Dr. Ulrich von Bülow

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Martin Heidegger saw the oral form of thinking as original and exemplary. After all, Socrates, whom he distinguished as “the purest thinker of the west”, operated exclusively through oral conversation but “wrote nothing.” But as much as Heidegger may have valued the spoken word, his papers, which are preserved in the German Literary Archiv Marbach, show that he also required paper to think. He thought in writing; he would jot down ideas in the earliest stages of their development and prepared oral lectures and speeches first at his desk, word for word with pen in hand. Dr. von Bülow, head of Marbach’s Archive Department, discusses by means of concrete examples and unknown archival documents Heidegger’s ways of thinking and writing.

Dr. von Bülow has published books and articles on German writers such as Arthur Schnitzler, Peter Handke, Franz Fühmann, Tankred Dorst, and W. G. Sebald. Among the books he’s edited are volumes by Rainer Maria Rilke, Erich Kästner, Karl Löwith, and Martin Heidegger. His most recently publication is a book on Hannah Arendt in Marbach.

Von Bülow is currently a guest scholar with the German Studies Progam and the Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College for the month of September 2015.