The Black Notebooks are a set of notebooks written by German philosopherMartin Heidegger between 1931–1941. Originally a set of small notebooks with black covers in which Heidegger jotted observations, they have been collated into a 1,000-page transcript. Peter Trawny is editing the transcripts and publishing them in the Gesamtausgabe. The first transcript was published in 2014. As of 2020, fourteen notebooks have been published encompassing the years 1931–1941. The notebooks from 1942–1945 are in private possession, but have already been prepared for publication. The first notebook, Anmerkungen I, now GA 97, was originally believed to be lost, but was found in the possession of Heidegger scholar Silvio Vietta, who had received it from his mother Dorothea. One notebook written in approximately 1930, sometimes called: “Winke Überlegungen ”, is still missing.
Controversy
When the transcripts were first published in 2014, they were edited by Peter Trawny. The notebooks contain explicitly antisemitic content, reigniting the debate about Heidegger's Nazism and its relationship to his philosophical project. Critics of this claim have countered it by pointing to the sketchbook character of the Black Notebooks and the intention of the author for them to remain private and unpublished ruminations on the cultural and philosophical ideas received via time and place. Others have cited an antisemitism that does not qualify as racial, social, interpersonal or political, but rather exists only in a certain use of received concepts and German philosophical commentary up to his time. argues in that "In Heidegger's case, it is a type of anti-Semitism that could be qualified as "religious," "cultural," or "spiritual." In a letter to Hannah Arendt, in which he comments on the rumors about his anti-Semitism, it reads: "As to the rest, in matters related to the university I am as much an anti-Semite as I was ten yearsago in Marburg. This anti-Semitism even found the support of Jacobstahl and Friedländer. This has nothing to do with personal relationships." When Heidegger speaks of "Judaization", he does so from a given cultural context".
