Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship

There are few accounts of 20th-century intellectual history that are as compelling as this. Under Gershom (a.k.a. Gerhard) Scholem's comprehensive and compassionate gaze, Benjamin emerges as a troubled and daring intellect--and human, very human. I first heard about Walter Benjamin in graduate school when everyone was reading "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," but I don't recall hearing about Scholem's memoir. Benjamin impressed me then as someone who saw the evolution of consumer culture--the religion-like qualities of shopping, the attractions of film and photography--long before anyone else. But I don't recall studying the daily life of such a scholar, the ordinary circumstances under which he produced his work; Scholem's account shows us those conditions, the near-complete situation in which Benjamin produced his most influential work. I was fascinated to learn that Benjamin collected children's books, that he spent a lot of time on the islands of Capri and Ibiza, that he had an "inner relationship to things he owned--books, works of art, or hand-crafted items, often of rustic construction . . ." (47). And, of course, Scholem recounts Benjamin's relationship with other creative men and women of 1920s and '30s Germany, including his wife, Dora. And, then after about 1930, the reader can feel the rise of fascism as these thinkers begin to plan for their future, how they must find a place to live where thinking is possible. Because Scholem has a fine sense of story development over chronological time, there are many exquisite moments in this book. One narrative arc Scholem pursues was Benjamin's inability to find a university teaching position. Apparently, even during his college years, Benjamin's work was misunderstood; his examining and dissertation committees found him incomprehensible. Scholem quotes a teacher or friend as saying (perhaps ironically) that Benjamin's "intellect cannot be habilitated" (145), that is, he can't fit into the prevailing norms in the university system. Throughout his account, Gerhard Scholem is very clear in telling the reader what he knows about Benjamin, how he knew it, or what he does not know. For many years, Scholem was studying in Palestine and not in personal contact with Benjamin, but in that case their letters tell the tale--in a wonderful way. In fact, long quotations from letters are keys to understanding their relationship. After reading this memoir, I am reminded that today, even with e-mail and cell phones, people are less intimate, less able to know each other, or less able to develop complex intellectual lives in tandem with other lives. But Weimar Germany--especially after the currency was devalued and social pressures increased--was certainly the place where like-minded people came together, a climate in which tension was at a high pitch. Perhaps some people, like Walter Benjamin, produced their greatest work under those dire conditions--but, alas!--we will never know. Al

This is the story of a friendship between two of the most remarkable intellectual figures of the twentieth century , Gershom Scholem and Walter Benjamin. It begins in Berlin in 1914 and continues through their separation until Benjamin's tragic death twenty -five years later. Both of them were greatly interested in the historical processes of their times, in philology , in the meaning of signs and symbols, in Socialism, in Zionism. Scholem left Germany for the Jerusalem of pre- state Israel and became a central figure there in the development of the Hebrew University. He became too the great scholar who opened a new field that of Jewish Mysticism. Benjamin hesitated and seemed to always find the way to misfortune. But their conversation and their friendship illuminates fundamental issues of life and thought. This book should be read by everyone for whom the life of the mind is important.