"Wolin’s Misguided Attacks

on

Gadamer and Hermeneutics"

To have entrusted a review of Jean Grondin’s monumental biography of Gadamer, recently translated from the German and published by Yale University Press in 2003, to a man who has made a career of Heidegger-bashing and who in the New Republic (2000) dedicated his poisonous pen to a slanderously distorted picture of Gadamer as some kind of Nazi collaborator (“Nazism and the Complicities of Hans-Georg Gadamer: Untruth and Method (New Republic, 15 May 2000, pp. 36-45) was to invite the vitriolic falsification we received in the Book Forum review. In my article, “A Response to Richard Wolin on Gadamer and the Nazis,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10, 4(2002): 467-482, and in my introduction to Gadamer in Conversation (Yale, 2002), I have detailed the extent of Wolin’s slanderous misrepresentations and willful concealment of exonerating evidence about Gadamer that were to be found in his earlier denunciation of Gadamer in the New Republic.

To see the falseness of the picture Wolin paints of Gadamer in Book Forum and the unrealistic character of Wolin’s expectations of Gadamer in the 1930s, let’s look at the situation in which Gadamer found himself. Like his circle of close Jewish friends at Marburg, Gadamer was a young intellectual who had nothing but contempt for Hitler. To assert otherwise, as Wolin does, and to say flatly that Gadamer was “pro-Nazi” is to twist the facts in order to try to discredit Gadamer and his philosophy-which is Wolin’s aim. Why a person with this aim would be assigned to review Grondin’s Gadamer biography is a mystery to me. Wolin simply takes the opportunity to repeat his earlier denunciation of Gadamer.

When Hitler came to power Gadamer found himself in a police state. He had been in search of a job for over five years and in the meantime was working as a Privatdozent at the university where he got his degree. He had a wife and daughter who depended on him for support. In this situation, Wolin faults Gadamer for a lack of “civil courage,” for not heroicly standing up to Hitler, a fate that would result in imprisonment and possible death! Wolin willfully forgets what it means to live in a police state! In effect, Wolin asks: Why aren’t you dead? Why did not you not make a futile sacrifice and leave your wife behind to fend for herself? But a Bonhoeffer Gadamer was not. Bonhoeffer eventually died for his beliefs. That is what Wolin demands. Why did you not follow his example? Wolin seems to imagine that Gadamer lived in a democracy where he would have been free to stand up to Hitler, but the truth was he did not live in the USA, he lived in a police state where he felt constantly spied upon. I think the demand that Gadamer become a dead hero is unreasonable.

Under Hitler, Gadamer was not not “pro-Nazi” or a collaborator. He did what was necessary to avoid arrest and to gain a teaching position and then to hang on to it, Wolin faults Gadamer for signing an oath of support for Hitler in 1933 at Marburg, but he does not tell us that failure to sign it would have meant immediate dismissal from the University. So everyone signed it! This does not make him “pro-Nazi.” In 1934 he published a book written two years before which only was published in 1334, Plato and the Poets. He had no fascist political agenda in it and did not justify Plato but described his view.

He did not write it to please the National Socialists, as Teresa Orozco wrongly suggests in her now discredited book. At the time he wrote it, the Nazis had not come to power and Gadamer would not do this in any case. Gadamer was never for a single instant pro-Nazi. He considered Hitler an idiot. Indeed, Kate Lekebusch, a young woman he later married, spent the closing months of the war in jail for lamenting on the street that the assassination attempt on Hitler had failed. She came within minutes of being killed before she was liberated by the Russians. Gadamer shared her view, but was more careful than she. He was never pro-Nazi, a Wolin repeatedly asserts. Even when he attended an “orientation camp” in order to qualify for a university job, he did not change his mind. The trip to France and the talk on Herder there, so much criticized by Orozco and Wolin as evidence of pro-Nazi collaboration, came about in a quite unpolitical way. An old friend from Marburg invited Gadamer to visit him in Paris. Gadamer got permission from the authorities to make the trip by giving a talk to a group of French prisoners of war. He even joked to them that the Romans were right in saying that an empire that overextends itself is doomed. Even his Nazi overseers thought it was clever. Professors, after all, were not a threat. They were harmless.

Yes, Herder, an 18^{th century figure, did speak of the great German Volk and their destiny, but that does not make Herder or Gadamer a Nazi. It gave Gadamer a theme that would pass muster with the censors. Sneaking by the censors does not make Gadamer actively pro-Nazi. Later he toned down the references to Volk for the 1967 republication of the essay, but this was logical for a changed audience. Characterizing Gadamer’s efforts to survive under Hitler as “unpardonable” and the biography by Grondin as “hero-worship” and “hagiography” are typical of Wolin’s effort to discredit Gadamer and his life. Calling for “critical standards and methods” from Grondin, as Wolin does, makes no sense in light of Wolin’s tactics of denunciation, which were fashionable in Hitler’s era and under McCarthyism, his tendentious misrepresentation of Gadamer as “collaborator” or as “pro-Nazi,” and his willful concealment evidence that would exonerate the object of his misplaced wrath. Actually, Grondin comes far closer to fairness and objectivity in dealing with the Hitler years than Wolin. Fairness and reasonable standards of scholarly objectivity are the last things one could expect from Wolin. In this case, Wolin has taken as his target a man who was not a Nazi, or a pro-Nazi from outside the Party, but a young professor who survived the Nazi regime but never actively supported it, who kept in communication with his Jewish colleagues and helped get them reappointed to their positions after the war, and who was appointed Rector of Leipzig University immediately after the war because he was free of association with the Nazis or Nazi program. In my view, it is not Gadamer’s behavior under the Nazis that is “unpardonable” but rather the effort by Wolin through willful misrepresentation to blacken the name and philosophy of one of the most revered, decorated, and significant philosophers of the twentieth century.}