The Jewish literary tradition in Heidegger's Heimat

Abstract

The most important German regionalist writers—Berthold Auerbach (1812–1882) and Alexandre Weill (1811–1892)—were Jewish. Both wrote in and about the Alemannic or Black Forest region of Germany, where Martin Heidegger's Heimat is located. Moreover, both anticipated Heidegger's view of the local Volk as a resisting alternative to the homogenizing effects of technology and bureaucracy (what Heidegger called Machenschaft). Yet Heidegger fails to mention either writer's work in his essays on Heimat, dwelling, and dialect. This article examines Heidegger's relevant writings, as well as pertinent works by Auerbach, Weill, and Johann Peter Hebel (1760–1826), to propose that Heidegger's anti‐Semitism warped his conception of regionalist literature, enabling his exclusion of the most prominent writers in his Heimat.