Blücher came from a poor, non-Jewish Berlin working-class background. She was a former student of Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers, Germany’s leading philosophers, who had directed her doctoral dissertation, Augustine’s Idea of Love, which was published in Berlin in 1929. Arendt was the sheltered only daughter in a conservative, upper-middle-class Jewish-Prussian family (her grandfather had been president of the Königsberg city parliament). By background and education they could not have been more different. Both were still formally married but separated from their spouses. Unlike Arendt, who had a steady job at a Jewish welfare organization, he lacked the requisite permis de séjour and had to move frequently from hotel to hotel. Blücher, a former Communist militant, got out by the same route. Arendt had escaped without papers across the Czech border, following a short stay in a Gestapo prison for engaging in allegedly subversive research in a Berlin public library. Arendt was twenty-nine, Blücher thirty-seven. Bertolt Brecht, Heinrich Mann, Lion Feuchtwanger, Joseph Roth, Manès Sperber, Alfred Döblin, and other celebrities of the Weimar period stayed there in cheap hotels, “like kings who had lost their throne.” They lived in a kind of ghetto, according to Arthur Koestler, who claimed that neither he nor any of his fellow exiles were ever invited to a French house.Īrendt and Blücher met in a café in the rue Soufflot frequented by their friend Walter Benjamin and other German émigrés. At the time, Paris was the capital of German literature.

Hannah Arendt and Heinrich Blücher first met in Paris in 1936.

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