title: The Matrix Revolutions

text: On opening day, "The Matrix Revolutions" scored $24.3 million, becoming the third-highest Wednesday opening, behind "" and "". During its three-day opening weekend, it would earn $48.5 million. In its first five days of release, the film grossed $83.8 million in the United States and Canada from 3,502 theaters, but dropped 66% during the second week. It had the highest five-day Wednesday opening for any Warner Bros. film until it was taken by "Superman Returns" in 2006. The film would even compete against the newly released family films "Brother Bear" and "Elf".


title: The Matrix Revolutions

text: Internationally, the film grossed $119 million in its first 5 days from 10,013 prints in 107 territories, with the third-biggest opening ever in Japan and Spain and the fourth biggest in the United Kingdom, Italy and Mexico. Combined, it grossed $203 million in its first five days. This made it the highest worldwide opening weekend for any film, holding the record until it was beaten by "" a month later. "The Matrix Revolutions" would also achieve the record for having the biggest international opening weekend for an R-rated film until 2015 when it was surpassed by "Fifty Shades of Grey". The film grossed over $139 million in North America and approximately $427 million worldwide, roughly half of "The Matrix Reloaded" box-office total.


title: The Matrix Revolutions

text: "The Matrix Revolutions" was released on DVD and VHS on April 6, 2004. The film grossed $116 million in DVD sales. Additionally, it was released on 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray on October 30, 2018.


title: The Matrix Revolutions

text: On review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, "The Matrix Revolutions" holds an approval rating of 35% based on 218 reviews, with an average rating of 5.30/10. The site's critical consensus reads, "A disappointing conclusion to the "Matrix" trilogy as characters and ideas take a back seat to the special effects." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 47 out of 100 based on 41 reviews, indicating "mixed or average reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "B" on an A+ to F scale, a grade down from the "B+" earned by the previous film and two grades down from the "A−" earned by the first film, therefore the second lowest grade earned by a film in the series.


title: The Matrix Revolutions

text: Some critics criticized the film for being anticlimactic. Additionally, some critics regard the film as less philosophically ambiguous than its predecessor, "The Matrix Reloaded". Critics had difficulty finding closure pertaining to events from "The Matrix Reloaded", and were generally dissatisfied.


title: The Matrix Revolutions

text: Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" gave the film three stars out of four, despite offering criticisms of his own, on the grounds that it at least provided closure to the story well enough so that fans following the series would prefer seeing it as to not.


title: The Matrix Revolutions

text: While making the "Matrix" films, the Wachowskis told their close collaborators that at that time they had no intention of making another installment after "The Matrix Revolutions". Instead, they gave their blessing to the notion of gamers "inherit[ing] the storyline", and "The Matrix Online" video game was billed as the official continuation. In February 2015, in interviews promoting "Jupiter Ascending", Lilly Wachowski called a return to "The Matrix" a "particularly repelling idea in these times", noting the studios' tendency to green-light sequels, reboots, and adaptations over original material, while Lana Wachowski, addressing rumors about a potential reboot, said that they had not heard anything, but she believed that the studio might be looking to replace them. At various times, Keanu Reeves and Hugo Weaving have stated that they would be willing to reprise their roles in potential "Matrix" films, but only if the Wachowskis were involved.


title: The Matrix Revolutions

text: In March 2017, "The Hollywood Reporter" wrote that Warner Bros. was in early stages of developing a relaunch of the franchise, with Zak Penn in talks to write a treatment, and interest in getting Michael B. Jordan attached to star. According to the article neither the Wachowskis nor Joel Silver were involved at that stage, although the studio would like to get at minimum the blessing of the Wachowskis.


title: The Matrix Revolutions

text: Warner Bros. officially announced the development on a fourth film in August 2019, with Lana Wachowski serving as director and producer on it. Lana wrote the screenplay with David Mitchell and Aleksander Hemon. Grant Hill produced it alongside Lana. The production is a joint-venture between Warner Bros. Pictures and Village Roadshow Pictures, similar to the original films. Keanu Reeves and Carrie-Anne Moss reprise their roles from the previous films; Laurence Fishburne and Hugo Weaving do not appear in the film. Production began in February 2020 in San Francisco, briefly halted due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and wrapped in November of that same year. The film, "The Matrix Resurrections", had its world premiere in Toronto, Canada, on December 16, 2021, and was released to theaters and streaming services on December 22, 2021.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: Lincoln is a 2012 American biographical historical drama film directed and produced by Steven Spielberg, starring Daniel Day-Lewis as United States President Abraham Lincoln. It also features Sally Field, David Strathairn, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, James Spader, Hal Holbrook and Tommy Lee Jones in supporting roles.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: The screenplay by Tony Kushner was loosely based on Doris Kearns Goodwin's 2005 biography "Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln", and covers the final four months of Lincoln's life, focusing on his efforts in January 1865 to abolish slavery and involuntary servitude by having the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution passed by the United States House of Representatives.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: The film was produced by Spielberg and frequent collaborator Kathleen Kennedy, through their respective production companies, Amblin Entertainment and the Kennedy/Marshall Company. Filming began October 17, 2011, and ended on December 19, 2011. "Lincoln" premiered on October 8, 2012 at the New York Film Festival. The film was co-produced by American companies DreamWorks Pictures, 20th Century Fox, and Participant Media, with Indian company Reliance Entertainment, and released theatrically by Touchstone Pictures in North America on November 16, 2012. It was distributed by 20th Century Fox in international territories.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: "Lincoln" was acclaimed by critics, who lauded its acting (especially Day-Lewis), Spielberg's direction, and its production values. In December 2012, it was nominated for seven Golden Globe Awards, including Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director for Spielberg, and winning Best Actor (Motion Picture – Drama) for Day-Lewis. At the 85th Academy Awards, it was nominated for twelve Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director; it won for Best Production Design and Best Actor for Day-Lewis. It was also a commercial success, grossing over $275 million at the box office.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: In January 1865, United States President Abraham Lincoln expects the Civil War to end soon, with the defeat of the Confederate States. He is concerned that his 1863 Emancipation Proclamation may be discarded by the courts after the war and that the proposed Thirteenth Amendment will be defeated by the returning slave states. He feels it imperative to pass the amendment beforehand, to remove any possibility that freed slaves might be re-enslaved.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: The Radical Republicans fear the amendment will be defeated by some who wish to delay its passage; support from Republicans in the border states is not yet assured. The amendment also requires the support of several Democratic congressmen to pass. With dozens of Democrats being lame ducks after losing their re-election campaigns in the fall of 1864, some of Lincoln's advisors believe he should wait for a new Republican-heavy Congress. Lincoln remains adamant about having the amendment in place before the war is concluded and the southern states are re-admitted.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: Lincoln's hopes rely upon Francis Preston Blair, a founder of the Republican Party whose influence could win over members of the border state conservative faction. With Union victory in the Civil War highly likely but not yet secured, and with two sons serving in the Union Army, Blair is keen to end hostilities quickly before the spring thaw arrives and the armies march again. Therefore, in return for his support, Blair insists that Lincoln allow him to engage the Confederate government in peace negotiations. However, Lincoln knows that significant support for the amendment comes from Radical Republicans, for whom negotiated peace is unacceptable. Unable to proceed without Blair's support, Lincoln reluctantly authorizes Blair's mission.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: In the meantime, Lincoln and Secretary of State William Seward work to secure Democratic votes for the amendment. Lincoln suggests they concentrate on the lame-duck Democrats, as they will feel freer to vote as they choose and soon need employment; Lincoln will have many federal jobs to fill as he begins his second term. Though Lincoln and Seward are unwilling to offer monetary bribes to the Democrats, they authorize agents to contact Democratic congressmen with offers of federal jobs in exchange for their support. Meanwhile, Lincoln's son, Robert, returns from law school and announces his intention to discontinue his studies and enlist in the Union Army, hoping to earn a measure of honor and respect outside of his father's shadow before the war's end. Lincoln reluctantly secures an officer's commission for Robert. The First Lady is aghast, fearing that he will be killed. She furiously presses her husband to pass the amendment and end the war, promising woe upon him if he should fail.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: At a critical moment in the debate in the House of Representatives, racial-equality advocate Thaddeus Stevens agrees to moderate his position and argue that the amendment represents only "legal" equality, not a declaration of "actual" equality. Meanwhile, Confederate envoys are ready to meet with Lincoln to discuss terms for peace, but he instructs they be kept out of Washington as the amendment approaches a vote on the House floor. Rumor of their mission circulates, prompting both Democrats and conservative Republicans to advocate postponing the vote. In a carefully worded statement, Lincoln denies there are envoys "in Washington", and the vote proceeds, passing by a margin of just two votes. Black visitors to the gallery celebrate, and Stevens returns home to his "housekeeper" and lover, a biracial woman.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: When Lincoln meets with the Confederates, he tells them slavery cannot be restored, as the North is united for ratification of the amendment, and several of the southern states' reconstructed legislatures would also vote to ratify. As a result, the peace negotiations fail, and the war continues. On April 3, Lincoln visits the battlefield at Petersburg, Virginia, where he exchanges a few words with Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant. On April 9, Grant receives General Robert E. Lee's surrender at Appomattox Courthouse. On April 14, a cheerful Lincoln expresses to his wife that they will be happy in the future and later meets members of his cabinet to discuss future measures to enfranchise blacks, before leaving for Ford's Theatre. That night, while Lincoln's son Tad is watching "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp" at Grover's Theatre, the manager suddenly stops the play to announce that the President has been shot. The next morning, at the Petersen House, Lincoln dies with a peaceful expression across his face; in a flashback, Lincoln finishes his second inaugural address on March 4.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: While consulting on a Steven Spielberg project in 1999, Goodwin told Spielberg she was planning to write "Team of Rivals", and Spielberg immediately told her he wanted the film rights. DreamWorks finalized the deal in 2001, and by the end of the year, John Logan signed on to write the script. His draft focused on Lincoln's friendship with Frederick Douglass. Playwright Paul Webb was hired to rewrite, and filming was set to begin in January 2006, but Spielberg delayed it out of dissatisfaction with the script. Liam Neeson said Webb's draft covered the entirety of Lincoln's term as president.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: Tony Kushner replaced Webb. Kushner considered Lincoln "the greatest democratic leader in the world" and found the writing assignment daunting because "I have no idea [what made him great]; I don't understand what he did any more than I understand how William Shakespeare wrote "Hamlet" or Mozart wrote "Così fan tutte"." Kushner said Lincoln's abolitionist ideals made him appealing to a Jewish writer, and although he felt Lincoln was Christian, he noted the president rarely quoted the New Testament and that his "thinking and his ethical deliberation seem very talmudic". By late 2008, Kushner joked he was on his "967,000th book about Abraham Lincoln". Kushner's initial 500-page draft focused on four months in the life of Lincoln, and by February 2009 he had rewritten it to focus on two months in Lincoln's life when he was preoccupied with adopting the Thirteenth Amendment.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: Spielberg approached Daniel Day-Lewis about the project in 2003, but Day-Lewis turned down the part at the time, believing the idea of himself playing Lincoln "preposterous". Liam Neeson was cast as Lincoln in January 2005, having worked previously with Spielberg in "Schindler's List". In preparation for the role, Neeson studied Lincoln extensively. However, in July 2010, Neeson left the project, saying that he had grown too old for the part. Neeson was 58 at the time, and Lincoln, during the period depicted, was 55 and 56. In an interview with "GQ," Neeson said he realized during a table read that the part was not right for him in "a thunderbolt moment" and after the read requested that Spielberg recast his role. Co-star Sally Field, in a 2012 PBS interview, intimated that Neeson's decision was influenced by the death of his wife Natasha Richardson less than a year earlier. In November 2010, it was announced that Day-Lewis would replace Neeson in the role.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: While promoting "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" in May 2008, Spielberg announced his intention to start filming in early 2009, for release in November, ten months after the 200th anniversary of Lincoln's birth. In January 2009, Taunton and Dighton, Massachusetts were being scouted as potential locations. Spielberg arranged a $50 million budget for the film, to please Paramount Pictures CEO Brad Grey, who had previously delayed the project over concerns it was too similar to Spielberg's commercially unsuccessful "Amistad" (1997). Spielberg had wanted Touchstone Pictures – which agreed to distribute all his films from 2010 – to distribute the film, but he was unable to afford paying off Paramount, which had collaborated with DreamWorks on the film's development.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: Filming took place in Richmond, Fredericksburg, and Petersburg, Virginia. In reference to Petersburg, according to location manager Colleen Gibbons, "one thing that attracted the filmmakers to the city was the 180-degree vista of historic structures" which is "very rare".


title: Lincoln (film)

text: The Virginia State Capitol served as the exteriors and interiors of the U.S Capitol, and the exteriors of the White House. The House of Delegates inside the building was remodeled to fit for the House of Representatives Chamber set. Scenes representing Grover's Theatre were filmed in Richmond, Virginia at Virginia Repertory Theatre's November Theatre.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: John Williams composed and conducted the score. It was recorded by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Chicago Symphony Chorus. The soundtrack album was released by Sony Classical on November 2, 2012.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: All music was composed by Williams except "Battle Cry of Freedom," which was written in 1862 by American composer George Frederick Root (1820–1895) during the American Civil War. Williams composed Track 6, "With Malice Toward None", for Chris Martin, principal trumpeter of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at the time.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: "Lincoln" premiered at the New York Film Festival on October 8, 2012. It was also screened at the 2012 AFI Film Festival on November 8, 2012. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures distributed it in North America under its Touchstone Pictures banner, while 20th Century Fox distributed it internationally. Disney Publishing Worldwide released several companion books and ancillary literature in anticipation of the film, including "Lincoln: A Cinematic and Historical Companion" and "Lincoln: A Spielberg Film – Discover the Story". DreamWorks and Google Play released the film's trailer during a Google+ hangout with Spielberg and Joseph Gordon-Levitt on September 13, 2012. A teaser trailer was released on September 10, 2012.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: "Lincoln" was released by Touchstone Home Entertainment on Blu-ray, DVD, and digital download in North America on March 26, 2013. It debuted at No. 1 in Blu-ray and DVD sales in its first week. Disney Educational Productions donated DVDs and a teaching guide, "Stand Tall: Live Like Lincoln," to more than 37,100 secondary schools in the United States after Spielberg received letters from educators who wished to incorporate the film into their curriculum.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: "Lincoln" earned $182,207,973 in North America from 2,293 theaters and $93,085,477 overseas for a total of $275,293,450, well exceeding its $65 million budget. The film had a limited opening in 11 theaters with $944,308 and an average of $85,846 per theater. It opened at the #15 rank, becoming the highest opening of a film with such a limited release. It opened in 1,175 theaters with $21,049,406 and an average of $11,859 per theater. Disney produced additional prints of the film to accommodate theater demand.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: "Lincoln" received widespread critical acclaim. The cast was lauded, especially Day-Lewis, Field and Jones. The film holds an 89% approval rating on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 284 reviews with an average rating of 8.00/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Daniel Day-Lewis characteristically delivers in this witty, dignified portrait that immerses the audience in its world and entertains even as it informs." On Metacritic, which assigns a rating out of 100 based on reviews from critics, the film has a score of 86 (out of 100) based on 44 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim", thus making it Spielberg's highest-rated film on the site since "Saving Private Ryan." Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: Roger Ebert of the "Chicago Sun-Times" gave the film 4 out of 4 stars and said, "The hallmark of the man, performed so powerfully by Daniel Day-Lewis in "Lincoln", is calm self-confidence, patience and a willingness to play politics in a realistic way." Glenn Kenny of MSN Movies gave it 5 out of 5 stars stating, "It's the most remarkable movie Steven Spielberg has made in quite a spell, and one of the things that makes it remarkable is how it fulfills those expectations by simultaneously ignoring and transcending them."


title: Lincoln (film)

text: Colin Covert of the "Star Tribune" wrote, ""Lincoln" is one of those rare projects where a great director, a great actor and a great writer amplify one another's gifts. The team of Steven Spielberg, Daniel Day-Lewis and Tony Kushner has brought forth a triumphant piece of historical journalism, a profound work of popular art and a rich examination of one of our darkest epochs." Charlie McCollum of the "San Jose Mercury News" called the film "one of the finest historical dramas ever committed to film." Despite mostly positive reviews, Rex Reed of "The New York Observer" wrote, "In all, there's too much material, too little revelation and almost nothing of Spielberg's reliable cinematic flair." However, reviewers were unanimous in their praise of Day-Lewis's performance.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: A. O. Scott from "The New York Times" wrote that the film "is finally a movie about how difficult and costly it has been for the United States to recognize the full and equal humanity of black people" and concluded that the movie was "a rough and noble democratic masterpiece". He also said that Lincoln's concern about his wife's emotional instability and "the strains of a wartime presidency ... produce a portrait that is intimate but also decorous, drawn with extraordinary sensitivity and insight and focused, above all, on Lincoln's character as a politician. This is, in other words, less a biopic than a political thriller, a civics lesson that is energetically staged and alive with moral energy."


title: Lincoln (film)

text: As reported in the "Maariv" newspaper, on February 3, 2013, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and his ministers discussed Spielberg's film, which several of them saw in Israeli cinemas. They debated whether the end of abolishing slavery justified the means used by Lincoln, and compared Lincoln's predicament with their own complicated situation in the confusing aftermath of the 2013 Israeli elections.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: Eric Foner (Columbia University), a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian of the period, claimed in a letter to "The New York Times" that "The film grossly exaggerates the possibility that by January 1865 the war might have ended with slavery still intact." He also noted, "The 13th Amendment originated not with Lincoln but with a petition campaign early in 1864 organized by the Women's National Loyal League, an organization of abolitionist women headed by Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton." Kate Masur (Northwestern University) accused the film of oversimplifying the role of blacks in abolition and dismissed the effort as "an opportunity squandered" in an op-ed for "The New York Times". Harold Holzer, the co-chair of the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Foundation and author of more than 40 books, served as a consultant to the film and praised it, but also observed that there is "no shortage of small historical bloopers in the movie" in a piece for "The Daily Beast". Holzer states, "As for the Spielberg movie's opening scene ... it is almost inconceivable that any uniformed soldier of the day (or civilians, for that matter) would have memorized a speech that, however ingrained in modern memory, did not achieve any semblance of a national reputation until the 20th century."


title: Lincoln (film)

text: Barry Bradford, a member of the Organization of American Historians, offered an analysis of some of the finer historical points of the film's representation of clothing, relationships and appearance. Allen Guelzo (Gettysburg College), also writing for "The Daily Beast", had some plot criticism, but disagreed with Holzer: "The pains that have been taken in the name of historical authenticity in this movie are worth hailing just on their own terms". In a later interview with the "World Socialist Web Site", Guelzo claimed that "the film was 90 percent on the mark, which given the way Hollywood usually does history is saying something" and that it "got with reasonable accuracy a lot of Lincoln's character, the characters of the main protagonists, and the overall debate over the 13th Amendment. The acting and screenwriting were especially well done... I had never thought that Daniel Day-Lewis was acting, because what he portrayed seemed so close to my own mental image of what Lincoln must have been like." A historian has suggested that the depiction of Lincoln's high pitched voice, somewhat awkward mannerisms and even how he walked was remarkably accurate.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: David Stewart, an independent historical author, writing for History News Network, described Spielberg's work as "reasonably solid history", and told readers of HNN to "go see it with a clear conscience". Lincoln biographer Ronald White also admired the film, though he noted a few mistakes and pointed out in an interview with NPR, "Is every word true? No."


title: Lincoln (film)

text: Historian Joshua M. Zeitz, writing in "The Atlantic", noted some minor mistakes, but concluded that ""Lincoln" is not a perfect film, but it is an important film". Following a screening during the film's opening weekend, the Minnesota Civil War Commemoration Task Force held a panel discussion in which Dr. David Woodard of Concordia University remarked, "I always look at these films to see if a regular person who wasn't a 'Lincoln nut' would want to read a book about it after they watched the movie. I get the impression that most people who are not history buffs will now want to read something about Lincoln."


title: Lincoln (film)

text: Regarding the historical source material for Kushner's screenplay, legal historian Michael Vorenberg, a professor at Brown University and author of "Final Freedom: The Civil War, The Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment", noted several details throughout the film that "could only have come from [his] book." Among these details were specifics of dealings between Democrats and Thaddeus Stevens, the story behind securing Alexander Coffroth's vote and the fact that African Americans were present in the congressional galleries during the final vote. Ultimately, Kushner replied directly to inquiries from "The New Republic" writer Timothy Noah, explaining that while he had read Vorenberg's book and many others as research, he insists that "Team of Rivals" was his principal source material.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: Dr. Ranjan Batra stated he was inspired to investigate the history of the Thirteenth Amendment in Mississippi after seeing "Lincoln". This led him to find out that although the Thirteenth Amendment was adopted throughout the country in 1865, Mississippi's formal ratification of the amendment in 1995 was not official because the US Archivist was never officially notified of it.


title: Lincoln (film)

text: Batra informed his colleague Ken Sullivan about this, and when Sullivan saw "Lincoln", he said he was further inspired to fix the matter. Sullivan subsequently contacted Mississippi Secretary of State Delbert Hosemann to make the ratification official, which he did in 2013, thus meaning Mississippi officially ratified the Thirteenth Amendment at that time.


title: NKVD

text: The People's Commissariat for Internal Affairs (, ), abbreviated NKVD ( ), was the interior ministry of the Soviet Union.


title: NKVD

text: Established in 1917 as NKVD of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the agency was originally tasked with conducting regular police work and overseeing the country's prisons and labor camps. It was disbanded in 1930, with its functions being dispersed among other agencies, only to be reinstated as an all-union commissariat in 1934.


title: NKVD

text: The functions of the OGPU (the secret police organization) were transferred to the NKVD around the year 1930, giving it a monopoly over law enforcement activities that lasted until the end of World War II. During this period, the NKVD included both ordinary public order activities, and secret police activities. The NKVD is known for its role in political repression and for carrying out the Great Purge under Joseph Stalin. It was led by Genrikh Yagoda, Nikolai Yezhov, and Lavrentiy Beria.


title: NKVD

text: The NKVD undertook mass extrajudicial executions of citizens, and conceived, populated and administered the Gulag system of forced labour camps. Their agents were responsible for the repression of the wealthier peasantry. They oversaw the protection of Soviet borders and espionage (which included political assassinations), and enforced Soviet policy in communist movements and puppet governments in other countries, most notably the repression and massacres in Poland to crush opposition and establish political control.


title: NKVD

text: In March 1946 all People's Commissariats were renamed to Ministries. The NKVD became the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD).


title: NKVD

text: After the Russian February Revolution of 1917, the Provisional Government dissolved the Tsarist police and set up the "People's Militsiya". The subsequent Russian October Revolution of 1917 saw a seizure of state power led by Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who established a new Bolshevik regime, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR). The Provisional Government's Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), formerly under Georgy Lvov (from March 1917) and then under Nikolai Avksentiev (from ) and Alexei Nikitin (from ), turned into NKVD (People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs) under a People's Commissar. However, the NKVD apparatus was overwhelmed by duties inherited from MVD, such as the supervision of the local governments and firefighting, and the "Workers' and Peasants' Militsiya" staffed by proletarians was largely inexperienced and unqualified. Realizing that it was left with no capable security force, the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR established () a secret political police, the "Cheka", led by Felix Dzerzhinsky. It gained the right to undertake quick non-judicial trials and executions, if that was deemed necessary in order to "protect the Russian Socialist-Communist revolution".


title: NKVD

text: The "Cheka" was reorganized in 1922 as the State Political Directorate, or GPU, of the NKVD of the RSFSR. In 1922 the USSR formed, with the RSFSR as its largest member. The GPU became the OGPU (Joint State Political Directorate), under the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR. The NKVD of the RSFSR retained control of the "militsiya", and various other responsibilities.


title: NKVD

text: In 1934 the NKVD of the RSFSR was transformed into an all-union security force, the NKVD (which the Communist Party of the Soviet Union leaders soon came to call "the leading detachment of our party"), and the OGPU was incorporated into the NKVD as the Main Directorate for State Security (GUGB); the separate NKVD of the RSFSR was not resurrected until 1946 (as the MVD of the RSFSR). As a result, the NKVD also took over control of all detention facilities (including the forced labor camps, known as the GULag) as well as the regular police. At various times, the NKVD had the following Chief Directorates, abbreviated as "ГУ"– , .


title: NKVD

text: Until the reorganization begun by Nikolai Yezhov with a purge of the regional political police in the autumn of 1936 and formalized by a May 1939 directive of the All-Union NKVD by which all appointments to the local political police were controlled from the center, there was frequent tension between centralized control of local units and the collusion of those units with local and regional party elements, frequently resulting in the thwarting of Moscow's plans.


title: NKVD

text: During Yezhov's time in office, the Great Purge reached its height. In the years 1937 and 1938 alone, at least 1.3 million were arrested and 681,692 were executed for 'crimes against the state'. The Gulag population swelled by 685,201 under Yezhov, nearly tripling in size in just two years, with at least 140,000 of these prisoners (and likely many more) dying of malnutrition, exhaustion and the elements in the camps (or during transport to them).


title: NKVD

text: On 3 February 1941, the 4th Department (Special Section, OO) of GUGB NKVD security service responsible for the Soviet Armed Forces military counter-intelligence, consisting of 12 Sections and one Investigation Unit, was separated from GUGB NKVD USSR.


title: NKVD

text: The official liquidation of OO GUGB within NKVD was announced on 12 February by a joint order No. 00151/003 of NKVD and NKGB USSR. The rest of GUGB was abolished and staff was moved to newly created People's Commissariat for State Security (NKGB). Departments of former GUGB were renamed Directorates. For example, foreign intelligence unit known as Foreign Department (INO) became Foreign Directorate (INU); GUGB political police unit represented by Secret Political Department (SPO) became Secret Political Directorate (SPU), and so on. The former GUGB 4th Department (OO) was split into three sections. One section, which handled military counter-intelligence in NKVD troops (former 11th Section of GUGB 4th Department OO) become 3rd NKVD Department or OKR (Otdel KontrRazvedki), the chief of OKR NKVD was Aleksander Belyanov.


title: NKVD

text: After the German invasion of the Soviet Union (June 1941), the NKGB USSR was abolished and on July 20, 1941, the units that formed NKGB became part of the NKVD. The military CI was also upgraded from a department to a directorate and put in NKVD organization as the (Directorate of Special Departments or UOO NKVD USSR). The NKVMF, however, did not return to the NKVD until January 11, 1942. It returned to NKVD control on January 11, 1942, as UOO 9th Department controlled by P. Gladkov. In April 1943, Directorates of Special Departments was transformed into SMERSH and transferred to the People's Defense and Commissariates. At the same time, the NKVD was reduced in size and duties again by converting the GUGB to an independent unit named the NKGB.


title: NKVD

text: In 1946, all Soviet Commissariats were renamed "ministries". Accordingly, the Peoples Commissariat of Internal Affairs (NKVD) of the USSR became the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MVD), while the NKGB was renamed as the Ministry of State Security (MGB).


title: NKVD

text: In 1953, after the arrest of Lavrenty Beria, the MGB merged back into the MVD. The police and security services finally split in 1954 to become:


title: NKVD

text: In 1935–1945 Main Directorate of State Security of NKVD had its own ranking system before it was merged in the Soviet military standardized ranking system.


title: NKVD

text: The main function of the NKVD was to protect the state security of the Soviet Union. This role was accomplished through massive political repression, including authorised murders of many thousands of politicians and citizens, as well as kidnappings, assassinations and mass deportations.


title: NKVD

text: In implementing Soviet internal policy towards perceived enemies of the Soviet state ("enemies of the people"), untold multitudes of people were sent to GULAG camps and hundreds of thousands were executed by the NKVD. Formally, most of these people were convicted by NKVD troikas ("triplets")– special courts martial. Evidential standards were very low: a tip-off by an anonymous informer was considered sufficient grounds for arrest. Use of "physical means of persuasion" (torture) was sanctioned by a special decree of the state, which opened the door to numerous abuses, documented in recollections of victims and members of the NKVD itself. Hundreds of mass graves resulting from such operations were later discovered throughout the country. Documented evidence exists that the NKVD committed mass extrajudicial executions, guided by secret "plans". Those plans established the number and proportion of victims (officially "public enemies") in a given region (e.g. the quotas for clergy, former nobles etc., regardless of identity). The families of the repressed, including children, were also automatically repressed according to NKVD Order no. 00486.


title: NKVD

text: The purges were organized in a number of waves according to the decisions of the Politburo of the Communist Party. Some examples are the campaigns among engineers (Shakhty Trial), party and military elite plots (Great Purge with Order 00447), and medical staff ("Doctors' Plot"). Gas vans were used in the Soviet Union during the Great Purge in the cities of Moscow, Ivanovo and Omsk


title: NKVD

text: A number of mass operations of the NKVD were related to the persecution of whole ethnic categories. For example, the Polish Operation of the NKVD in 1937–1938 resulted in the execution of 111,091 Poles. Whole populations of certain ethnicities were forcibly resettled. Foreigners living in the Soviet Union were given particular attention. When disillusioned American citizens living in the Soviet Union thronged the gates of the U.S. embassy in Moscow to plead for new U.S. passports to leave the USSR (their original U.S. passports had been taken for 'registration' purposes years before), none were issued. Instead, the NKVD promptly arrested all the Americans, who were taken to Lubyanka Prison and later shot. American factory workers at the Soviet Ford GAZ plant, suspected by Stalin of being 'poisoned' by Western influences, were dragged off with the others to Lubyanka by the NKVD in the very same Ford Model A cars they had helped build, where they were tortured; nearly all were executed or died in labor camps. Many of the slain Americans were dumped in the mass grave at Yuzhnoye Butovo District near Moscow. Even so, the people of the Soviet Republics still formed the majority of NKVD victims.


title: NKVD

text: The NKVD also served as arm of the Russian Soviet communist government for the lethal mass persecution and destruction of ethnic minorities and religious beliefs, such as the Russian Orthodox Church, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church, the Roman Catholic Church, Greek Catholics, Islam, Judaism and other religious organizations, an operation headed by Yevgeny Tuchkov.


title: NKVD

text: During the 1930s, the NKVD was responsible for political murders of those Stalin believed to oppose him. Espionage networks headed by experienced multilingual NKVD officers such as Pavel Sudoplatov and Iskhak Akhmerov were established in nearly every major Western country, including the United States. The NKVD recruited agents for its espionage efforts from all walks of life, from unemployed intellectuals such as Mark Zborowski to aristocrats such as Martha Dodd. Besides the gathering of intelligence, these networks provided organizational assistance for so-called "wet business", where enemies of the USSR either disappeared or were openly liquidated.


title: NKVD

text: The NKVD's intelligence and "special operations" ("Inostranny Otdel") unit organized overseas assassinations of political enemies of the USSR, such as leaders of nationalist movements, former Tsarist officials, and personal rivals of Joseph Stalin. Among the officially confirmed victims of such plots were:


title: NKVD

text: Prominent political dissidents were also found dead under highly suspicious circumstances, including Walter Krivitsky, Lev Sedov, Ignace Reiss and former German Communist Party (KPD) member Willi Münzenberg.


title: NKVD

text: The pro-Soviet leader Sheng Shicai in Xinjiang received NKVD assistance in conducting a purge to coincide with Stalin's Great Purge in 1937. Sheng and the Soviets alleged a massive Trotskyist conspiracy and a "Fascist Trotskyite plot" to destroy the Soviet Union. The Soviet Consul General Garegin Apresoff, General Ma Hushan, Ma Shaowu, Mahmud Sijan, the official leader of the Xinjiang province Huang Han-chang and Hoja-Niyaz were among the 435 alleged conspirators in the plot. Xinjiang came under soviet influence.


title: NKVD

text: During the Spanish Civil War, the NKVD ran Section X coordinating the Soviet intervention on behalf of the Spanish Republicans. NKVD agents, acting in conjunction with the Communist Party of Spain, exercised substantial control over the Republican government, using Soviet military aid to help further Soviet influence. The NKVD established numerous secret prisons around the capital Madrid, which were used to detain, torture, and kill hundreds of the NKVD's enemies, at first focusing on Spanish Nationalists and Spanish Catholics, while from late 1938 increasingly anarchists and Trotskyists were the objects of persecution. In 1937 Andrés Nin, the secretary of the Trotskyist POUM and his colleagues were tortured and killed in an NKVD prison in Alcalá de Henares.


title: NKVD

text: Prior to the German invasion, in order to accomplish its own goals, the NKVD was prepared to cooperate even with such organizations as the German Gestapo. In March 1940, representatives of the NKVD and the Gestapo met for one week in Zakopane, to coordinate the pacification of Poland; "see Gestapo–NKVD conferences". For its part, the Soviet Union delivered hundreds of German and Austrian Communists to the Gestapo, as unwanted foreigners, together with their documents. However, many NKVD units were later to fight the Wehrmacht, for example the 10th NKVD Rifle Division, which fought at the Battle of Stalingrad.


title: NKVD

text: After the German invasion, the NKVD evacuated and killed prisoners. During World War II, NKVD Internal Troops units were used for rear area security, including preventing the retreat of Soviet Union army divisions. Though mainly intended for internal security, NKVD divisions were sometimes used at the front to stem the occurrence of desertion through Stalin's Order No. 270 and Order No. 227 decrees in 1941 and 1942, which aimed to raise troop morale via brutality and coercion. At the beginning of the war the NKVD formed 15 rifle divisions, which had expanded by 1945 to 53 divisions and 28 brigades. A list of identified NKVD Internal Troops divisions can be seen at List of Soviet Union divisions 1917-1945. Though mainly intended for internal security, NKVD divisions were sometimes used in the front-lines, for example during the Battle of Stalingrad and the Crimean offensive. Unlike the Waffen-SS, the NKVD did not field any armored or mechanized units.


title: NKVD

text: In the enemy-held territories, the NKVD carried out numerous missions of sabotage. After fall of Kyiv, NKVD agents set fire to the Nazi headquarters and various other targets, eventually burning down much of the city center. Similar actions took place across the occupied Byelorussia and Ukraine.


title: NKVD

text: The NKVD (later KGB) carried out mass arrests, deportations, and executions. The targets included both collaborators with Germany and non-Communist resistance movements such as the Polish Home Army and the Ukrainian Insurgent Army aiming to separate from the Soviet Union, among others. The NKVD also executed tens of thousands of Polish political prisoners in 1940–1941, including the Katyń massacre. On 26 November 2010, the Russian State Duma issued a declaration acknowledging Stalin's responsibility for the Katyn massacre, the execution of 22,000 Polish POW's and intellectual leaders by Stalin's NKVD. The declaration stated that archival material "not only unveils the scale of his horrific tragedy but also provides evidence that the Katyn crime was committed on direct orders from Stalin and other Soviet leaders."


title: NKVD

text: NKVD units were also used to repress the prolonged partisan war in Ukraine and the Baltics, which lasted until the early 1950s. NKVD also faced strong opposition in Poland from the


title: NKVD

text: After the death of Stalin in 1953, the new Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev halted the NKVD purges. From the 1950s to the 1980s, thousands of victims were legally "rehabilitated" (i.e., acquitted and had their rights restored). Many of the victims and their relatives refused to apply for rehabilitation out of fear or lack of documents. The rehabilitation was not complete: in most cases the formulation was "due to lack of evidence of the case of crime". Only a limited number of persons were rehabilitated with the formulation "cleared of all charges".


title: NKVD

text: Very few NKVD agents were ever officially convicted of the particular violation of anyone's rights. Legally, those agents executed in the 1930s were also "purged" without legitimate criminal investigations and court decisions. In the 1990s and 2000s (decade) a small number of ex-NKVD agents living in the Baltic states were convicted of crimes against the local population.


title: NKVD

text: The extensive system of labor exploitation in the Gulag made a notable contribution to the Soviet economy and the development of remote areas. Colonization of Siberia, the North and Far East was among the explicitly stated goals in the very first laws concerning Soviet labor camps. Mining, construction works (roads, railways, canals, dams, and factories), logging, and other functions of the labor camps were part of the Soviet planned economy, and the NKVD had its own production plans.


title: NKVD

text: The most unusual part of the NKVD's achievements was its role in Soviet science and arms development. Many scientists and engineers arrested for political crimes were placed in special prisons, much more comfortable than the Gulag, colloquially known as "sharashkas". These prisoners continued their work in these prisons, and later released, some of them became world leaders in science and technology. Among such "sharashka" members were Sergey Korolev, the head designer of the Soviet rocket program and first human space flight mission in 1961, and Andrei Tupolev, the famous airplane designer. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was also imprisoned in a sharashka, and based his novel "The First Circle" on his experiences there.


title: NKVD

text: After World War II, the NKVD coordinated work on Soviet nuclear weaponry, under the direction of General Pavel Sudoplatov. The scientists were not prisoners, but the project was supervised by the NKVD because of its great importance and the corresponding requirement for absolute security and secrecy. Also, the project used information obtained by the NKVD from the United States.


title: NKVD

text: The agency was headed by a people's commissar (minister). His first deputy was the director of State Security Service (GUGB).


title: NKVD

text: "Note: In the first half of 1941 Vsevolod Merkulov transformed his agency into separate commissariat (ministry), but it was merged back to the people's commissariat of Interior soon after the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union. In 1943 Merkulov once again split his agency this time for good."


title: NKVD

text: Andrei Zhukov has singlehandedly identified every single NKVD officer involved in 1930s arrests and killings by researching a Moscow archive. There are just over 40,000 names on the list.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Martin Heidegger (; ; 26 September 188926 May 1976) was a German philosopher who is best known for contributions to phenomenology, hermeneutics, and existentialism. He is among the most important and influential philosophers of the 20th century. He has been widely criticized for supporting the Nazi Party after his election as rector at the University of Freiburg in 1933, and there has been controversy about the relationship between his philosophy and Nazism.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: In Heidegger's fundamental text "Being and Time" (1927), "Dasein" is introduced as a term for the type of being that humans possess. Dasein has been translated as "being there". Heidegger believes that Dasein already has a "pre-ontological" and non-abstract understanding that shapes how it lives. This mode of being he terms "being-in-the-world". Dasein and "being-in-the-world" are unitary concepts at odds with rationalist philosophy and its "subject/object" view since at least René Descartes. Heidegger explicitly disagrees with Descartes, and uses an analysis of Dasein to approach the question of the meaning of being. This meaning is "concerned with what makes beings intelligible as beings", according to Heidegger scholar Michael Wheeler.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger was born in rural Meßkirch, Baden, the son of Johanna (Kempf) and Friedrich Heidegger. Raised a Roman Catholic, he was the son of the sexton of the village church that adhered to the First Vatican Council of 1870, which was observed mainly by the poorer class of Meßkirch. His family could not afford to send him to university, so he entered a Jesuit seminary, though he was turned away within weeks because of the health requirement and what the director and doctor of the seminary described as a psychosomatic heart condition. Heidegger was short and sinewy, with dark piercing eyes. He enjoyed outdoor pursuits, being especially proficient at skiing.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Studying theology at the University of Freiburg while supported by the church, He later switched his field of study to philosophy. Heidegger completed his doctoral thesis on psychologism in 1914, influenced by Neo-Thomism and Neo-Kantianism, directed by Arthur Schneider. In 1916, he finished his "venia legendi" with a habilitation thesis on Duns Scotus directed by the Neo-Kantian Heinrich Rickert and influenced by Edmund Husserl's phenomenology.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: In the two years following, he worked first as an unsalaried Privatdozent then served as a soldier during the final year of World War I; serving "the last ten months of the war" with "the last three of those in a meteorological unit on the western front".


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger taught courses at the University of Freiburg from 1919-1923. See his published courses in "Gesamtausgabe. Early Freiburg lecture courses, 1919–1923."


title: Martin Heidegger

text: In 1923, Heidegger was elected to an extraordinary professorship in philosophy at the University of Marburg. His colleagues there included Rudolf Bultmann, Nicolai Hartmann, Paul Tillich, and Paul Natorp. Heidegger's students at Marburg included Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Karl Löwith, Gerhard Krüger, Leo Strauss, Jacob Klein, Günther Anders, and Hans Jonas. Following on from Aristotle, he began to develop in his lectures the main theme of his philosophy: the question of the sense of being. He extended the concept of subject to the dimension of history and concrete existence, which he found prefigured in such Christian thinkers as Paul of Tarsus, Augustine of Hippo, Martin Luther, and Søren Kierkegaard. He also read the works of Wilhelm Dilthey, Husserl, Max Scheler, and Friedrich Nietzsche.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: In 1927 Heidegger published his main work, "Sein und Zeit" ("Being and Time"). When Husserl retired as Professor of Philosophy in 1928, Heidegger accepted Freiburg's election to be his successor, in spite of a counter-offer by Marburg. Heidegger remained at Freiburg im Breisgau for the rest of his life, declining later offers including one from Humboldt University of Berlin. His students at Freiburg included Hannah Arendt, Günther Anders, Hans Jonas, Karl Löwith, Charles Malik, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Nolte. Karl Rahner likely attended four of his seminars in four semesters from 1934 to 1936. Emmanuel Levinas attended his lecture courses during his stay in Freiburg in 1928, as did Jan Patočka in 1933; Patočka in particular was deeply influenced by him.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger was elected rector of the University on 21 April 1933, and joined the Nazi Party on 1 May. During his time as rector he was a member and an enthusiastic supporter of the party. There is continuing controversy as to the relationship between his philosophy and his political allegiance to Nazism. He wanted to position himself as the philosopher of the party, but the highly abstract nature of his work and the opposition of Alfred Rosenberg, who himself aspired to act in that position, limited Heidegger's role. His withdrawal from his position as rector owed more to his frustration as an administrator than to any principled opposition to the Nazis, according to historians. In his inaugural address as rector on 27 May he expressed his support of a German revolution, and in an article and a speech to the students from the same year he also supported Adolf Hitler. In November 1933, Heidegger signed the "Vow of allegiance of the Professors of the German Universities and High-Schools to Adolf Hitler and the National Socialistic State".


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger resigned from the rectorate in April 1934, but remained a member of the Nazi Party until 1945 even though the Nazis eventually prevented him from publishing. From 1936 to 1940, Heidegger delivered a series of lectures on Nietzsche at Freiburg that presented much of the raw material incorporated in his more established work and thought from this time. Of this series, Heidegger said in his 1966 interview with "Der Spiegel": "Everyone who had ears to hear was able to hear in these lectures... a confrontation with National Socialism." Later scholars, however, have come to the opposite conclusion about this material; for example David Farrell Krell, in the introduction to an English translation of the seminar, writes: "The problem is not that Heidegger lacked a political theory and praxis but that he had one."


title: Martin Heidegger

text: In the autumn of 1944, Heidegger was drafted into the "Volkssturm" and assigned to dig anti-tank ditches along the Rhine.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger's "Black Notebooks", written between 1931 and into the early 1970s and first published in 2014, contain several expressions of anti-semitic sentiments, which have led to a reevaluation of Heidegger's relation to Nazism. Having analysed the Black Notebooks, Donatella di Cesare asserts in her book "Heidegger and the Jews" that "metaphysical anti-semitism" and antipathy toward Jews was central to Heidegger's philosophical work. Heidegger, according to di Cesare, considered Jewish people to be agents of modernity disfiguring the spirit of Western civilization; he held the Holocaust to be the logical result of the Jewish acceleration of technology, and thus blamed the Jewish genocide on its victims themselves.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: In late 1946, as France engaged in "épuration légale" in its occupation zone, the French military authorities determined that Heidegger should be blocked from teaching or participating in any university activities because of his association with the Nazi Party. The denazification procedures against Heidegger continued until March 1949 when he was finally pronounced a "Mitläufer" (the second lowest of five categories of "incrimination" by association with the Nazi regime). No punitive measures against him were proposed. This opened the way for his readmission to teaching at Freiburg University in the winter semester of 1950–51. He was granted emeritus status and then taught regularly from 1951 until 1958, and by invitation until 1967.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger married Elfride Petri on 21 March 1917, in a Catholic ceremony officiated by his friend , and a week later in a Protestant ceremony in the presence of her parents. Their first son, Jörg, was born in 1919. Elfride then gave birth to in August 1920. Heidegger knew that he was not Hermann's biological father but raised him as his son. Hermann's biological father, who became godfather to his son, was family friend and doctor Friedel Caesar. Hermann was told of this at the age of 14; Hermann became a historian and would later serve as the executor of Heidegger's will. Hermann Heidegger died on 13 January 2020.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger spent much time at his vacation home at Todtnauberg, on the edge of the Black Forest. He considered the seclusion provided by the forest to be the best environment in which to engage in philosophical thought.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: A few months before his death, he met with Bernhard Welte, a Catholic priest, Freiburg University professor and earlier correspondent. The exact nature of their conversation is not known, but what is known is that it included talk of Heidegger's relationship to the Catholic Church and subsequent Christian burial at which the priest officiated.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger had a four-year affair with Hannah Arendt and a decades-long affair with Elisabeth Blochmann; both women were his students. Arendt was Jewish, and Blochmann had one Jewish parent, making them subject to severe persecution by the Nazi authorities.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: The 35-year-old Heidegger, who was married with two young sons, began a long romantic relationship with 17-year-old Arendt who later faced criticism for this because of Heidegger's support for the Nazi Party after his election as rector at the University of Freiburg in 1933. They agreed to keep the details of the relationship a secret, preserving their letters but keeping them unavailable. The relationship was not known until Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's biography of Arendt appeared in 1982. At the time of publishing, Arendt and Heidegger were deceased and Heidegger's wife, Elfride (1893–1992), was still alive. The affair was not widely known until 1995, when Elzbieta Ettinger gained access to the sealed correspondence.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: It is probably fair to say that, following his relationship with Hannah Arendt, Blochmann had one of the most important extramarital affairs with Heidegger (as is known since 2005, Heidegger led something of an open marriage and his wife Elfriede both knew about his affairs and conducted her own). Elfriede Heidegger and Elisabeth Blochmann were friends and former classmates. The story is well documented in the 1989 edition of their letters, starting in 1918. Heidegger's letters to his wife contain information about several other affairs of his. He helped Blochmann emigrate from Germany before the start of World War II and resumed contact with both of them after the war.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: In the 1927 "Being and Time", Heidegger rejects the Cartesian view of the human being as a subjective spectator of objects, according to Marcella Horrigan-Kelly (et al.). The book instead holds that both subject and object are inseparable. In presenting "being" as inseparable, Heidegger introduced the term "Dasein" (literally: being there), intended to embody a "living being" through their activity of "being there" and "being-in-the-world". "Famously, Heidegger writes of Dasein as Being-in-the-world," according to Michael Wheeler (2011). Understood as a unitary phenomenon rather than a contingent, additive combination, being-in-the-world is an essential characteristic of Dasein, Wheeler writes.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger's account of Dasein in "Being and Time" passes through a dissection of the experiences of "Angst", "the Nothing" and mortality, and then through an analysis of the structure of "Care" as such. From there he raises the problem of "authenticity", that is, the potentiality for mortal "Dasein" to exist "fully" enough that it might actually understand being and its possibilities. "Dasein" is not "man", but is nothing other than "man", according to Heidegger. Moreover, he wrote that Dasein is "the being that will give access to the question of the meaning of Being".


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Dasein's ordinary and even mundane experience of "being-in-the-world" provides "access to the meaning" or "sense of being" ("Sinn des Seins"). This access via Dasein is also that "in terms of which something becomes intelligible as something." Heidegger proposes that this meaning would elucidate ordinary "prescientific" understanding, which precedes abstract ways of knowing, such as logic or theory.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: This supposed "non-linguistic, pre-cognitive access" to the meaning of Being didn't underscore any particular, preferred narrative, according to an account of Richard Rorty's analysis by Edward Grippe. In this account, Heidegger holds that no particular understanding of Being (nor state of Dasein and its endeavors) is to be preferred over another. Moreover, "Rorty agrees with Heidegger that there is no hidden power called Being," Grippe writes, adding that Heidegger's concept of Being is viewed by Rorty as metaphorical.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: But Heidegger actually offers "no sense of how we might answer the question of being as such," writes Simon Critchley in his 2009 nine-part blog commentary on the work for "The Guardian". The book instead provides "an answer to the question of what it means to be human," according to Critchley. Nonetheless, Heidegger does present the concept: "'Being' is not something like a being but is rather "what determines beings as beings."


title: Martin Heidegger

text: The interpreters Thomas Sheehan and Mark Wrathall each separately assert that commentators' emphasis on the term "Being" is misplaced, and that Heidegger's central focus was never on "Being" as such. Wrathall wrote (2011) that Heidegger's elaborate concept of "unconcealment" was his central, life-long focus, while Sheehan (2015) proposed that the philosopher's prime focus was on that which "brings about being as a givenness of entities." Heidegger claims that traditional ontology has prejudicially overlooked the question of being.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger believes that time finds its meaning in death, according to Michael Kelley. That is, "time" is understood only from a finite or mortal vantage. Dasein's essential mode of being-in-the-world is temporal: Having been "thrown" into a world implies a “pastness” to its being. Dasein occupies itself with the present tasks required by goals it has projected on the future. Thus Heidegger concludes that Dasein's fundamental characteristic is temporality, Kelley writes.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Dasein as an inseparable subject/object, cannot be separated from its objective "historicality". On the one hand, Dasein is "stretched along" between birth and death, and thrown into its world; into its "possibilities" which "Dasein" is charged with assuming. On the other hand, "Dasein's" access to this world and these possibilities is always via a history and a tradition—this is the question of "world historicality".


title: Martin Heidegger

text: In "Being and Time","Heidegger drew a sharp distinction between ontical and the ontological -- or beings and "Being" as such. He labelled this the "Ontological Difference". It is from this distinction that he developed the concept of "Fundamental Ontology".


title: Martin Heidegger

text: According to Taylor Carman (2003), traditional ontology asks "Why is there anything?" whereas Heidegger's "Fundamental Ontology" asks "What does it mean for something to be?". Heidegger's ontology "is fundamental relative to traditional ontology in that it concerns what any understanding of entities necessarily presupposes, namely, our understanding of that in virtue of which entities are entities", Carman writes.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: This line of inquiry is based on the "ontological difference"—central to Heidegger's philosophy. In 1937's "Contributions to Philosophy" Heidegger calls the ontological difference ""the" essence of Dasein".


title: Martin Heidegger

text: He accuses the Western philosophical tradition of incorrectly focusing on the "ontic"—and thus "forgetful" of this distinction. This has led to the mistake of understanding "being as such" as a kind of ultimate entity, for example as idea, energeia, substantia, actualitas or will to power. According to Richard Rorty, Heidegger envisioned no "hidden power of Being" as an ultimate entity. Heidegger tries to rectify ontic philosophy by focusing instead on the "meaning of being"—or what he called "fundamental ontology". This "ontological inquiry" is required to understand the basis of the sciences, according to "Being and Time" (1927).


title: Martin Heidegger

text: This inquiry is engaged by studying the human being, or Dasein, according to Heidegger. This method works because of Dasein's "pre-ontological understanding" of "being" that shapes experience. This implicit understanding can be made explicit through phenomenology and its methods, but these must be employed using hermeneutics in order to avoid distortions by the "forgetfulness of being", according to interpretations of Heidegger.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger's Kehre, or "the turn" ("die Kehre") refers to a change in his work as early as 1930 that became clearly established by the 1940s, according to various commentators. Heidegger rarely used the term. Recurring themes include poetry and technology. Commentators such as William J. Richardson (1963) describe, variously, a shift of focus, or a major change in outlook.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: The 1935 "Introduction to Metaphysics" "clearly shows the shift" to an emphasis on language from a previous emphasis on Dasein in "Being and Time" eight years earlier, according to Brian Bard's 1993 essay titled "Heidegger's Reading of Heraclitus". In a 1950 lecture Heidegger formulated the famous saying "Language speaks", later published in the 1959 essays collection "Unterwegs zur Sprache", and collected in the 1971 English book "Poetry, Language, Thought".


title: Martin Heidegger

text: This supposed shift—applied here to cover about thirty years of Heidegger's 40-year writing career—has been described by commentators from widely varied viewpoints; including as a shift in priority from "Being and Time" to "Time and Being"—namely, from dwelling (being) in the world to doing (time) in the world. (This aspect, in particular the 1951 essay ""Building, Dwelling Thinking"" influenced architectural theorists including Christian Norberg-Schulz, Dalibor Vesely, Joseph Rykwert, Daniel Libeskind and the philosopher-architect Nader El-Bizri.)


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Other interpreters believe "the Kehre" can be overstated or even that it doesn't exist. Thomas Sheehan (2001) believes this supposed change is "far less dramatic than usually suggested," and entailed a change in focus and method. Sheehan contends that throughout his career, Heidegger never focused on "being", but rather tried to define "[that which] brings about being as a givenness of entities." Mark Wrathall argued (2011) that the "Kehre" isn't found in Heidegger's writings but is simply a misconception. As evidence for this view, Wrathall sees a consistency of purpose in Heidegger's life-long pursuit and refinement of his notion of "unconcealment".


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Some notable "later" works are The Origin of the Work of Art", (1935), "Contributions to Philosophy" (1937), "Letter on Humanism" (1946). "Building Dwelling Thinking", (1951), "The Question Concerning Technology", (1954) " and "What Is Called Thinking?" (1954). Also during this period, Heidegger wrote extensively on Nietzsche and the poet Holderlin.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: In his later philosophy, Heidegger attempted to reconstruct the "history of being" in order to show how the different epochs in the history of philosophy were dominated by different conceptions of "being". His goal is to retrieve the "original experience of being" present in the early Greek thought that was covered up by later philosophers.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Michael Allen Gillespie says (1984) that Heidegger's theoretical acceptance of "destiny" has much in common with the millenarianism of Marxism. But Marxists believe Heidegger's "theoretical acceptance is antagonistic to practical political activity and implies fascism. Gillespie, however, says "the real danger" from Heidegger isn't quietism but fanaticism. "History, as Heidegger understands it, doesn't move forward gradually and regularly but spasmodically and unpredictably." Modernity has cast mankind toward a new goal "on the brink of profound nihilism" that is "so alien it requires the construction of a new tradition to make it comprehensible."


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Allen extrapolated from Heidegger's writings that mankind may degenerate into scientists, workers and brutes. According to Allen, Heidegger envisaged this abyss to be the greatest event in the West's history because it would enable Humanity to comprehend Being more profoundly and primordially than the Pre-Socratics.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger was substantially influenced by St. Augustine of Hippo, and "Being and Time" would not have been possible without the influence of Augustine's thought. Augustine's "Confessions" was particularly influential in shaping Heidegger's thought. Almost all central concepts of "Being and Time" are derived from Augustine, Luther, and Kierkegaard, according to Christian Lotz.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Augustine viewed time as relative and subjective, and that being and time were bound up together. Heidegger adopted similar views, e.g. that time was the horizon of Being: ' ...time temporalizes itself only as long as there are human beings.'


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger was influenced at an early age by Aristotle, mediated through Catholic theology, medieval philosophy and Franz Brentano. Aristotle's ethical, logical, and metaphysical works were crucial to the development of his thought in the crucial period of the 1920s. Although he later worked less on Aristotle, Heidegger recommended postponing reading Nietzsche, and to "first study Aristotle for ten to fifteen years". In reading Aristotle, Heidegger increasingly contested the traditional Latin translation and scholastic interpretation of his thought. Particularly important (not least for its influence upon others, both in their interpretation of Aristotle and in rehabilitating a neo-Aristotelian "practical philosophy") was his radical reinterpretation of Book Six of Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" and several books of the "Metaphysics". Both informed the argument of "Being and Time". Heidegger's thought is original in being an authentic retrieval of the past, a repetition of the possibilities handed down by the tradition.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: The idea of asking about being may be traced back via Aristotle to Parmenides. Heidegger claimed to have revived the question of being, the question having been largely forgotten by the metaphysical tradition extending from Plato to Descartes, a forgetfulness extending to the Age of Enlightenment and then to modern science and technology. In pursuit of the retrieval of this question, Heidegger spent considerable time reflecting on ancient Greek thought, in particular on Plato, Parmenides, Heraclitus, and Anaximander, as well as on the tragic playwright Sophocles.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: According to W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz, Heidegger believed "the thinking of Heraclitus and Parmenides, which lies at the origin of philosophy, was falsified and misinterpreted" by Plato and Aristotle, thus tainting all of subsequent Western philosophy. In his "Introduction to Metaphysics", Heidegger states:


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Among the most ancient Greek thinkers, it is Heraclitus who was subjected to the most fundamentally un-Greek misinterpretation in the course of Western history, and who nevertheless in more recent times has provided the strongest impulses toward redisclosing what is authentically Greek.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Charles Guignon wrote that Heidegger aimed to correct this misunderstanding by reviving Presocratic notions of 'being' with an emphasis on "understanding the way beings show up in (and as) an unfolding "happening or event"." Guignon adds that "we might call this alternative outlook 'event ontology.'"


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger's very early project of developing a "hermeneutics of factical life" and his hermeneutical transformation of phenomenology was influenced in part by his reading of the works of Wilhelm Dilthey.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Of the influence of Dilthey, Hans-Georg Gadamer writes that Dilthey's influence was important in helping the youthful Heidegger "in distancing himself from the systematic ideal of Neo-Kantianism, as Heidegger acknowledges in "Being and Time"."


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Scholars as diverse as Theodore Kisiel and David Farrell Krell have argued for the importance of Diltheyan concepts and strategies in the formation of Heidegger's thought.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Even though Gadamer's interpretation of Heidegger has been questioned, there is little doubt that Heidegger seized upon Dilthey's concept of hermeneutics. Heidegger's novel ideas about ontology required a "gestalt" formation, not merely a series of logical arguments, in order to demonstrate his fundamentally new paradigm of thinking, and the hermeneutic circle offered a new and powerful tool for the articulation and realization of these ideas.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Husserl's influence on Heidegger is controversial. Disagreements centre upon how much of Husserlian phenomenology is contested by Heidegger, and how much his phenomenology in fact informs Heidegger's own understanding. On the relation between the two figures, Gadamer wrote: "When asked about phenomenology, Husserl was quite right to answer as he used to in the period directly after World War I: 'Phenomenology, that is me and Heidegger'." Nevertheless, Gadamer noted that Heidegger was no patient collaborator with Husserl, and that Heidegger's "rash ascent to the top, the incomparable fascination he aroused, and his stormy temperament surely must have made Husserl, the patient one, as suspicious of Heidegger as he always had been of Max Scheler's volcanic fire."


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger himself, who is supposed to have broken with Husserl, bases his hermeneutics on an account of time that not only parallels Husserl's account in many ways but seems to have been arrived at through the same phenomenological method as was used by Husserl... The differences between Husserl and Heidegger are significant, but if we do not see how much it is the case that Husserlian phenomenology provides the framework for Heidegger's approach, we will not be able to appreciate the exact nature of Heidegger's project in "Being and Time" or why he left it unfinished.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Daniel O. Dahlstrom saw Heidegger's presentation of his work as a departure from Husserl as unfairly misrepresenting Husserl's own work. Dahlstrom concluded his consideration of the relation between Heidegger and Husserl as follows:


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger's silence about the stark similarities between his account of temporality and Husserl's investigation of internal time-consciousness contributes to a "misrepresentation" of Husserl's account of intentionality. Contrary to the criticisms Heidegger advances in his lectures, intentionality (and, by implication, the meaning of 'to be') in the final analysis is not construed by Husserl as sheer presence (be it the presence of a fact or object, act or event). Yet for all its "dangerous closeness" to what Heidegger understands by temporality, Husserl's account of internal time-consciousness does differ fundamentally. In Husserl's account the structure of protentions is accorded neither the finitude nor the primacy that Heidegger claims are central to the original future of ecstatic-horizonal temporality.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heideggerians regarded Søren Kierkegaard as, by far, the greatest philosophical contributor to Heidegger's own existentialist concepts. Heidegger's concepts of anxiety ("Angst") and mortality draw on Kierkegaard and are indebted to the way in which the latter lays out the importance of our subjective relation to truth, our existence in the face of death, the temporality of existence, and the importance of passionate affirmation of one's individual being-in-the-world.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Patricia J. Huntington claims that Heidegger's book "Being and Time" continued Kierkegaard's existential goal. Nevertheless, she argues that Heidegger began to distance himself from any existentialist thought.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Friedrich Hölderlin and Friedrich Nietzsche were both important influences on Heidegger, and many of his lecture courses were devoted to one or the other, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. The lectures on Nietzsche focused on fragments posthumously published under the title "The Will to Power", rather than on Nietzsche's published works. Heidegger read "The Will to Power" as the culminating expression of Western metaphysics, and the lectures are a kind of dialogue between the two thinkers.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: This is also the case for the lecture courses devoted to the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin, which became an increasingly central focus of Heidegger's work and thought. Heidegger grants to Hölderlin a singular place within the history of being and the history of Germany, as a herald whose thought is yet to be "heard" in Germany or the West. Many of Heidegger's works from the 1930s onwards include meditations on lines from Hölderlin's poetry, and several of the lecture courses are devoted to the reading of a single poem (see, for example, "Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister"").


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Some writers on Heidegger's work see possibilities within it for dialogue with traditions of thought outside of Western philosophy, particularly East Asian thinking. Despite perceived differences between Eastern and Western philosophy, some of Heidegger's later work, particularly "A Dialogue on Language between a Japanese and an Inquirer", does show an interest in initiating such a dialogue. Heidegger himself had contact with a number of leading Japanese intellectuals, including members of the Kyoto School, notably Hajime Tanabe and Kuki Shūzō. Reinhard May refers to Chang Chung-Yuan who stated (in 1977) "Heidegger is the only Western Philosopher who not only intellectually understands Tao, but has intuitively experienced the essence of it as well." May sees great influence of Taoism and Japanese scholars in Heidegger's work, although this influence is not acknowledged by the author. He asserts (1996): "The investigation concludes that Heidegger's work was significantly influenced by East Asian sources. It can be shown, moreover, that in particular instances Heidegger even appropriated wholesale and almost verbatim major ideas from the German translations of Daoist and Zen Buddhist classics. This clandestine textual appropriation of non-Western spirituality, the extent of which has gone undiscovered for so long, seems quite unparalleled, with far-reaching implications for our future interpretation of Heidegger's work."


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger has been influential in research on the relationship between Western philosophy and the history of ideas in Islam, particularly for some scholars interested in Arabic philosophical medieval sources. These include the Lebanese philosopher and architectural theorist Nader El-Bizri, who, as well as focusing on the critique of the history of metaphysics (as an 'Arab Heideggerian'), also moves towards rethinking the notion of "dwelling" in the epoch of the modern unfolding of the essence of technology and "Gestell", and realizing what can be described as a "confluence of Western and Eastern thought" as well. El-Bizri has also taken a new direction in his engagement in 'Heidegger Studies' by way of probing the Arab/Levantine Anglophone reception of "Sein und Zeit" in 1937 as set in the Harvard doctoral thesis of the 20th century Lebanese thinker and diplomat Charles Malik.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: It is also claimed that the works of counter-enlightenment philosophers such as Heidegger, along with Friedrich Nietzsche and Joseph de Maistre, influenced Iran's Shia Islamist scholars, notably Ali Shariati. A clearer impact of Heidegger in Iran is associated with thinkers such as Reza Davari Ardakani, Ahmad Fardid, and Fardid's student Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, who have been closely associated with the unfolding of philosophical thinking in a Muslim modern theological legacy in Iran. This included the construction of the ideological foundations of the Iranian Revolution and modern political Islam in its connections with theology.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Adolf Hitler was sworn in as Chancellor of Germany on 30 January 1933. Heidegger was elected rector of the University of Freiburg on 21 April 1933, and assumed the position the following day. On May 1, he joined the Nazi Party.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: On 27 May 1933, Heidegger delivered his inaugural address, the "Rektoratsrede" ("The Self-assertion of the German University"), in a hall decorated with swastikas, with members of the Sturmabteilung and prominent Nazi Party officials present.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: His tenure as rector was fraught with difficulties from the outset. Some Nazi education officials viewed him as a rival, while others saw his efforts as comical. Some of Heidegger's fellow Nazis also ridiculed his philosophical writings as gibberish. He finally offered his resignation as rector on 23 April 1934, and it was accepted on 27 April. Heidegger remained a member of both the academic faculty and of the Nazi Party until the end of the war.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Though as rector he prevented students from displaying an anti-Semitic poster at the entrance to the university and from holding a book burning, he kept in close contact with the Nazi student leaders and clearly signaled to them his sympathy with their activism.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: In 1945, Heidegger wrote of his term as rector, giving the writing to his son Hermann; it was published in 1983:


title: Martin Heidegger

text: The rectorate was an attempt to see something in the movement that had come to power, beyond all its failings and crudeness, that was much more far-reaching and that could perhaps one day bring a concentration on the Germans' Western historical essence. It will in no way be denied that at the time I believed in such possibilities and for that reason renounced the actual vocation of thinking in favor of being effective in an official capacity. In no way will what was caused by my own inadequacy in office be played down. But these points of view do not capture what is essential and what moved me to accept the rectorate.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Beginning in 1917, German-Jewish philosopher Edmund Husserl championed Heidegger's work, and helped Heidegger become his successor for the chair in philosophy at the University of Freiburg in 1928.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: On 6 April 1933, the Gauleiter of Baden Province, Robert Wagner, suspended all Jewish government employees, including present and retired faculty at the University of Freiburg. Heidegger's predecessor as rector formally notified Husserl of his "enforced leave of absence" on 14 April 1933.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger became Rector of the University of Freiburg on 22 April 1933. The following week the national Reich law of 28 April 1933 replaced Reichskommissar Wagner's decree. The Reich law required the firing of Jewish professors from German universities, including those, such as Husserl, who had converted to Christianity. The termination of the retired professor Husserl's academic privileges thus did not involve any specific action on Heidegger's part.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger had by then broken off contact with Husserl, other than through intermediaries. Heidegger later claimed that his relationship with Husserl had already become strained after Husserl publicly "settled accounts" with Heidegger and Max Scheler in the early 1930s.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger did not attend his former mentor's cremation in 1938. In 1941, under pressure from publisher Max Niemeyer, Heidegger agreed to remove the dedication to Husserl from "Being and Time" (restored in post-war editions).


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger's behavior towards Husserl has provoked controversy. Hannah Arendt initially suggested that Heidegger's behavior precipitated Husserl's death. She called Heidegger a "potential murderer". However, she later recanted her accusation.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: In 1939, only a year after Husserl's death, Heidegger wrote in his "Black Notebooks": "The more original and inceptive the coming decisions and questions become, the more inaccessible will they remain to this [Jewish] 'race'. Thus, Husserl's step toward phenomenological observation, and his rejection of psychological explanations and historiological reckoning of opinions, are of enduring importance—yet it never reaches into the domains of essential decisions", seeming to imply that Husserl's philosophy was limited purely because he was Jewish.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: After the failure of Heidegger's rectorship, he withdrew from most political activity, but remained a member of the Nazi Party. In May 1934 he accepted a position on the Committee for the Philosophy of Law in the Academy for German Law (), where he remained active until at least 1936. The academy had official consultant status in preparing Nazi legislation such as the Nuremberg racial laws that came into effect in 1935. In addition to Heidegger, such Nazi notables as Hans Frank, Julius Streicher, Carl Schmitt and Alfred Rosenberg belonged to the Academy and served on this committee.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: In a 1935 lecture, later published in 1953 as part of the book "Introduction to Metaphysics", Heidegger refers to the "inner truth and greatness" of the Nazi movement ("die innere Wahrheit und Größe dieser Bewegung"), but he then adds a qualifying statement in parentheses: "namely, the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity" ("nämlich die Begegnung der planetarisch bestimmten Technik und des neuzeitlichen Menschen"). However, it subsequently transpired that this qualification had not been made during the original lecture, although Heidegger claimed that it had been. This has led scholars to argue that Heidegger still supported the Nazi party in 1935 but that he did not want to admit this after the war, and so he attempted to silently correct his earlier statement.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: In private notes written in 1939, Heidegger took a strongly critical view of Hitler's ideology; however, in public lectures, he seems to have continued to make ambiguous comments which, if they expressed criticism of the regime, did so only in the context of praising its ideals. For instance, in a 1942 lecture, published posthumously, Heidegger said of recent German classics scholarship:


title: Martin Heidegger

text: In the majority of "research results," the Greeks appear as pure National Socialists. This overenthusiasm on the part of academics seems not even to notice that with such "results" it does National Socialism and its historical uniqueness no service at all, not that it needs this anyhow.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: An important witness to Heidegger's continued allegiance to Nazism during the post-rectorship period is his former student Karl Löwith, who met Heidegger in 1936 while Heidegger was visiting Rome. In an account set down in 1940 (though not intended for publication), Löwith recalled that Heidegger wore a swastika pin to their meeting, though Heidegger knew that Löwith was Jewish. Löwith also recalled that Heidegger "left no doubt about his faith in Hitler", and stated that his support for Nazism was in agreement with the essence of his philosophy.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger rejected the "biologically grounded racism" of the Nazis, replacing it with linguistic-historical heritage.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: After the end of World War II, Heidegger was summoned to appear at a denazification hearing. Heidegger's former lover Hannah Arendt spoke on his behalf at this hearing, while Karl Jaspers spoke against him. He was charged on four counts, dismissed from the university and declared a "follower" ("Mitläufer") of Nazism. Heidegger was forbidden to teach between 1945 and 1951. One consequence of this teaching ban was that Heidegger began to engage far more in the French philosophical scene.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: In his postwar thinking, Heidegger distanced himself from Nazism, but his critical comments about Nazism seem "scandalous" to some since they tend to equate the Nazi war atrocities with other inhumane practices related to rationalisation and industrialisation, including the treatment of animals by factory farming. For instance in a lecture delivered at Bremen in 1949, Heidegger said: "Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs."


title: Martin Heidegger

text: In 1967 Heidegger met with the Jewish poet Paul Celan, a concentration camp survivor. Having corresponded since 1956, Celan visited Heidegger at his country retreat and wrote an enigmatic poem about the meeting, which some interpret as Celan's wish for Heidegger to apologize for his behavior during the Nazi era.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: On 23 September 1966, Heidegger was interviewed by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff for "Der Spiegel" magazine, in which he agreed to discuss his political past provided that the interview be published posthumously. ("Only a God Can Save Us" was published five days after his death, on 31 May 1976.) In the interview, Heidegger defended his entanglement with Nazism in two ways: first, he argued that there was no alternative, saying that he was trying to save the university (and science in general) from being politicized and thus had to compromise with the Nazi administration. Second, he admitted that he saw an "awakening" ("Aufbruch") which might help to find a "new national and social approach," but said that he changed his mind about this in 1934, largely prompted by the violence of the Night of the Long Knives.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: In his interview Heidegger defended as double-speak his 1935 lecture describing the "inner truth and greatness of this movement." He affirmed that Nazi informants who observed his lectures would understand that by "movement" he meant Nazism. However, Heidegger asserted that his dedicated students would know this statement wasn't praise for the Nazi Party. Rather, he meant it as he expressed it in the parenthetical clarification later added to "Introduction to Metaphysics" (1953), namely, "the confrontation of planetary technology and modern humanity."


title: Martin Heidegger

text: The eyewitness account of Löwith from 1940 contradicts the account given in the "Der Spiegel" interview in two ways: that he did not make any decisive break with Nazism in 1934, and that Heidegger was willing to entertain more profound relations between his philosophy and political involvement. The "Der Spiegel" interviewers did not bring up Heidegger's 1949 quotation comparing the industrialization of agriculture to the extermination camps. In fact, the interviewers were not in possession of much of the evidence now known for Heidegger's Nazi sympathies. "Der Spiegel" journalist Georg Wolff had been an SS-Hauptsturmführer with the Sicherheitsdienst, stationed in Oslo during World War II, and had been writing articles with antisemitic and racist overtones in "Der Spiegel" since the end of the war.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger is "widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century while remaining one of the most controversial." His ideas have penetrated into many areas, but in France there is a very long and particular history of reading and interpreting his work which in itself resulted in deepening the impact of his thought in Continental Philosophy. He influenced Jean Beaufret, , Dominique Janicaud, Jean-Luc Marion, , Jean Paul Sartre, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault and others.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger's influence on French philosophy began in the 1930s, when "Being and Time", "What is Metaphysics?" and other Heideggerian texts were read by Jean-Paul Sartre and other existentialists, as well as by thinkers such as Alexandre Kojève, Georges Bataille and Emmanuel Levinas. Because Heidegger's discussion of ontology (the study of being) is rooted in an analysis of the mode of existence of individual human beings ("Da-sein", or there-being), his work has often been associated with existentialism. The influence of Heidegger on Sartre's "Being and Nothingness" (1943) is marked, but Heidegger felt that Sartre had misread his work, as he argued in later texts such as the "Letter on Humanism". In that text, intended for a French audience, Heidegger explained this misreading in the following terms:


title: Martin Heidegger

text: "Letter on 'Humanism'" is often seen as a direct response to Sartre's 1945 lecture "Existentialism Is a Humanism". Aside from merely disputing readings of his own work, however, in the "Letter on Humanism" Heidegger asserts that "Every humanism is either grounded in a metaphysics or is itself made to be the ground of one." Heidegger's largest issue with Sartre's existential humanism is that, while it does make a humanistic 'move' in privileging existence over essence, "the reversal of a metaphysical statement remains a metaphysical statement." From this point onward in his thought, Heidegger attempted to think beyond metaphysics to a place where the articulation of the fundamental questions of ontology were fundamentally possible: only from this point can we restore (that is, re-give [redonner]) any possible meaning to the word "humanism".


title: Martin Heidegger

text: After the war, Heidegger was banned from university teaching for a period on account of his support of Nazism while serving as Rector of Freiburg University. He developed a number of contacts in France, where his work continued to be taught, and a number of French students visited him at Todtnauberg (see, for example, Jean-François Lyotard's brief account in "Heidegger and "the Jews"", which discusses a Franco-German conference held in Freiburg in 1947, one step toward bringing together French and German students). Heidegger subsequently made several visits to France, and made efforts to keep abreast of developments in French philosophy by way of correspondence with Jean Beaufret, an early French translator of Heidegger, and with Lucien Braun.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Deconstruction came to Heidegger's attention in 1967 by way of Lucien Braun's recommendation of Jacques Derrida's work (Hans-Georg Gadamer was present at an initial discussion and indicated to Heidegger that Derrida's work came to his attention by way of an assistant). Heidegger expressed interest in meeting Derrida personally after the latter sent him some of his work. There was a discussion of a meeting in 1972, but this failed to take place. Heidegger's interest in Derrida is said by Braun to have been considerable (as is evident in two letters, of September 29, 1967, and May 16, 1972, from Heidegger to Braun). Braun also brought to Heidegger's attention the work of Michel Foucault. Foucault's relation to Heidegger is a matter of considerable difficulty; Foucault acknowledged Heidegger as a philosopher whom he read but never wrote about. (For more on this see "Penser à Strasbourg," Jacques Derrida, et al., which includes reproductions of both letters and an account by Braun, "À mi-chemin entre Heidegger et Derrida").


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Derrida attempted to displace the understanding of Heidegger's work that had been prevalent in France from the period of the ban against Heidegger teaching in German universities, which amounted to an almost wholesale rejection of the influence of Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialist terms. In Derrida's view, deconstruction is a tradition inherited via Heidegger (the French term "déconstruction" is a term coined to translate Heidegger's use of the words "Destruktion"—literally "destruction"—and "Abbau"—more literally "de-building"). According to Derrida, Sartre's interpretation of Dasein and other key Heideggerian concerns is overly psychologistic, anthropocentric, and misses the historicality central to "Dasein" in "Being and Time".


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Jean-François Lyotard, among others, all engaged in debate and disagreement about the relation between Heidegger's philosophy and his Nazi politics. These debates included the question of whether it was possible to do without Heidegger's philosophy, a position which Derrida in particular rejected. Forums where these debates took place include the proceedings of the first conference dedicated to Derrida's work, published as "Les Fins de l'homme à partir du travail de Jacques Derrida: colloque de Cerisy, 23 juillet-2 août 1980", Derrida's "Feu la cendre/cio' che resta del fuoco", and the studies on Paul Celan by Lacoue-Labarthe and Derrida which shortly preceded the detailed studies of Heidegger's politics published in and after 1987.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: When in 1987 Víctor Farías published his book "Heidegger et le nazisme", this debate was taken up by many others, some of whom were inclined to disparage so-called "deconstructionists" for their association with Heidegger's philosophy. Derrida and others not only continued to defend the importance of reading Heidegger, but attacked Farías on the grounds of poor scholarship and for what they saw as the sensationalism of his approach. Not all scholars agreed with this negative assessment: Richard Rorty, for example, declared that "[Farías'] book includes more concrete information relevant to Heidegger's relations with the Nazis than anything else available, and it is an excellent antidote to the evasive apologetics that are still being published."


title: Martin Heidegger

text: More recently, Heidegger's thought has influenced the work of the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler. This is evident even from the title of Stiegler's multi-volume "magnum opus", "La technique et le temps" (volume one translated into English as "Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus"). Stiegler offers an original reading of Heidegger, arguing that there can be no access to "originary temporality" other than via material, that is, technical, supports, and that Heidegger recognised this in the form of his account of world historicality, yet in the end suppressed that fact. Stiegler understands the existential analytic of "Being and Time" as an account of psychic individuation, and his later "history of being" as an account of collective individuation. He understands many of the problems of Heidegger's philosophy and politics as the consequence of Heidegger's inability to integrate the two.


title: Martin Heidegger

text: Heidegger has been very influential in the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. Agamben attended seminars in France led by Heidegger in the late 1960s.