Chronic illness conditioned Jaspers toward risk-averse caution in politics

Evidence

Karl and Gertrud Jaspers were also wrestling with their own decision, and continued to do so through the 1930s: should they leave Germany? The Nuremberg Laws of 1935 severely restricted their lives: they stripped Jews of their citizenship and banned mixed marriages, although those already existing, like theirs, were officially tolerated for the moment. The following year, Jaspers lost his university position because of his marriage. Yet they still could not bring themselves to leave. Instead, they kept their heads down and lived cautiously, very much as Jaspers had learned always to breathe and move cautiously, for fear of damaging his vital organs. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 316

Categorization

• XREF: The physical caution bred by Jaspers’s lifelong illness shaping his existential decisions connects to the chapter’s broader meditation on embodiment and mortality. — connects to: Chemical well-being can suppress the motivation for political struggle — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 2380