An overlooked dimension to this controversy within a controversy is the specific relationship between Heidegger’s account of being-towards-death in Being and Time and his remarks in Bremen in 1949. One of the most notorious passages from the Bremen lectures is best understood against the backdrop of Heidegger’s account of death in Being and Time where he distinguishes between the notions of death (as a way for Dasein to be) and perishing. In this article, we will revisit Heidegger’s account of being-towards-death and the concomitant notion of Dasein (as the way of being for the human being) before looking at the conflicting ways that he will invoke those ideas in subsequent work. We will further challenge the criticisms of Heidegger’s Bremen remarks in some recent literature and offer a competing interpretation.