Peter Gratton’s response to the Heidegger posts is thoughtful and balanced. He is surely right that any book on the 30s would have to deal with the Nazi question in a way that would dominate the rest of the story.

It’s such a narrative blot (to say nothing of its political blot) that it would cast a pall on everything else. It’s here we could flip it: more work on the bio of the 1920s and more of a Kisiel-type biography of a book on the Nietzsche lectures. (But, please, not one on the Beiträge, though there is an interesting story of its dormancy…)

That sounds a good compromise. The Beiträge is overrated, certainly, but the dormancy is definitely an interesting story. Think of it this way: Heidegger was only in his late 40s when he wrote the material, but made the decision to leave its publication to after his death. It appeared in 1989, but even then it was earlier than he’d wanted: I think his direction was that it should appear only after all the lecture courses, since he thought readers needed to work through all that material before they’d be ready for it.