Salon kontrovers: Briefe – schreiben und lesen - „Wahrheit gibt es nur zu zweien“ – Der Briefwechsel zwischen Hannah Arendt und ihrem Mann Heinrich Blücher
“Truth exists only between two.” – The correspondence between Hannah Arendt and her husband Heinrich Blücher
“Our hearts have grown together, and our steps go in unison.” – Hannah Arendt wrote this to Heinrich Blücher on June 13, 1952. The two met under the aegis of Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht in exile in Paris. He was a working-class child, born in 1899 in Berlin-Kreuzberg. His father died in a work accident before his birth. His mother raised him alone as a laundress in Kreuzberg. As a self-taught individual, he read Shakespeare as well as Marx and Trotsky, joining the Zionist youth group Blau-Weiß, even though he was not Jewish. Heinrich Blücher joined the revolting soldiers' councils in 1918, became a member of the Spartacus League and then the KPD, was part of the illegal military apparatus of the KPD, but turned against the party leadership as it became Stalinist and accused the SPD of "social fascism."
At the end of 1933, the illegal one had to flee to Prague, was expelled from there, and went to Paris, into the “waiting room” (Lion Feuchtwanger) of about 55,000 German emigrants. A man of impressive physical stature, equipped with courage and chutzpah, plebeian, conspiratorial, adventurous, a favorite of women, already married twice. He disguised himself as a Scandinavian-dressed flâneur, with a pipe in his mouth, and earned his living as a tutor. “This inclination for the conspiratorial and the dangerous must have given him an additional erotic appeal,” Hannah Arendt wrote about the man of Rosa Luxemburg, but she could also have meant her Heinrich.
We are dealing here with the rare case of a correspondence charged as much with eroticism as with intellect. The evolutionary process of this love is also unusual. First, there were the heated discussions in the circle of exiles around Brecht and Benjamin. Then one evening, the spark flew when the daring Heinrich courted Hannah directly – and stayed overnight with her after her Hebrew teacher had kindly left the apartment. As Hannah proudly reported to her friends.
Desire and willingness to discuss complement each other from then on. There comes the dialectic of Eros and exegesis. How do I interpret Plato, and how do we lie together? How is “totalitarianism” to be understood, and how do we understand each other? Thus, an erotic hermeneutics can unfold, where spirit and body find each other.
“Truth exists only between two.”
Photo: Ricarda Schwerin/with friendly permission of Piper Verlag
Hallo, ich bin Maya.
