Klaus Heinrich, born in Berlin in 1927, was a founding student member of the Freie Universität Berlin and Professor of Philosophy of Religion at its Institute of Religious Studies from 1971 to 1995. In his last public statements, shortly before his death in 2020, he referred to psychoanalysis as one of the constitutive pillars on which his original thinking was based. The psychoanalytic approach, its perspective – including the libidinal dimension of the subject – provided the tools for a substantial understanding of the formation of the human species. Freud's theory and method thus shaped his decades-long exploration of a wide range of topics: whether through religion, mythology, art, music, architecture, philosophy or social theory, he was fundamentally concerned with the question of how these historical artifacts can be conceptualized as the formative forces of the human itself – and how conflicts and unresolved issues are created and simultaneously concealed in this very process.
From this perspective, human history appears as a fateful chain of failed attempts to process human needs and desires, the process of civilization is nothing but as a catastrophic process of repression. Heinrich's desideratum was aimed at recovering the debris in the manifestations of the social – from their beginnings to the present, from prehistoric instruments to ancient times and the digital-age. According to this approach, works of scientific rationality as well as religious or everyday symbolizations are equally subject to mechanisms of repression. With this epistemological research program, extending beyond religious studies, Heinrich has presented a method of analyzing human libidinal nature that is far from exhausted and awaits appropriate appreciation.
This research project is dedicated to the collection, processing and dissemination of Klaus Heinrich's published and unpublished work. This is primarily available in the form of recorded and partially (incompletely) transcribed lectures that Heinrich gave at the Freie Universität Berlin over several decades. Step by step, an archive is being developed for the scholarly study of his work. The editorial work is accompanied by an examination of the content of his manifold oeuvre. Biographical and historical studies (university history and the history of ideas in the post-war period) will provide an additional framework. The intention of the research project is also to acknowledge the reception of this great unknown figure of German post-war history in the philosophy of religion and culture – "Nothing you can remember is over" (Klaus Heinrich).