Another absence in the Martin Heidegger letters

The absence of an index in the GA volume of Vorträge unde Aufsätze may reflect Heidegger's view on "der Leser".

The absence of one particular entry in the index to the English translation of "Letters to his Wife" is vexing: it may reflect the use of digital indexing and the exclusion of "common words".  The missing term is culture or Kultur. There are a few old Indo-European words which any reader should know and this is one.

I have added two notes: page 137 and page 190 which correspond to his letter 19320620 and his 19450614.

While both remarks are distasteful as quotations, they are perhaps not as troubling as his repeated mention in other works of those who "reckon" or "calculate".

Unlike correspondence between Jaspers and Arnedt with its many discussions of "German" and "Jewish", in the letters to Elfride the English translators have the term "Jews" in the index refer the reader to "anti-Semitism."  This is astonishing.  If many politically radicalized Jews were attracted to Communism then his remark to that effect is to indicate what?  A lack of anti-Semitism? His literary executors proved unable to translate one of his remarks; another appears to be a repetition of a stereotypical insult.

But the absence for me will always be the Jews of Marburg.  How many mezuzah were neglected on doorframes?  Where is the map of Marburg for December 1938?  Who later retired in comfort from the sale of such a house in 1965, 1975?  How were the tax-rolls of Marburg lost in the undamaged town? Lost in a town so free of the "culture" that the Heideggers despised? What would be a simple index on such a map?

When Heidegger says hegen it is as if the forest has not only a steward, but a shepherd.  And the houses in the town, what he called "Wohnhäuser" - who was to be the steward of those absent names and each Mezuzuh "en-framed"?