Lectures and Transcripts

A substantial portion of the New School lecture recordings and transcripts preserved in this collection exists due to the efforts of Ruth Shultz, whose work was recounted by her husband, Julius Shultz, during the Hannah Arendt Center conference Human Being in an Inhuman Age in October 2010. Julius and Ruth Shultz were a young married couple attending evening courses at the New School in 1949–1950. After attending only a few of Blücher’s lectures, they became deeply engaged with his teaching and developed a close personal friendship with him.

In 1950, as Hannah Arendt was preparing to return from Europe, the Shultzes offered to meet her at Idlewild Airport. During subsequent dinners, the idea emerged to record Blücher’s lectures using a heavy, early-model tape recorder that had been given to Arendt and Blücher by a friend. The Shultzes undertook the task of taping the lectures: Julius Shultz assisted by transporting the equipment, while Ruth Shultz operated the recorder and later devoted countless hours to transcription.

Ruth Shultz’s transcriptions were not mechanical reproductions of speech. She reworked Blücher’s spoken lectures into coherent English sentence structure, drawing on her own philosophical understanding of his ideas. Julius Shultz emphasized that Blücher’s philosophy profoundly shaped both their ethical thinking and intellectual lives. In 1969, at Hannah Arendt’s request, the Shultzes delivered the tapes and transcripts to Arendt and Blücher at their home on Riverside Drive. That visit was the last time they saw Blücher alive.

The recordings and transcripts presented here are thus the product of sustained intellectual labor, friendship, and historical circumstance. Without Ruth Shultz’s dedication, much of Heinrich Blücher’s teaching at the New School would not survive. This collection recognizes her essential role and situates these materials within the broader history of Blücher’s work as a teacher at the New School and Bard College, and within the archival legacy preserved at Bard.