From 1919 to 1923, he matriculated at the universities of Munich, Berlin, and Tübingen, attending lectures by noted academics including Ernst Troeltsch, Eduard Spranger, and Heinrich Wölfflin.
Residing in Degerloch, an outer district of Stuttgart, he authored Fahrt nach der Südsee (1924), which premiered simultaneously at the National Theatre Mannheim and Staatstheater Berlin in 1925.
During these years Blume authored short newspaper and journal articles about Kleist, Klabund, Bruckner, Franz Grillparzer, Gerhart Hauptmann, and Anna Seghers.
On 1 April 1933, two months after the Nazi party's accession to power, Carola Rosenberg-Blume was dismissed from her position as head of the women's division of the Stuttgart Volkshochschule on grounds both of race and her leftist political stance.
For a few years Blume was able to continue as a playwright, but Nazi racial laws were tightened and he was finally subject to an official boycott of his plays because he was “related by marriage to a non-Aryan”.
Continuing to live in Germany became increasingly untenable, and in order to prepare for emigration and a career change, Blume completed a doctorate with a dissertation on the nihilistic world view of Arthur Schnitzler, defended in June 1935.
Filling the faculty position at Mills College formerly held by Theodore Brohm,[3] Blume not only headed the German program but would eventually reorganize the general curriculum in modern European literature.
Blume's political outlook gradually shifted from the Nietzschean nihilism of his early years to a democratic liberalism informed by Thomas Mann’s simultaneous transformation.
In addition to teaching, Blume delivered public lectures on Hitler’s Mein Kampf and Hermann Rauschning’s nihilism; he also authored articles on Thomas Mann, Goethe, Kleist, and Rainer Maria Rilke.
Blume continued to publish on Lessing, Goethe, Kleist, Mann, Rimbaud, Rilke, Elisabeth Langgässer, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, and Hermann Hesse.
At age 65, Blume accepted a final academic appointment as the first professor of German in the Department of Literature at the newly founded University of California, San Diego.
Following retirement he remained active up to the time of his death at age 77, coediting with Henry J. Schmidt of Ohio State University a textbook for undergraduate students, German Literature: Texts and Contexts (1974), as well as a volume of Rilke's correspondence with Sidonie Nádherná von Borutín (1973) and working on an autobiography, which was published posthumously under the title Narziß mit Brille (1985; English translation 1992).