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Martin und Fritz Heidegger: Philosophie und Fastnacht, by Hans Dieter Zimmerman. HERE.

Actually, I’ve read the book, which came out in 2005, and it’s one of the most interesting books about Heidegger that I’ve ever read. Seeing Heidegger from his brother’s standpoint is interesting in itself. But more than that, Fritz Heidegger turns out to be quite a fascinating character. He was a prolific writer of his own (still unpublished) books, not just a transcriber of his brother’s lectures. And there’s something like comic genius in Fritz’s popular speeches in Meßkirch. In one case he actually satirized the Nazis (then in power), by saying of their calls for Volksgemeinschaft that “by means of special mathematical formulae, I have determined that it will take 300 years to achieve Volksgemeinschaft in Germany, and here in Meßkirch at least 500″ (quoting from memory; may be a bit off on the numbers and the wording).

On another occasion, in a piece of writing rather than a speech, he gives a good-natured but biting satire of his brother’s fascination with homelands and country paths. I’m kind of hoping that someone starts publishing selected works of Fritz Heidegger, in fact.

There are other interesting details in the book, such as some things about Heidegger’s sister, who otherwise is strangely airbrushed from his life (if memory serves, Rüdiger Safranski never even mentions her in Ein Meister aus Deutschland, which is kind of weird for a biography).

Also, the book takes away any political excuse for Heidegger’s Nazism as some sort of relapse into comfortable small-town provincialism: Meßkirch had some of the lowest levels of electoral support for the NDSP in all of Germany, and Fritz Heidegger himself was no supporter. The town was a stronghold, instead, of the Catholic Center, which would have been Martin Heidegger’s true path of least resistance politically, but he went for the Nazis in spite of that.

My sense is that we’re still in the “pre-paradigm” stage of Heidegger biographies, and it will probably be awhile before anything like a definitive one is available. For one thing, there seem to be some more scandalous documents that have not yet been made available.