The Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures presents Barbara von Bechtolsheim and Paul North:
“Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher, a conversation about the philosophical couple.”
Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher first met in Paris as refugees in 1936. After tumultuous transit experiences they started a new life in New York. Soon they became the center of an intellectual circle of friends which inspired their thinking and acting. Her writing and his teaching were a result of their dialogue about the end of Western tradition and the necessary new beginnings. Coming from very different cultural backgrounds they mutually enriched and sharpened the other’s work. Barbara von Bechtolsheim explores with Paul North how exile, freedom of thought, and the responsibility in the public sphere shaped the more than thirty years of the philosophical marriage Arendt-Blücher.