Heinrich Blücher

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Heinrich Blücher and Hannah Arendt (1950)

Heinrich Fritz Ernst Blücher (born January 29, 1899 in Berlin , † October 31, 1970 in New York ) was a German-American philosopher , cosmopolitan intellectual and university professor . He was married to the political theorist and publicist Hannah Arendt for the third time.

Life

Origin and youth

His parents were Protestant and originally came from Potsdam . His father, August Karl Heinrich Blücher, a well builder, died before he was born on October 3, 1898 in a factory accident. His mother, Klara Emilie geb. Wilke gave birth to him in the maternity home at Urbanstrasse 21/23. At the time, she lived at Gneisenaustrasse 4 and had to raise her son alone. She was a laundress and her son helped her make a living by delivering packages. After elementary school, Heinrich Blücher completed training at a teacher training college , which he did not complete - interrupted by the First World War.

As a teenager he was very thirsty for knowledge and bought books whenever he had money - including German poetry and Shakespeare . During the war he read Marx , Engels and Trotsky . Although he was not a Jew, he joined the Zionist youth group Blau-Weiß .

In 1917 Blücher was drafted into military service. He was unable to attend an officers' course because of gas poisoning. As he wrote in a résumé in 1942, he was employed as a “radio telegraphist” during the First World War. H. trained as a radio operator. In November 1918 he joined the soldiers' councils in Berlin , became a member of the Spartakusbund and in 1919 a member of the Communist Party of Germany . He took part in the fighting and strikes in the spring of 1919 and was also a member of the Communist Workers' Party of Germany for a short time . Before Blücher married Hannah Arendt, he was married to Liselotte Ostwald and Natascha Jefroikyn (1932–1935).

Berlin

According to himself, Blücher attended evening lectures in Berlin at the German University for Politics on political theory and at the Berlin Academy on art history. At the time, Blücher was a close friend of Heinrich Brandler , the co-founder of the anti-Stalinist Communist Party opposition . For a while he worked for the Political East-West News Agency. With his lifelong friend Robert Gilbert , he worked on cabaret, operetta and film projects. As recent research shows, since 1928 Blücher belonged to the group of " Compromisers ", which rejected the thesis of social fascism as a split in the labor movement. Until 1933 he worked in the illegal military apparatus of the KPD. As a professional revolutionary with the code name "Heinrich Larsen", he obtained information about the illegal arming of the Reichswehr and trained radio operators for the Soviet intelligence service.

exile

At the end of 1933 Blücher fled to Prague and continued to work for the “Compromisers” group, which Heinrich Süsskind also belonged to. In 1934 he was arrested by the police in Prague and expelled from what was then Czechoslovakia in November 1934. At the beginning of 1935 he came to Paris. Here, too, he was one of the leading “compromisers”, held training courses and worked out programmatic texts. On November 11, 1936, Blücher was expelled from the Communist Party of Germany along with other “Compromisers” because of “Trotskyist connections and disintegration work”.

Hannah Arendt

In 1936 Blücher met Hannah Arendt at a lecture. They made friends. After Arendt's divorce from Günther Stern (1937), they married on January 16, 1940. In Paris, Blücher was close friends with Walter Benjamin and discussed the Moscow show trials with him . Together with the “Berlin Opposition” group, he pleaded for the “German Soviet Republic” and rejected the KPD's popular front policy. From September to December 1939 he was imprisoned in a French internment camp as a so-called enemy alien.

United States

From Paris, Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher fled via Spain to Lisbon in 1941 and on to New York by ship , where they arrived in May. When he entered the country, Blücher did not mention his former membership in the KPD and was able to work as a military expert on documentation for the American military secret service. Blücher received American citizenship on August 7, 1952 .

Philosopher and university professor

Blücher dealt intensively with politics and philosophy, but did not have a university degree. Nevertheless, from 1950 the autodidact got the opportunity to give lectures at the New School for Social Research in New York. Blücher had previously given lectures in the "Club" of the Abstract Expressionists and regularly attended events there. From 1952 Blücher was professor of philosophy at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson , New York . In 1968 he was given an honorary doctorate there. In the same year he gave his last lecture there.

Like his wife, Blücher was in contact with Karl Jaspers by letter - albeit very rarely . He tried - always in vain - to get his Jewish wife as well as Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher to feel like Germans. Blücher wrote to him in February 1956:

“Now I come back to your old question: how do I feel as a German at this time? My answer has to be: not at all. Just as Holderlin once said that it was no longer the time of kings, so is the time of peoples no longer. "

At the beginning of 1962, Blücher received compensation for the damage he suffered from the Nazis ' " seizure of power ".

He died of a heart attack on October 31, 1970. He was buried in the Bard College cemetery.

Trivia

In the film Hannah Arendt by Margarethe von Trotta , Blücher is portrayed by Axel Milberg .

Quotes

“You don't yell at the crowd, you wait until it begins to get lost and has grown a little tired of its own yelling. Just like you don't spit against the wind. "

"Pessimists are cowards and optimists are fools."

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Birth register StA Berlin IVb No. 285/1899 .
  2. ↑ Marriage register StA Berlin IVb No. 544/1896 .
  3. ↑ Death register StA Berlin VI No. 1054/1898 .
  4. ^ Elisabeth Young-Bruehl: Hannah Arendt. Life, work and time. Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 198 f.
  5. ↑ Reinhard Müller: Heinrich Blücher - Hannah Arendt's "Wunderrabbi". Revision of a resume. In: Ulrich Bielefeld, Heinz Bude, Bernd Greiner (eds.): Society - violence - trust. Jan Philipp Reemtsma on his 60th birthday. Hamburg 2012, pp. 381–394.
  6. ↑ Federal Commissioner for the Documents of the State Security Service of the former GDR (BStU): Files: MFS HA ​​IX / 11 ZR, NR. 886 A. 10. S. 22 .
  7. ↑ Natalie Edgar (ed.): Club without Walls. Selections from the Journales of Philip Pavia . Midmarch Arts Press, New York 2007, pp. 86, 117, 153, 158, 161 .
  8. ^ So Blücher in: Hannah Arendt, Karl Jaspers: Briefwechsel. Munich 1993, p. 315.
  9. ↑ See letters. P. 273.
  10. ↑ In a lecture to American students, cf. Ken Booth: Theory of world security. 2007, p. 172. (Translation: "Pessimists are cowards, and optimists are madmen.")
personal data
SURNAME Blucher, Heinrich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Larsen, Heinrich (pseudonym); Blücher, Heinrich Friedrich Ernst
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German poet and philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH January 29, 1899
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH October 31, 1970
Place of death new York