What the Notebooks add to this account are details both of Heidegger's increasing disgruntlement with party politics and of the philosophical ideas underpinning his own ambition for reform. As far as the former is concerned, it is remarkable how sharply he criticises the party even at the height of his political engagement. Critics have often dismissed as retrospective whitewashing Heidegger's 1945 profession that by taking up the rectorship he had "hoped to counter the advancement of the threatening supremacy of the party apparatus and the party doctrine". But the 1933-34 notebooks bristle with abuse about the obstinate, supercilious anti-intellectualism of the party and the fact that the party leadership is dictating tedious and ineffectual institutional reshuffles (including Gleichschaltung, the subjugation of universities to National Socialist political aims) that do nothing towards true reform.

Equally interesting is the positive aspect of Heidegger's criticism: a vision of renewal that resituates the call to an authentic life issued in Being and Time within a romantic nationalism familiar from Fichte, Hegel and Hölderlin, and precariously projected on to the Nazi movement. Six years earlier, in his philosophical runaway hit Being and Time, Heidegger had tried to reform his countrymen's relationship to both philosophy and life, arguing that the "question of Being", far from being a metaphysical curio, was in fact at the heart of every human existence. Being human, he argued, simply meant being able and called to recognise the infinite possibilities but also the terrible precariousness of existence, and to "stand in the storm" of that exposure, rejecting the false security both of appetite-driven drifting and of socially dictated roles.

When he opens his philosophical journal of 1931-32, it is with the dejected refrain that no one "gets" Being and Time: instead of changing their lives, people sit in cafés prattling about authenticity and publish half-baked articles about anxiety. How, Heidegger asks again and again, can his project — which should elicit a consciously lived life, not more chatter — be actualised, and not merely by one or two exceptional individuals, but among a whole generation of young Germans?

His despondency lasts until the end of his 1931-32 notebooks. Then, in the autumn of 1932, Heidegger pricks up his ears at the young Hitler's grave talk about the greatness of the German people, and the need for discipline, suffering, and the shedding of false securities in order to realise its potential. In November 1932, Heidegger writes excitedly to his friend Rudolf Bultmann (who was never a Nazi, and later joined the regime-resisting Confessing Church) that National Socialism might be a movement with enough driving force to instil in Germany as a whole the kind of conscious life he envisions. Bultmann agrees that although he regrets National Socialism's consolidation into a political party, the "actual movement was, and perhaps still is, something great, with its instinct for the ultimate, its feeling of solidarity, and its discipline".