In 1941 Heinrich Bluecher emigrated to the United States with his much more famous wife Hannah Arendt after spending almost six years as a German communist refugee in Paris, fleeing the Nazis. He did not have an academic education nor a degree, his communist past in Europe is vague. However, he has been a reader of philosophy and literature throughout his life. As an autodidact, he was detached from all academic traditions. Nevertheless, in the U.S. he managed to perfect his very talent for public speaking and teaching. It was this talent which helped pave his way to the New School and later on to Bard College. At both places, he taught his interpretation of philosophy mixed with insights into the philosophy of art. By doing so, he did not seek an academic reputation but rather an answer to the question of how to live in this world, being both unstable and dangerous but still offering all the possibilities to lead a good life. His teaching program focused on the overall question: what can we do? Using this question, he gave lectures to students, who were mostly academically untrained. In the framework of the adult education program at the New School he spoke to interested New Yorkers who used to work the whole day, at Bard College he was the head of the now well known and famous Common Course for all freshmen.

Bluecher never published anything, but his enthusiastic students recorded his lectures on reel-to-reel tapes. Almost 100 of these tapes are preserved in the Stevenson Library at Bard College. After his death, his famous wife Hannah Arendt had the recordings transcribed and was looking for publication. However, it never came to that, but thousands of transcribed lecture pages have survived until this very day, thanks to the commitment of his students Ruth Schulz and Alexander Bazelow. These transcripts are also preserved at Bard College.

In fall and spring of 1953/54 Bluecher hold the lecture series »Sources of Creative Power« at the New School. This is not only the one which is almost completely handed down and transcribed it is also the lecture series that seems to contain his core philosophical approach. In it, he developed his thinking along nine main thinkers: Lao-tze, Buddha, Zarathustra, Abraham, Homer, Heraclitus, Solon, Socrates and Jesus of Nazareth are those nine figures on which Bluecher’s explanation as to how one can learn a lot from Man’s own creative capabilities is based. In them, he finds the answer to the question of what we can do, that is to say, of how Man can live a fulfilled life on their own and without any orientation towards fixed ideologies — or how Bluecher would put it: without sticking to »isms« such as totalitarianism, capitalism and so forth. Since he was tackling these very questions with his freshmen at Bard College as well, this lecture series assumably presents Bluecher’s ideas best.

For the first time, the whole lecture series »Sources of Creative Power« is now available. Thanks to the transcripts, the Heinrich-Bluecher-Project presents all 29 lectures, which were handed down, in a readable fashion. The lectures are accompanied by seven podcast introductions, which were produced by Anna Ponnath, Talea Schütte, Mara Muck, Jacob Schober, Felix Bielefeld, Justus Träger, and Thomas Voigt in a class on Bluecher during winter term 2019/20 at Leipzig University. Additionally, all lectures can be downloaded as scans from the original transcripts as well as text searchable PDF files. Depending on their availability, the original recordings are provided as well.

Thanks to the work of Felix Bielefeld, Carsten Kinder and Ringo Rösener with the support of the VolkswagenStiftung, the »Fellow-Programm Freies Wissen« and the team of the Stevenson Library at Bard College, it is now possible to revive Heinrich Bluecher’s ideas in »troubled times«, which is how Bluecher would have referred to these present times we live in.