Ernst Bloch

(1885 - 1977)

A philosopher born in Germany in 1885, Ernst Bloch and his third wife fled the Nazi regime in the 1930s, returning in 1949. He defected from East Germany in 1961 when the Berlin Wall was built and moved to Tübingen, where he died in 1977. “Bloch, like his heroes Moses, Jesus Christ, Thomas Münzer, and Karl Marx,” wrote scholar Jack Zipes in 1988, “was a rabble-rouser.”