SOURCE: "Dialogue Amid the Deluge," in The New York Times, Vol. CXLIV, No. 49977, September 20, 1992, pp. 1, 53-4.

Below, Shweden reviews Hannah Arendt—Karl Jaspers: Correspondence, 1926–1969, concluding that "it is a privilege to enter [Arendt's and Jaspers studies."]

The correspondence begins at the University of Heidelberg in 1926, in the years before what now might be called the "ethnic cleansing" of the German universities and the Holocaust. It starts with a skeptical query from a 19-year-old German Jewish student, Hannah Arendt, to her German and non-Jewish professor, Karl Jaspers, about the impossibility of learning anything from history. It ends 43 years later, six years before Arendt's death in 1975, with the student delivering a eulogy for "the greatest educator of all time" and declaring him "the conscience of Germany."

Hannah Arendt—Karl Jaspers: Correspondence, 1926–1969, edited by Lotte Kohler and Hans Saner and translated by Robert Kimber and Rita Kimber, is not a volume...