Martin Heidegger
Freiburg

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. The title of his 1929 inaugural lecture was "What is Metaphysics?" In this year he also published Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics.

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. 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.

Heidegger was elected rector of the university on 21 April 1933, and joined the Nazi Party on 1 May, just three months after Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor. 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. 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.

In 1935, he gave the talk " On the Origin of the Work of Art ". The next year, while in Rome, Heidegger gave his first lecture on Friedrich Hölderlin. In the years 1936 – 1937, Heidegger wrote what some commentators consider his second greatest work, Contributions to Philosophy; it would not be published, however, until 1989, 13 years after his death.

From 1936 to 1940, Heidegger also delivered a series of lectures on Friedrich Nietzsche at Freiburg that presented much of the raw material incorporated in his more established work and thought from this time. These would appear in published form in 1961. This period also marks the beginning of his interest in the " essence of technology".

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