But surely it matters for a book in which the relationship, and whatever turns on it, is the thing. The ideal of history as a seamless web, after all, was never intended to exclude the seamy. I understand that there are, in the Heidegger archives, seventeen letters from Arendt to Heidegger which remain out of public reach. Perhaps nothing yet to be found or brought to the public eye in any of the now sequestered archival material would substantially change the outline of the relationship between Heidegger and Arendt that begins to emerge in Ettinger's account. Even allowing for that, however, it is remarkable that in a book intended to recover history, elementary questions of method should be so slighted that the result not only delays but hinders.
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Go back to the text. From The New Criterion Vol.