Over the course of World War I, the Volksbegriff metamorphosed into toxic ideological amalgam: a composite of late Romantic emotionalism, decisionistic Machtpolitik, secular eschatology, Lebensphilosophie, and Social Darwinism. Taken as a whole, these elements fused to shape and inform the Rassengedanke.
In “The Self-Assertion of the German University,” Heidegger referenced “das Volk” no fewer than thirty-eight times. “The will to the essence of the German university,” asserted Heidegger, “is the will to [realize] the historical-spiritual mission of the German Volk as a Volk that knows itself in its State.” “The spiritual world of a Volk is a power that derives from . . . forces that are rooted in the soil and blood of a Volk”: forces that possess the “power to arouse . . . and to shake up the Volk’s existence.”181
In referencing das Volk, Heidegger did not mean any Volk whatsoever. He meant the German Volk, or Deutschtum, to which he consistently attributed an eschatological, salvific role. Heidegger held that the West’s redemption from the nightmare of European nihilism hinged on the “metaphysics of German Dasein.”182 In his view, the German Volk possessed metaphysical traits and capacities that other Völker egregiously lacked. Time and again, Heidegger insisted that the “saving power”—das Rettende—should it materialize, could only come from the Germans.
Heidegger’s frequent employment of Volk, in philosophical treatises as well as in political texts, offers a number of important clues concerning his attitudes toward race thinking. By the late 1920s and early 1930s, when Heidegger began utilizing the Volksbegriff extensively, it had merged indistinguishably with the idea of race. Research on the “language of totalitarianism” has shown that, between 1871 and 1900, the meanings of “national” and “völkisch” diverged. According to Meyers Enzyklopädisches Lexikon, “völkisch” increasingly became synonymous with “an ethnically exclusive, antisemitic nationalism.” The Brockhaus Wörterbuch reaffirmed this finding, remarking that, during this time frame, “ ‘völkisch’ assumed the contours of an emphatically antisemitic nationalism that was grounded in the Rassengedanke.”183 Finally, the conceptual historian Reinhart Koselleck, in his contribution to the article “Volk, Nation, Nationalismus, Masse” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, confirmed the semantic