Yvonne Sherratt, Hitler’s Philosophers, Yale University Press, New Haven CT and London, 2013. 336 pp., £25.00 hb., 978 0 30015 193 0. Yvonne Sherratt’s book on the response of philosophers to the Third Reich is written in the style of a docudrama. There are colourful descriptions of foliage in Heidegger’s Todtnauberg and peasants in ‘folksy knickerbockers’. Attention is drawn to the scent of fresh roasted coffee and sweet pastries, as Carl Schmitt hears the announcement of Hitler’s appointment as chancellor in a Berlin cafe. Thick dark hair is parted neatly on both Nietzsche’s and Schmitt’s heads. Men such as Schmitt, Alfred Rosenberg or Kurt Huber are ‘handsome’, while Arendt is referred to as Hannah, a girl ‘ready for total devotion’ to Heidegger, who, later, her long dark wavy hair cropped short, ‘escaped the gas chambers by the skin of her teeth’, and took comfort in the ‘solid presence by night and by day’ of Heinrich Blucher. The language of Hitler’s Philosophers wants to be immediate, to express something of the passions and solidity of the philosophers it discusses, whose own disciplinary predilections apparently push them towards abstraction, lack of concretion, disembodiment. But the effect is largely comic or bathetic, as [...]
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