"Black notebooks" is what Martin Heidegger (1889-1976) called the black oilcloth notebooks with notes and reflections of various kinds, which he had been keeping since 1931. There were thirty-four of them. According to the will of the author, the Frankfurt publishing house of Vittorio Klostermann started publishing them after all the books and lecture courses. The 97th volume of the Collected Works of M. Heidegger, the translation of which we offer you, contains entries relating to the years 1942–1948 ("Notes I–V").

The publisher of the Black Notebooks, Peter Travny, described Heidegger's reflections in this way, based on his own self-assessment: these are not "aphorisms" as evidence of "worldly wisdom", but "inconspicuous outposts – and rearguard positions" – in a holistic attempt to conquer the path for initial questioning, which, unlike metaphysical, calls itself Existential-historical thinking. The philosopher applies this method to the situation in religion, art and science.