Fascination with technology was not limited to right-wing thinkers outside the universities. During the Weimar Republic and into the first years of the dictatorship, three of Germany's most prominent mandarin professors, Martin Heidegger, Carl Schmitt, and Hans Freyer, devoted considerable effort to the issue of technology and its challenge to German society and culture. Of the three, Heidegger was least drawn to any aspect of modern technological society, though for a brief time both he and Schmitt were ardent advocates of National Socialism. Although Freyer was less drawn to active and public support for the Nazis, his philosophical and sociological essays of the period were striking examples of reactionary modernist reconciliations.

The case of Martin Heidegger is an interesting chapter in the history of German reactions to the second industrial revolution, but it is not a chapter in the history of the reactionary modernist tradition. Heidegger wrote several essays in the 1930s on “the question concerning technology,” and there is no doubt that his views on the subject were important in his initial attraction to National Socialism. Further, like the intellectuals of the Right whose enthusiasm for technology knew no limits, Heidegger believed that the Germans had a special mission to combine Technik and Kultur. For a while he thought that the Nazis would fulfill this special mission. When he concluded instead that Hitlerism would continue the long-term process of Western domination over “being,” he retreated from politics and fell into disfavor with the Nazis. His fundamental distaste for modern technology became obvious.