Bultmann's sympathetic response may seem shocking; but in reality, it merely shows how unspecific the National Socialist programme still was in the early Thirties. To Heidegger, as to many other intellectuals at the time, it seemed less an innovation than a return to the great nationalist tradition of the 19th century.

The nationalism of the educated middle classes had, from its beginnings in the Napoleonic Wars, been a glorification of the German national "spirit" (Geist) as nothing less than a pure expression of the quasi-divine "world spirit" which would, in its self-realisation, perfect the world. This nationalism was, at heart, a matter of education as much as of political or military action, and played into the rise of the German research universities. In 1808, Fichte published his conviction that it was in the Germans that "the seed of human perfection is most decisively planted, and to whom progress in this development is entrusted". "If you perish in this your essence," he warned his countrymen, "then all hope of the entire human race for salvation from the depths of its evils perishes with you." In 1821, Hegel declared that Germany's ascendancy would mark the "absolute rule" of spirit, in which "all peoples would find their salvation". This spiritual or intellectual nationalism was so deeply rooted that during the First World War it was exploited to romanticise German militarism: "This army," Pastor Karl König preached, "is an embodiment of our national spirit"; and the philosopher Adolf Lasson chimed in, "Our army and navy too are a spiritual power."

After the sluggish and depressed Weimar years, many intellectuals, including Heidegger, saw in the National Socialist movement a potential renewal of this spiritual-intellectual vision, and in Hitler's promised Reich the quasi-messianic kingdom envisioned by Fichte and Hegel. At the beginning, Nazi leaders encouraged these projections: "the Third Reich" as an epithet for the Germany of the future was not just a reference to the two preceding "German" empires, but also to Joachim of Fiore's apocalyptic periodisation of history, in which the empires of God the Father (Old Testament) and the Son (New Testament and Church) would be followed by an apocalyptic "third empire" of the Holy Spirit.

Heidegger had hinted at such hope for renewal in the last part of Being and Time, and spelled it out in the Thirties: again and again in the Black Notebooks, he refers to the "distant calling" of the German people to an unprecedented "depth of existence and breadth of horizon", spearheaded by an "intellectual elite strong enough to give new shape to the tradition of the Germans". In 1932, Heidegger looked to Adolf Hitler to rally such an elite.