re-readig Karl Jaspers: 1930 - 1937

I had intended to cotnrast Jaspers post-1945 on the idea of the university and Liz Coleman on her plan for Bennington College (while noting the seeming collapse of the FNCU in Saskatchewan.)

But I cannot reconcile Heidegger's letter to Elfride of March 19, 1933.  The Reichstag fire had been on Feb 27 of that year.  Granted, the next act in the consolidation of Hitler's power is March 23.  So I look to the letters of Jaspers to Heidegger and Arendt for some sign that he grasps what is happening.  It is more than sad and disillusioning.

One reason that I work on site-specific research browsers and the Curl web content language at aule-browser.com is to be able to place side-by-side such texts as these with and without combinations of links and annotations - and to let the reader or researcher determine that quotations are not out of context or poorly translated.

Start with the letter to Elfride.  We seem to learn from the assessment of Heidegger which Jaspers held back from the 1st Ed. of the Schilpp "Jaspers" collection that Jaspers found a kindred spirit in Heidegger.  Their first meeting is so telling: it is an "occasion" at the Husserl home.  We have only Jaspers word that he confronted Husserl on the matter of Afra Geiger.  What I take from my reading is that Jaspers and Heidegger were given to mocking Husserl, Cassirer and the like (see Jaspers 1930 on "The Sophist".)

In the letter to Elfride, Heidegger makes one of his unkind references to Jaspers wife. Gertrud, a Jew.  Jaspers is portrayed by Heidegger as open to the possibilities that are opening up.  Now comes the name of Kriek.  Then Baumgarten. This latter is key.  Why would Heidegger lie to Elfride about Jaspers' views?

I flip to the Jaspers letters to Hannah Arendt of this period: full of "the German character" and his doubts about what roots a Jew could have in sharing the fate of Europe's Jews (he is imagining assimilation here, not annihilation - the focus is the Arendt book on Rahel.)

I then flip to the Jaspers letters to Heidegger (these are noa vailable in German in Minnesota colleges and universities, so I am reduced to an incomplete "preview" on Google Books.)

One possibility is that Jaspers now fears Heidegger and is bilking him for information - deceiving the ever mendatious Heidegger (one could take this impression from the post-war letters between Arendt and Jaspers - but we now know how much she deliberately misrepresented her role in rehabilitating Heidegger in those very letters to her "most Honoured").  I see no sign to indicate this.

Here is what I am able to read in "Briefwechsel 1920-1963" by Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Walter Biemel, Hans Saner.  Jaspers would have us believe that it was only in 1934 that he learned of Heidegger's deunciation by letter (Dec. 1933).  What they were they discussing in early 1933 - Baumgarten and American pragmatism?  The Heidegger letter to Elfride suggests that there was an issue of "funds" that needed to be brought to the attention of Max Weber's widow.  Baungarten joined the NSDAP in 1937 and was later linked with Konrad Lorenz in Koenigsberg.  What is essential to know is whether Baungarten's opposition in Freiburg was to the SA (Rohm's SturmAbteilung was Heidegger's preferred movement.)

It is almost impossible to form a clear opinion of where Jaspers stood without being able to lay side-by-side the original 1930 text of "Die Geistige Situation der Zeit" and the sanitized 1946 version.

In the letter to Elfride, Heidegger asserts that it was Jaspers who ensured the career of Ernst Krieck!. (task: look for the connection of Kriek and Elisabeth Blochmann.)  Kriek had already been censured in 1931 for his use of the Hitler salute (which we now know Heidegger retained even after 1936.)

Jaspers to Arendt: that Heidegger spoke like an anti-Semite when with an anti-Semite, spoke like a radical conservative when with him; spoke like a Lutheran when with Husserl; spoke very carefully while first at Catholic Frieburg and later with often wirh caution at Protestant Marburg (see Husserl's letter to Natorp; see Heidegger to Elfride on "debate" at Marburg.)

From reading the letters to Elfride where so much is not said:
  My suspicion: that a DNA test would show that Hermann was in fact Heidegger's biological son - and not the son of Friedel Caesar. 
  My second suspicion: that Erike Birle was compromised by Heidegger: in 1945 her first son is named Martin.  She was 14 at the time she became a foster daughter.