Suzanne Kirkbright's Karl Jaspers biography

Suzanne Kirkbright's 2004 Karl Jaspers biography contains one remarkable omission and at least one incomprehensible sentence.

I can make no sense of this:

Jaspers' actions on behalf of his wife's and his own sense of dignity were, however, largely halted by Hitler's takeover of power as Chancellor on 30 January 1933." [pg 142]

She is speaking of 1937 and after - specifically his diary from 1939 to 1942. She completely evades the question of how Jaspers obtained exemption. She utterly evades the issue of what was required of him morally - ethically - to protect Gertrud in light of what befell her brothers in the years 1933 and after given that Gertrud had sacrificed all for him: she had no career which she could pursue upon emigration or even as grounds for emigration other than to Palestine.

Which actions of his were "halted"?

The footnotes to a book she cites are more revealing: Ehrlich and Wisser pg 334 explicitly discuss Gustav Adolf Scheel and his likely or possible role in the protection of Jaspers. Perhaps her intent was not to tar the name of Jaspers with the misdeeds of Scheel - Wisser and Ehrlich are less circumspect and do not suppress the Hans Saner footnote.

It is troubling that Gertrud advised Jaspers against publishing his note on Heidegger in the first Edition of the Schilpp volume on Jaspers: Jaspers would have preferred to keep quiet about Heidegger even - or perhaps especially - during the "whitewash" years at Heidelberg. Had it been common knowledge that Heidegger was so close to Jaspers, had Jaspers August 23, 1933 letter to Heidegger been known - Jaspers could not have been called upon by Heidelberg.  It places the eventual post-war flight of Jaspers to Basel in quite a different light.

We are told that during the war Jaspers took inner flight to the thought of the East, as did Hermann Hesse - but not Dietrich Bonhoeffer and many others.  There is no record of Jaspers speaking up when the first objections slowed the implementation of Action T4 "euthanasia" as a key step in selective democide.

One aid will be to have the 1923, 1946 and 1961 editions laid out as web e-documents along with the 1933 "Theses" of Jaspers and his letter to Heidegger.

In many matters we have only Jaspers declarations to go by, so his letter to his parents [quoted in Kirkbright, pg 150] is critical to assessing his thought and not his thought as he chose to present it in the post-war years.

I am still without access to a first edition of Die Geistige Situation der Zeit which is also critical: one must see the actual revisions just as we now look for these in Heidegger's work and in such texts as Elfride Heidegger's letter to Malvine Husserl.