The German Genius

was made one of the professors charged with reopening the University of Heidelberg (described by one American observer as “once famous, now notorious,” because it was “still infested” with Nazis) and now began his most creative period of writing, not just in philosophy but also in politics. 41 Jaspers laid great store by civic morality, arguing that a liberal humanistic education was the best means of disseminating democratic ideas throughout Germany. He remained firmly against the rehabilitation of professors who had a history of Nazi affiliation, and his writings and radio broadcasts became a major force at the time. 42
    To an extent, therefore, Jaspers adopted a classic British or French view of political liberty. 43 In theory he wanted to see this model imported into his native Germany but he must have had doubts that this would happen, because in 1948 he accepted a professorship at the University of Basel and became a Swiss national, saying “he felt he was breathing again for the first time in fifteen years.” 44 That year too he published Der philosophische Glaube angesichts der Offenbarung (translated as Philosophical Faith ), a complicated but influential work in which he claimed that the “evidence” produced by faith (through revelation, say) is always likely to be paradoxical and uncertain. Therefore, dogmatism is unconvincing in religious belief, and a critical form of philosophy can be an important help in adding to what religions have to say; Jaspers saw it as one of philosophy’s main aims to update and relate theology to present circumstances. This led him into confrontation with both Karl Barth and, more especially, Rudolf Bultmann. 45 Jaspers also returned to Marx’s point about the role of the educated bourgeois elite. Marx had criticized this elite for making culture its refuge at the expense of politics. Jaspers argued that societies where the educated bourgeois elite see their role undermined will always be “inherently unstable” and that this segment of the body politic has a primary role to play in upholding democratic culture.
    Jaspers’s erstwhile friend Martin Heidegger had been through a much rougher time since the end of the war. In 1946 he had been banned from teaching by the Allies (this lasted until 1949), and his two sons were still in Russian captivity. 46 One bright spot for him was Hannah Arendt, who visited Heidegger in 1950 and again two years later. She eventually found it in her heart to forgive him and, from 1967 on, they met every year until his death in 1976. 47
    Heidegger’s postwar career in philosophy embraced three subjects—humanism, the nature of thinking, and the issue of technology. 48 There was also a very public exchange with Theodor Adorno, who criticized Heidegger in no uncertain terms.
    In a 1946 essay, Über den Humanismus ( On Humanism ), Heidegger was again the unyielding—and unrepentant—critic of “reason” and “modernity,” still in the name of “Being” and “poesis,” a stance that dovetailed well with the emerging postwar climate of opinion in the West, especially America, where many people were disillusioned with the modern world, “with its attendant horrors and catastrophes.” As often as not, Heidegger’s views were broadcast by French followers, such as Sartre and Jacques Derrida. 49 This approach formed a major plank in the postwar development of postmodernism.
    The Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts invited Heidegger to give lectures there from the early 1950s and the lecture of 1953 became famous. His subject was “Die Frage nach der Technik” (The Question of Technology), and the hall was packed with Munich’s intelligentsia—Werner Heisenberg, Ernst Jünger, and José Ortega y Gasset. Rüdiger Safranski says it was probably Heidegger’s greatest success in postwar Germany, and he was given a standing ovation. By the time of this lecture, as again Safranski points out, there was widespread anxiety about the threat of a technological society, not only in Germany but especially so there. 50 Alfred Weber’s Der dritte oder der vierte Mensch ( The Third or Fourth Man ) came out in the same year with a horrific vision of a future robotic world, and Friedrich Georg Jünger (Ernst’s brother) had released Die Perfektion der Technik ( Perfection of Technology ), in which he argued that technology had already changed mankind, that technological man was locked in an irreversible exploitation of the earth that would