Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin, two Berlin Jews belonging to the same generation, reject lies and comforts right from the start. Scholem left Berlin for Jerusalem in 1923. He will Build a masterful work there. Contrasting with his certainties are Benjamin’s hesitations, the dispersion of his writings, the precariousness of his academic and literary enterprises, his balance between the seductions of Marxism and a very strong feeling of belonging to Judaism. He will also consider settling in Palestine.
A lucid witness, Scholem recalls the phases and places of this friendship: Berlin during the war and after the war, Switzerland, Paris in 1927 and 1938. Letters in support, provides details on Benjamin’s attitude towards Zionism and communism , on his relationships with other figures of German literature of his time: Brecht, Buber, Ernst Bloch, Hannah Arendt, Adorno, Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School. It traces the formation of Benjamin’s thought, his conception of the role of the literary critic, his artistic tastes, his ambiguous position in front of Marxism. Notice his double rejection; neither Moscow nor Jerusalem, then the tragic nature of his exile: for Benjamin, expelled from Germany by Nazism in 1933, Paris, “the capital ofAnd century “, home to a literature of which he is a critic and translator (Baudelaire, Proust), will be a place of loneliness and anguish before the October 1940 suicide on the Spanish border. At a time when the work of Walter Benjamin is the subject of growing attention, this essay by Gershom Scholem is an essential contribution to its understanding.
SUMMARY
Preface
First contacts (1915)
Birth of a friendship (1916-1917)
In Switzerland (1918-1919)
The early postwar years (1920-1923)
Trust despite the distance (1924-1926)
Paris (1927)
The failure of a project (1928-1929)
Crises and changes (1930-1932)
The years of exile (1933-1940)
Attached
