Correspondence, 1939 - 1969. Gershom Scholem

Benjamin lived in Berlin and Adorno in Frankfurt, until Benjamin’s death in 1940. From the years preceding Benjamin’s escape to Paris, only Benjamin’s letters survived. Adorno’s pre-1934 letters, like Scholem’s – presumably left behind in Benjamin’s Berlin apartment – are irretrievably missing. The correspondence, edited by Henri Lonitz from the Frankfurt Adorno archive, was published by Suhrkamp in 1994, as the first volume of Adorno’s correspondences with friends, colleagues, and his parents.

      The present volume, which formally completes the triangle, was originally published in 2015 as the eighth volume in the series of Adorno’s collected correspondence. As Jürgen Habermas wrote in his review of the German volume, the correspondence is “documentation of one of the finest hours of German-Jewish intellectual history – after the Holocaust … a reminder of the widely ramified network of relationships between a grand generation of German-Jewish intellectuals – including rivalries and viciousness in this small academic-literary world in which Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács, Martin Buber and Siegfried Kracauer, Helmuth Plessner, Hannah Arendt, and Herbert Marcuse lived next-door to one another” (Die Zeit, April 2015). The volume virtually begins where the two others end. Already in the second letter of the correspondence, Scholem writes: “I am extremely worried about the fate of Walter Benjamin, from whom I have received very troubling news from Paris.”²³ The following letters discuss possibilities for saving Benjamin’s life, until in the fifth letter, from October 1940, Adorno conveys that “Walter Benjamin has taken his life.”²⁴ From there, efforts are made to understand the exact circumstances of Benjamin’s death and to rescue his work and legacy. Despite the authors’ diverging viewpoints of Benjamin’s thought, they succeed in overcoming their differences to unfold a comprehensive – critical, but constructive – conversation regarding the substance, meaning, and power of Benjamin’s work.

Nevertheless, the intellectual relationship between Adorno and Scholem encompasses far more than their joint efforts to establish and sustain their mutual friend’s legacy. The present correspondence documents their substantial, wide-ranging, and far-reaching dialogue. In particular, it shows that Adorno and Scholem read each other’s work with serious interest and enthusiastically reported to each other of their reading experiences. Adorno, the Marxist social philosopher and cultural critic, emerges as a dedicated reader and admirer of Scholem’s work on Jewish mysticism. As he reported to Scholem, Adorno read the latter’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (based on Scholem’s 1938 New York lectures and published in 1941) “repeatedly [and] internalized it as well as anyone can who does not speak Hebrew. In substance, I was most powerfully moved by the chapter on Lurianic mysticism, the basic concepts of which appear infinitely productive to me.”²⁵ It is not surprising, therefore, that Kabbalistic motifs found their way into Adorno’s own writings. Scholem, the anti-Marxist historian of religion, read Adorno’s various writings with great care, often critically – but respectfully and constructively – pointing out problems and difficulties and not hesitating to suggest his own interpretations of his friend’s work. Having read Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, Adorno’s first book to be published in post-war Germany, a collection of social and cultural critical aphorisms on life in late capitalism, Scholem was inclined to assign the book to the long tradition of esoteric writings of negative theology: “I am not sure,” he wrote, “whether I always fully grasped your intentions, which, in keeping with a great esoteric tradition, lie hidden within the dialectic; nonetheless, your treatise appears to me to be one of the most a remarkable documents of negative theology.”²⁶ Adorno, for his part, responded that, “as for [the] reading of my book of aphorisms in terms of a negative theology, I have no objections, provided that this reading remains as esoteric as the subject itself. If, however, one translates the book straightforwardly into theological categories … then neither the book nor, presumably, the categories feel quite at ease.”²⁷ Instead of rejecting each other’s work from their divergent and, arguably, opposed perspectives on life, philosophy, and scholarship, Adorno and Scholem both chose to make each other’s work applicable to their own. Accordingly, the correspondence sheds light on Adorno’s hitherto unknown interest in Kabbalah and its impact on his own thought and writings. It also reveals Scholem’s interest in critical theory, as well as the dialectical-materialist dimensions of his own scholarship on Jewish mysticism.

      The letters comprising this volume provide a rare insight into a relationship that spans thirty years in a most turbulent time in history. The correspondence begins in 1939, only a year after Adorno’s arrival in the US from England, where, having escaped Nazi Germany, he had spent the years between 1934 and 1938 unsuccessfully attempting to establish a scholarly career at the University of Oxford. It ends in 1969, with Adorno’s death during a summer vacation in Switzerland. The underlying tone of the letters is implicitly shaped by the protagonists’ divergent portentous life decisions and responses to the rise of anti-Semitism and Nazism in Germany. Scholem’s wish for a new life of Zionist self-determination motivated him as a young man, as early as 1923, to emigrate from his native Germany to the unknown shores of Palestine. This decision remains constantly at odds with Adorno’s preference to remain in his hostile homeland for as long as possible, temporarily relocating when no alternative was at hand, first to England, and then to the United States, and returning to his home city of Frankfurt in 1949, only four years after the war ended.²⁸

These personal and political choices were arguably related to – influenced by and influencing – the philosophical, historical, social, and political questions addressed in Adorno’s and Scholem’s scholarships. Scholem’s decision to leave his native Germany behind and begin a new life in what he considered to be the promised land of the Jewish people was a political decision supported by and anchored in his scholarly work. For his part, Adorno continuously reflected philosophically on the meaning of life in exile, as well as on the meaning of a life in Germany in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust. During his years in exile, he made collaborative efforts with Max Horkheimer to understand – from the perspective of a philosophy of history – the Urgeschichte – that is, the primordial, underlying conception of history that could give an account of the relapse from progress to regression, from Enlightenment to destructive irrationality, as was elaborated in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947).²⁹ After his return to Germany, Adorno sought to elucidate not only the mechanisms that lead to fascism and authoritarianism but also the methods for educating the masses, in particular the younger generations, to resist and combat prejudice and oppression.³⁰

      Thematically, the correspondence begins with an in-depth textual analysis, namely, Adorno’s own interpretation of the Zohar, the Kabbalistic “Book of Splendor.”³¹ Adorno refers to Scholem’s own translation, which the two discussed during their first conversations in New York, a copy of which Scholem sent to Adorno after his return to Jerusalem. The chapter translated by Scholem is entitled “Sitrei Torah” [The secrets of the Torah]. It provides a mystical interpretation of the biblical story of the world’s creation in Genesis.³² Now it was Adorno’s turn to suggest his own interpretation – and this interpretation is not only illuminating in itself, it also provides a lens for understanding some of Adorno’s most central concepts. In his reading of Scholem’s translation, Adorno presents two substantial remarks: one concerns, as he writes, the history of philosophy, while the other concerns epistemology. Although the relation to Adorno’s own work is not conspicuous at first glance, a close examination will reveal the intrinsic relation between his reading of the text and his own work from the same time: the “philosophical fragments” that will comprise his seminal Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Horkheimer just a few years later. The proximity raises the question as to whether Adorno “ha[s] not read out of it anything other than what [he has] read into it,” as he is willing to admit, or whether these ideas found their way – directly or indirectly – into the reflections that constitute the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s main theses.

Firstly, Adorno detects in the Zohar chapter a proximity between Jewish mysticism and the Neoplatonic gnostic tradition. He aligns the Zohar with the Western tradition of gnostic metaphysics, in which knowledge of the unknowable is sought in a negative way, through a search for the “remainders” of a presumed original experience, without presupposing such an experience. Adorno calls