It was an eerie experience sitting through the press screening for Margarethe von Trotta’s “Hannah Arendt” at the Film Forum yesterday, a biopic that focuses on her reporting from the Eichmann trial with some flashbacks to her early affair with Heidegger.
Two of the major characters in the film were Heinrich Blücher and Hans Jonas, two professors I knew from Bard College and the New School Graduate Philosophy department respectively. I can’t say that I knew them all that well on a personal level but their teaching had a profound effect on my thinking. This was especially true of Blücher whose insisted that principle and truth always trumped patriotism and the state, frequently citing the trial of Socrates in his Common Course, a humanities type required class. After discovering from von Trotta’s film notes that Blücher had been in the German CP in the 20s, I decided to stop by the Columbia University library and take out a few books that will help me prepare an in-depth article on the film. As is always the case with me, ideas take priority over tracking shots. One of the books was Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s biography of Hannah Arendt that was written in 1982. I had mixed feelings about her value since I knew her only from her hatchet job on Hugo Chavez. To my utter amazement, I discovered that Blücher was a major player in the revolutionary struggles that were hobbled by Comintern “advice”. I only wish that I could get my hands on a time machine and travel back to 1963 and talk to him about what he saw and did. Back then I was too apolitical to know where to begin but now understand a lot better why he was so insistent on my writing an analysis of the Communist Manifesto for a sophomore year class. Fifty years ago my heart was in Camus and cannabis. It took an imperialist war to put me on the same path that Blücher followed when he was my age. From Elizabeth Young-Bruehl’s “Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World”: Hannah Arendt had been eleven years old when her mother took her to the Konigsberg demonstrations in support of the Spartacists. She was thirty years old when she walked through the streets of Paris to watch the 1936 demonstrations in support of the Front Populaire government under the leadership of the Jewish Socialist, Leon Blum. Most of the political awareness she had developed in the intervening years had come in the context of her relationship with Kurt Blumenfeld and his concern with the Jewish Question. With Heinrich Blücher as her teacher, she added to her preliminary reading of Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky a feeling for “revolutionary praxis.” Blücher—not a university man but a proletarian, not a theorist but a man of action, not a Jew but a man for whom thinking was a kind of religion—was Hannah Arendt’s New World. Ten years after they met, she summarized what Blücher had meant to her intellectually, in response to words of praise Jaspers had bestowed on her own cosmopolitan and impartial political vision: “That I learned from my husband’s political thinking and historical observation, and I would not have come to it otherwise, for I was historically and politically oriented toward the Jewish Question.” During those ten years, from 1936 to 1946, Hannah Arendt continued to concern herself with the Jewish Question, but what she learned from Blücher became, after the Second World War, central to the political philosophizing that animated The Origins of Totalitarianism, The Human Condition, Between Past and Future, On Revolution, On Violence, and Crises of the Republic. The learning relationship was not, however, completely one-way. Blücher, an avid reader of Rosa Luxemburg, Trotsky, and Bukharin, and a convinced Communist, slowly gave up his Communism and became an incisive critic of doctrinaire Marxism. While Hannah Arendt was being introduced to revolutionary politics in Konigsberg, Heinrich Blücher was twenty years old and fighting as a Spartacist in the streets of Berlin. The stories he told her of his political past shaped her vision, both critical and constructive, her understanding of resistance and revolution, and her theory of republicanism. Blücher’s stories are not easy to reconstruct: he was hesitant to tell them, particularly after he had entered America without admitting on his immigration documents that he had been a Communist, and he was given to exaggerating and embroidering what he did tell. In Heinrich Blücher, the combination of cautiousness and hyperbole was always an astonishment. Those members of the Arendt-Blücher tribe who had known him since his youth understood his storytelling for what it was—a way of finding meaning in a chaotic world. His devotees were unskeptical, and his detractors charged him with mythomania. In truth, had he had a gift for writing equal to his gift for talking, he would have made a fine novelist. full: http://louisproyect.wordpress.com/2013/05/17/heinrich-blucher-street-fighting-man/ _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
