Having mentioned earth in terms of concealment, the otherness of beings, the work-material, we turn to earth as homeland, with the express understanding that these other senses do not fall away completely. This final sense of earth opens up the political context of Origin. Heidegger's detractors most often assume a coherence between Heidegger's use of earth as Heimat and that of the rhetoric of Blut and Boden championed by nationalist ideologues. In fact, there are many who associate earth with National Socialism and its intellectual predecessors tout court, claiming that Heidegger's choice of earth as a fundamental concept betrays his involvement in and inheritance from this tradition.

First, it should be noted that the language of rootedness, tied to a romanticised vision of the rural and pastoral, does not originate with but is eventually co-opted by reactionary ideologues. For instance, Beistegui identifies the emphasis on Germanic rootedness as a response to the decline of culture in Ferdinand Tönnes’ 1887 Gemeinschaft und Gesellschaft, which decries the battle between rural communities tied together by blood, place and spirit and artificial (rootless) associations based on interests indicative of a decadent urbanism. Heidegger is no doubt persuaded that such a crisis or battle exists, as his reflections on the decadence of thought, machination, and his general distaste for city life indicate. Embracing the Hölderlinian- Nietzschean diagnoses of the crisis and danger befalling Western Europe, Heidegger sees Germany as a central figure in the historical future of the West, and in this respect he was caught up in the politics of the day. He also saw National Socialism as harbouring a possibility for great transformation on a spiritual and intellectual level. Heidegger's employment of the language of German rootedness and arché is undeniably a feature of his speeches of 1933–34 and plays out in his philosophic texts of the 1930s and 1940s, yet one must question whether he finds the impetus for returning to the Greeks in the same types of autochthonous thinking as his contemporaries, predicated as they were on the worst forms of biological racism.