The inconsistencies between Hugo Ott and the Heidegger letters

In a letter to Hannah Arendt, Heidegger posts of his being in fine hill-climbing form.  Yet only a decade earlier he was physically too weak for reserve army duty other than work as a postal censor.  Even earlier he blamed his "heart" problems on too much sport as a boy.

Ott characterized the boy Heidegger as athletic but provides no reference.  The hike with the Jesuits was to prove to be his complete undoing.  Yet later Heidegger will be initiating young Nazis from a nearby youth hostel through hiking - some of those hikes to the height of local passes.  No such thing can be imagined of Karl Jaspers, a man with a genuinely weak heart and frail constitution.

Ott refers to "nervous asthma" but provieds no reference.

I suggest that a simpler explanation would be hypoglycemia.  When he presented for military service, if Heidegger had merely not slept well the night before and opted for coffee or tea instead of breakfast, even a brisk walk to the recruiting office could leave him weak, breathless and with an irregular heart-beat.

Heidegger was characterized as frail, but compared to images of the young Jaspers, appears robust enough.  What is more likely is that his metabolism was slightly higher than the norm for someone of his size and frame.

It should be noted that Heidegger outlived his parents by many years and his not succumb to congestive heart failure: he would first have a stroke and much later died in his sleep.

To my knowledge it has never been substantiated that Heidegger suffered from asthma.  Pictures show him arriving at his hut on skiis: I have been there, and that is an implausible achievement for an asthmatic with a weak heart.

At the time Heidegger was prescribed complete rest, rest cures were a common prescription for neurasthenia.  Glucose tolerance tests were then unknown - it was only after WWI that medical science moved forward at all in the area of blood sugars and not until the 1940's that tachycardia with hypoglycemia was noted in symptomatology.

The greater puzzle is that Jaspers failed to take more note of Heidegger's duplicity in personal matters to which I will return later in my psychological speculation on the probability that this boy of impoverished means was a victim of priestly pederasty and that this pathology is indicated by his doctine of Ereignis and concealment.

see: notes on Eros and the Symposium in connection with Heidegger
see: notes on Brentano and papal infallibilty
see: notes on Husserl's bigotry and the fate of Edith Stein