Heinrich Blücher - The Outsider (by Wolfgang Heuer)

The German philosopher Karl Jaspers gives a very fitting characterisation of Heinrich Blücher in a letter he wrote to Hannah Arendt: "It seems to me that just as there would not have been Plato's thought without Socrates, so your thought would not have developed as it has without Heinrich." Blücher as a thoroughly Socratic individual. I want to look at three of these Socratic aspects more closely: firstly Blücher's appreciation of Socratic thought itself, secondly his experience with communism, and thirdly the Socratic response to the totalitarian experience.

The comparison of Blücher with Socrates is appropriate in more than one way. Blücher was a good speaker, with considerable rhetorical skill, but he was not a writer. In the letters he exchanged with his wife Hannah Arendt, it is possible to see how he suffered when he had to put his ideas down on paper. Without a degree, he would never have found a job at a university in Germany. But Bard College had the courage and the necessary pragmatism to appoint him.

In his last lecture, published in the Bard Alumni Magazine in 1968 under the title "A Lecture from the Common Course", he describes how important it was for him to explain Socratic thought to his students. And in doing this he also described how he saw himself as a Socratic thinker.

The most important thing for him was to resist the fatal attraction of words and ideas in our times, "an age of wars and revolutions . in which almost all words have turned into lies, and very often are consciously turned into lies . as tools of power." The best way to resist this is by using the Socratic method of criticism, in which thinking and philosophising "means nothing more than man's readiness to live in the presence of what he does not know. Man is only too happy to remain in the presence of what he knows, especially of what he just learned, but has always found it a bit difficult to live with what he knows not."

Philosophising manages in this way to resist the temptation to create new ideologies and new tyrannical systems. And at the same time it is more than just a mental activity: "It is the task of philosophy to develop man from being a mind into becoming a person with all the moral or ethical properties that go with it." For Blücher this means, in particular, developing the relationships of people to themselves and to other people: "To Socrates it was evident that man . should first . take care of establishing humane relations between men. And this, in turn, can be achieved . only by creating a decent and productive relationship of man to himself, or to his soul. It was this soul that cared for all those things Socrates was interested in and talked about - truth, justice, love, friendship, courage, and so on." None of these virtues can be learned - they can only be acquired with other people through acting and experience. Thus virtue and wisdom belong together and grow together.

The Socratic thinker never ignores the real world, but is a citizen in its midst. And here too Blücher resists the lure of higher principles. During the Vietnam war, he wrote that "those ... who believe we fight God's war in Vietnam or democrat's war or history's war or nature's war all speak about absolute principles of which they actually know nothing at all . God or the future or history, politically speaking they are all non-realities which help hide what actually happens." Politicians should address the realities, which can only exist between people. Their most important task is "the establishment of human-to-human relations which finally will cover all of mankind."

Blücher's activities as a communist might appear at first sight to contradict his fascination for Socratic thought and action. But Blücher did not join the communist movement because he was searching for a guiding light or a dominant authority, but because he was looking for a place where he could become active politically and artistically. He grew up as an outsider in a small country village, but then he was attracted by the big city and moved to Berlin. Blücher's father had been killed in a factory accident before he was born, and his mother was very poor. His uncle paid for him to complete his schooling and then to attend a teacher training college. However, before he had finished his course, the First World War broke out and he joined the military. He was wounded, and in the war time inflation his relatives lost their money. Blücher took part in the Spartacus uprising in January 1919, and it was here that he met most of his friends, including the popular Jewish song writer Robert Gilbert. Blücher never had a permanent job, but for a time he was a journalist with press agencies, then he worked together on songs with Robert Gilbert, and finally at the end of the 1920s he worked for a leading communist physician. Blücher and many of his communist friends rejected the growing Stalinisation of the German Communist Party, and he finally broke with the communist movement in 1936 while in exile in Paris. Why did he join the Communist Party in the first place?

In the essay "Action and the 'Pursuit of Happiness'", Hannah Arendt refers to the dilemma of someone who wanted to act but did not have a free choice between joining the communist movement or some other local association. She asked an American why he had joined the communists in the 1930s, and he replied not by saying he wanted to fight for liberty and justice but by telling the story of a gambler who happened to arrive late in a strange town and of course went straight to the gambling saloon. One of the local residents came up to him and warned him that the wheel was crooked, whereupon the stranger replied: 'But there is no other wheel in town.' "The moral of the story was clear", Arendt writes. "In those days, .... if you had the itch to do something you had no other place to go; you went there not for the good of society at large, but for your own sake."

Blücher played at the communist table until it became unbearable for him. In a birthday letter he sent in 1960 to his old friend Robert Gilbert, who after the war and his exile in the USA had gone to live in Switzerland, Blücher described the two of them affectionately as a pair of good-for-nothings, who had been no good for the Communist Party either. He and Gilbert were a couple of layabouts standing on street corners, him giving speeches and Gilbert singing songs. "Two notorious Berlin characters, of a kind that no longer exist after the double destruction of Berlin by the Nazis and the Bolsheviks. They were much too smart to be lured by heroic speeches, they would be more likely to hide in a coal cellar until the trouble had passed over. They liked to march behind all sorts of bands, because they enjoyed the music. But only for a short way. Then they would stop at some corner and let the others march on past. Because even if they had got their nose twisted they could still smell early on that a movement can start of as well as it likes, but as it grows bigger its own massive momentum means that it will always turn out wrong, often even finishing at the diametrically opposite end. . Recently people had been on their trail, but they were not going to get caught. They had hidden themselves in two of the largest flocks of sheep. One of them in the entertainment industry, and the other among the academics. However, it was difficult to identify the wolves there, because they could disguise themselves with something better than sheep's clothing, a luxurious fur coat, or a fur-trimmed academic gown. The only thing that protected the pair of them was their taste for bad company. But being smart guys could someday be their undoing. They kept on making fun of the higher society, and this distorted drive of theirs drove them from time to time into better company, where they appeared as Heinrich and Robert von Strasseck, claiming that they had been raised into a new nobility by the population of Berlin. So much for the What and Where. As far as the Who is concerned, a very well-informed, but highly secret source has made public a single vague hint, according to which they were the last surviving descendants, though of course distorted almost past recognition by time and circumstances, of the worst two good-for-nothings that the world had ever seen, the wandering minstrel Walther von der Vogelweide and the layabout Socrates."

Their independence had protected Blücher and Gilbert from the worst. "We know, wrote Arendt in her essay 'The Ex-Communist', that this century is full of dangers and perplexities; we ourselves do not always, and never fully, know what we are doing. We know that some of the best of us at one time or another have been driven into the totalitarian predicament. Those who have turned their back on it are welcome, everyone is welcome who has not become a murderer or a professional spy in the process." As a Socratic thinker, Blücher did not run the risk faced by the ex-communists of applying the training they had had in totalitarian thinking "to a new cause after the old cause has disappointed them."

This brings us to the third point, the Socratic response to the totalitarian experience. When Blücher encountered Hannah Arendt, he met a very exceptional woman who was just as passionate as he was about world developments, and just as he distanced himself from communism, she also distanced herself from an ideology - namely Zionism. Both felt the need to criticise these ideologies, but without taking recourse to ideas that were past their time. Faced with an impending world war, they wanted to act, and at the same time to follow new paths with their thinking. Arendt's political philosophy developed as a result of these combined efforts. Arendt's struggles for the independence of the Jewish people and Blücher's passion for political action culminated in an existential justification of political action, citizenship, federalism, and checks and balances.

This Socratic approach to dealing with the present not only uncovered the inadequacies of the political and philosophical tradition, but also defined and made visible this new way of thinking itself. Our view of the world is reshaped by Arendt's essays such as "Little Rock", "On Violence" following the student movement, "Truth and Politics", "Lying in Politics" following the Watergate scandal, or "Home to Roost" about the celebration of the bicentennial anniversary of the United States. These are exercises in political thinking without a safety net, the like of which we have not seen since. They move us so much because they are rooted in a deeply felt humanity. "For all other questions philosophy may raise," Blücher said, "Socrates did not have time: he had no time for nature or the universe or Being ... Such knowledge would never be able to teach you anything that could answer the question, What shall I do?"

- Wolfgang Heuer (May 24th, 2003) - Wolfgang Heuer works at the Department of Political Sciences at the Free University, Berlin, Germany and the Universidade Federal do Paraná in Curitiba, Brazil. He is Managing Editor of the Hannah Arendt Newsletter and the forthcoming Hannah Arendt Yearbook. His publications include Citizen. Political Integrity and Personal Responsibility and The Emergence of Civic Courage. Co-organizer of The Thought of Hannah Arendt: Asian Dialogues in the New Century Conference in Hong Kong.