Heidegger's silence

by Berel Lang

In What Is Called Thinking? Martin Heidegger wrote, "Man speaks by being silent." Berel Lang shows in this penetrating book how Heidegger's own silence on the "Jewish Question" - how (or if) the Jews were to live among the nations - constituted a deliberate and direct "speaking." The significance of the Jewish Question which gained currency in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was radically altered by the Holocaust. Lang argues, however, that Heidegger's post-Holocaust silence had its grounds in his earlier silence on the Jewish Question - itself based on the conceptual and historical role Heidegger ascribed to the Volk, in particular to the German Volk. Heidegger's enduring silence, Lang concludes, was thus more than an expression of prejudice or of public rhetoric. As an element of his philosophical position, it remains a necessary consideration in understanding and assessing Heidegger as thinker. In this way, Heidegger's silence still speaks.