The Love Letters of Hannah Arendt & Heinrich Blücher

To celebrate Valentine's Day, and in connection with the exhibition Bertolt Brecht's Paper War, which deals with exile during the Nazi era, acting students from the Lee Strasberg Institute will read selected love letters exchanged by Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher.
Registration Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher met in Paris in 1936, both exiled from Nazi Germany. Arendt was Jewish and escaped Germany in 1933 after being arrested by the Gestapo, and Blücher was a communist and was expelled due to his work with Versöhnler, an opposition group. Their early romance was characterized by tribulations, including being separated into different internment camps before they were eventually able to flee to the U.S. in 1941. They lived in New York together until Blücher's death in 1970, sharing their love and work; as Blücher wrote, “We each do our work, and then come together to discuss.”

Their love story is simultaneously cinematic and intimate - it spans borders and decades, and the two writers found in each other true life partners. As Arendt wrote to Blücher: "It still seems incredible to me that I managed to get both things, the ‘love of my life’ and a oneness with myself. And yet, I only got the one thing when I got the other. But finally I also know what happiness is."​


This event is part of the Goethe-Institut North America project Thinking is Dangerous, curated by Samantha Rose Hill. The project draws on the renewed interest in Hannah Arendt's work in the wake of the 2016 U.S. election, and is designed to engage participants in Hannah Arendt’s life and work. Who was Hannah Arendt? Why did she write so much about thinking? What are the core elements of her political thinking? Stay tuned for more information about this project!

Samantha Rose Hill is the assistant director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and visiting assistant professor of political studies at Bard College. She is also associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. She is the author of two forthcoming books: a biography on Hannah Arendt (2021, Reaktion Books) and a book about Hannah Arendt’s Poems (2022, Liveright). She is currently writing a book on loneliness for Yale University Press, and working on a memoir about the inheritance of rootlessness. She has given lectures for universities and think tanks and writes for a large number of magazines and other outlets as Los Angeles Review of Books, Contemporary Political Theory, and The South Atlantic Quarterly.