In the 1930s, Martin Heidegger began what would become a lifelong engagement with the work of Ernst Jünger. Part of Heidegger’s interest in Jünger was a result of Jünger’s Nietzsche-inspired cultural diagnosis; in Heidegger’s words, Jünger “makes all previous writings about Nietzsche inessential.” On the other hand, Heidegger was critical of what he deemed Jünger’s “bedazzlement” before the thought of Nietzsche. In this essay, I explore the sources of Heidegger’s interest and his criticism of Jünger’s work. To do this, I focus on elements of their correspondence, but mainly on Jünger’s essay “Über die Linie” of 1950 and Heidegger’s response, “Über ‘die Linie’” of 1955. In so doing, I hope to uncover their shared concern for the fate of Europe at the hands of a nihilism of which World War II was, to them, but an expression.

Heidegger often asserted that Germany, as “the land of poets and thinkers,” has a central world-historical role to play in any possible recovery from the technological nihilism of the modern epoch. And yet, on numerous occasions, Heidegger also demonstrated a serious interest in dialogue with the East Asian traditions of Daoism and Zen Buddhism. How are Heidegger’s entrenched ethnocentrism and his interest in East-West dialogue related? While neither can be wholly confined to one or another period in his thought, this article shows how, in the late 1930s, Heidegger begins to recover from the most ethnocentric period of his thought, and how he starts thinking of his reflections on the Western history of being as a preparation for what he came to call “the inevitable dialogue with the East Asian world.”

Heidegger’s engagement with the poet Friedrich Hölderlin often dwells on the issue of temporality. For Heidegger, Hölderlin is the most futural thinker (zukünftigster Denker) whose poetry is necessary for us now and must be wrested from being buried in the past. Heidegger frames his reading of Hölderlin in terms of past, present, and future and, more importantly, describes him as being able to poetize time. This paper examines what it means to poetize time and why Hölderlin’s poetry in particular allows us to understand temporality as the interplay of presence and non-presence.