Gershom Scholem is celebrated as the twentieth century's most profound student of the Jewish mystical tradition; Walter Benjamin, as a master thinker whose extraordinary essays mix the revolutionary, the revelatory, and the esoteric. Scholem was a precocious teenager when he met Benjamin, who became his close friend and intellectual mentor. His account of that relationship--which was to remain crucial for both men--is both a celebration of his friend's spellbinding genius and a lament for the personal and intellectual self ...
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Gershom Scholem is celebrated as the twentieth century's most profound student of the Jewish mystical tradition; Walter Benjamin, as a master thinker whose extraordinary essays mix the revolutionary, the revelatory, and the esoteric. Scholem was a precocious teenager when he met Benjamin, who became his close friend and intellectual mentor. His account of that relationship--which was to remain crucial for both men--is both a celebration of his friend's spellbinding genius and a lament for the personal and intellectual self-destructiveness that culminated in Benjamin's suicide in 1940. At once prickly and heartbroken, argumentative and loving, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship is an absorbing memoir with the complication of character and motive of a novel. As Scholem revisits the passionate engagements over Marxism and Kabbala, Europe and Palestine that he shared with Benjamin, it is as if he sought to summon up his lost friend's spirit again, to have the last word in the argument that might have saved his life.
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Dr. Annemarie V Q
Jul 14, 2014
The friendship of two greats
This account of a splendid friendship, retold in the words of one of the principals, is a masterpiece. The sharing, the understanding, the kindly concern and the caring, each for the other, could be considered a guide for how a friendship comes into being and is sustained.
T. M. Teale
Jan 31, 2009
Engaging memoir of a 20th-century intellectual
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--probably conditioning his work--and 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 and intellectual 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; or worse, 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 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.
Also, I continue to be in awe of the translator?s art; Harry Zohn, in this case.
