Eminent German intellectuals dismissed the Nazi threat despite the real danger.

Evidence

With the rise of the Nazis, something ‘estranging’ entered their relationship, as Jaspers put it in private notes about Heidegger written years later. Jaspers had reason to feel estranged from his friend: he was not Jewish himself, but Gertrud was. Like many others, the couple tended to be dismissive about the Nazi threat at first. They weighed the usual considerations: surely these barbarians could not stay in power long? Even for an eminent professor, it would be hard to flee the country and start again elsewhere, separated from everything that had given context to his life. Besides, leaving always meant paying punitive ‘Reich Flight’ taxes, and obtaining visas. From 1933 on, Karl and Gertrud regularly considered the possibility of escaping, but did not do it. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 280

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the Frankfurt School exile chapter in Wiggershaus’s history, where exile, Reich Flight taxes, and the difficulty of uprooting intellectual life recur as a theme. — connects to: Heidegger’s vigilance meant resolute German destiny, not opposing Nazi violence — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café: Freedom,…, 289
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how typical was this reluctance to leave among non-Jewish German professors married to Jews, and what role did Jaspers’s own later philosophy of Existenz play in this choice?

Broader Connections

• Heidegger’s vigilance meant resolute German destiny, not opposing Nazi violence #exemplifies (0.80) — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 289