Hans Blumenberg - Life

Life

Hans Blumenberg finished his university entrance exam in 1939 at the Katharineum zu Lübeck, as the only student receiving the grade 'Auszeichnung' ('Distinguished'). But, being labelled a "Half-Jew", the Catholic Blumenberg was barred from continuing his studies at any regular institution of learning in Germany. Instead, between 1939 and 1941 he was to pursue his studies of philosophy at the theological Universities in Paderborn and Frankfurt, where he was forced to leave towards the end of this period. Back in Lübeck he was enrolled in the workforce at the Drägerwerk AG. In 1944 Blumenberg was detained in a concentration camp, but was released after the intercession of Heinrich Dräger. At the end of the war he was kept hidden by the family of his future wife Ursula. Blumenberg greatly despised the years which he claimed had been stolen from him by the Nazis. His friend Odo Marquard reports that after the war, Blumenberg slept only six times a week in order to make up for lost time. Consequently, the theme of finite life and limited time as a hurdle for scholasticism recurs frequently in Part 2 of The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. After 1945 Blumenberg continued his studies of philosophy, Germanistics and classical philology at the University of Hamburg, and graduated in 1947 with a dissertation on the origin of the ontology of the Middle Ages, at the University of Kiel. He received the postdoctoral habilitation in 1950, with a dissertation on 'Ontological distance', an inquiry into the crisis of Husserl's phenomenology. His mentor during these years was Ludwig Landgrebe. During Blumenberg's lifetime he was a member of the Senate of the German Research Foundation, a professor at several universities in Germany and a joint founder of the research group "Poetics and Hermeneutics".