Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Heidegger: The German and the Jewish Turns to Ethnicism [1988]

In broad strokes I want to draw a diagram, as it were, of one phase of European intellectual history in the twentieth century and of some of its major political accompaniments. It is a phase that has to be of special importance to Germans and to Jews, but it must also be important to other men, for its philosophical and historical ramifications have long since engulfed the rest of mankind. Furthermore, I propose to show that this historical episode has significantly contributed to bringing all of us where we are now and that the forces that operated in it will, if continued, go on determining our and our children’s future for good or ill to some considerable extent.