Heinrich Blücher Archive

Heinrich Blücher (29 January 1899 – 31 October 1970) was a German poet and philosopher. He was the second husband of Hannah Arendt (14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) a German-American historian and philosopher and one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century whom he had first met in Paris in 1936.

Heinrich Blücher came to Bard College as a visiting professor in 1952. He was not hired by the faculty, but rather directly by James Case, who was at that time President of the College. He developed the Common Course at the college (which is now referred to as First Year Seminar with a differing curriculum) and became its director as well as the primary lecturer for the first-year section of the course, which took as its subject the history of philosophy. His first-year lectures were given in Sottery Hall, which stands just behind the administrative offices in Ludlow.

Over the course of the next seventeen years he taught at Bard and at The New School for Social Research (now The New School), in New York City, leaving scores of tapes of his lectures but very little written material. Except for two art reviews, none of Blücher's writing has been published. In a deed of gift Hannah Arendt left the tapes of the lectures and the manuscripts to the College. The deed clearly conveys the importance that she placed on these lectures.

To that effort, we are working to publish the lectures in our Institutional Repository as digitization efforts unfold. Some of these lectures are already digitized and published on Bard’s Blücher website with additional photos and information: https://www.bard.edu/bluecher/index.php