Heinrich Blücher (1899-1970) was a German philosopher born in Berlin on 29th January 1899 to working class parents. Although he never finished school, he was an autodidact with wide ranging enthusiasms. As a young man he joined the Spartacus League, a Marxist revolutionary movement founded by Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. He became a militant revolutionary who studied Marx and Engels, and in 1919 he took part in the failed German Revolution. When the Spartacus League became the German Communist Party (KPD), Blücher became one of its first members, but left the party in 1928 in protest of its Stalinist policies. He fled the Nazis to Paris, where he became close friends with Walter Benjamin. Through Benjamin, Blücher met Hannah Arendt in 1936 at a café in the rue Soufflot when Arendt was twenty-nine and Blücher thirty-seven. They married in France on 16th January, 1940. They were interned in separate camps but both escaped and joined each other in Montauban, France until they could obtain emergency visas to the United States. They arrived in New York City in May 1941.

In 1952 both Blücher and Arendt became American citizens. In July 1952, Blücher came to Bard College where he taught philosophy from 1952 to 1967. He was not hired by the faculty, but rather directly by President James Case. He developed the Common Course for freshmen at the college and became its director as well as the primary lecturer. He also taught at The New School for Social Research. On 30th October, 1970 Blücher suffered a major heart attack in the apartment he shared with Arendt at 370 Riverside Drive, New York City. He died at Mount Sinai Hospital a few hours later. He was buried on 4th November in the Bard College Cemetery. Arendt’s gravestone is now next to his.

Arendt died in 1975. In a deed of gift, she left to Bard College a collection of reel-to-reel audio tapes of Heinrich Blücher's lectures given at The New School and at Bard, along with transcripts of some of the audio tapes. The transcripts were done by Alexander Bazelow (’71) and Ruth Shultz. Although Blücher retired soon after Bazelow matriculated, Bazelow never forgot his lectures. He transcribed Blücher's ‘Last Lecture,’ and sent a copy to Arendt. After Blücher's death, Arendt arranged for Bazelow to transcribe the remaining reel-to-reel tapes of Bard lectures. Arendt intended to create definitive editions of all the transcripts for publication, before her death intervened.

In 1949/50 Julius and Ruth Shultz took Blücher’s course at the New School. After they became friends with Blücher and Arendt, Ruth began to tape the New School lectures that she then transcribed. In 1969 they gave the tapes and transcripts to Arendt. The transcripts in the Bard collection are an assortment of those done by Bazelow and Shultz that were among Arendt’s effects at the time of her death.

Additional tapes in Bard’s possession were transferred to 60-minute cassettes by Dr. George Rose ('63 ) at the Hershey Medical Center at the University of Pennsylvania. These copies, 43 one-hour tapes, represent lectures that remain untranscribed. The audio files (MP3) were digitized by Jeremy Hall ('98).

Sources: Jeff Katz, http://www.bard.edu/bluecher/history.phpand https://spartacus-educational.com/Heinrich_Blucher.htm