Martin Heidegger held a lecture course on Friedrich Hölderlin's hymn "Der Ister" in 1942. His reading of the poet's mythological outreach towards the East, i.e. Greek antiquity, is strangely superimposed on the contemporary conquests of the German army which created the preconditions for German "Ostkolonisation", an appropriation of Slav lands, not to mention the annihilation of Jewish inhabitants. The outline of Hitler's and Himmler's designs were put into the "Generalplan Ost", which sketched the basic socio-political conditions of the new "Siedlungswesen".

This talk was given at the Department of Philosophy at Jan Masaryk University Brno, November 6th, 2013. The slides are available here.