Correspondence, 1939 - 1969. Gershom Scholem

transfer to the National Library in Jerusalem, which he had hoped to arrange. However, beyond the professional discontent and frustration, it was the humanitarian situation of the survivors that most appalled him. The visits to destroyed synagogues and communities, and to camps of displaced persons, left Scholem with a most distressing impression – not only on account of the concrete situation of the survivors but also concerning the very idea of the possibility of Jewish life in Germany. The visit had a long-lasting negative effect on Scholem’s psyche, and it also seems to have affected his overall health. It took him a long time to recover, and some argue that he never fully recovered from the trauma of the visit. His wife Fania wrote of his personal situation after his return from the journey:

He returned to the Land of Israel physically exhausted and mentally depressed. He would lie down for most of the day, doing nothing, hardly speaking with anyone, and only occasionally repeat sentences like: “The Jewish people has been murdered, has ceased to exist, only smoldering stumps are left, with no strength or direction. Their source of nourishment no longer exists, the people has been cut off at the root. And we in Israel, a handful of people, the remnant (sheerit hapletah), will we really find the strength to build the creative, free society, not materialistic, for the sake of whose formation we came here? Maybe we won’t succeed in the task and we will degenerate, because we are bereft of our nation, we are orphaned.” He was prostrate on his bed, going from couch to couch in his house, without finding repose for himself. Scholem refused to be consoled and he only became himself again and recovered a year later.⁴⁴

      In the years that followed, Scholem was increasingly involved in debates on German-Jewish relations. Consistent with his position from the 1920s and 1930s, but with an added dimension of bitter disillusionment, he was critical and dismissive of the very idea of a “German-Jewish dialogue.” That is, he was not only critical of the possibility of renewing and preserving such a dialogue after the Holocaust, but he was profoundly skeptical of the very thought that such a dialogue had ever existed. In 1964, he wrote explicitly,

      I deny that there has ever been such a German-Jewish dialogue in any genuine sense whatsoever, i.e., as a historical phenomenon. It takes two to have a dialogue, who listen to each other, who are prepared to perceive the other as what he is and represents, and to respond to him. Nothing can be more misleading than to apply such a concept to the discussions between Germans and Jews during the last 200 years. This dialogue died at its very start and never took place.⁴⁵

Scholem maintained this argument over various discussions and publications in the post-war years. For a long time after his journey in search of the lost and looted libraries, he avoided further visits to Germany, and refrained particularly from any public appearances. This applied, however, specifically to Germany. In fact, the situation proved to be rather complex, since Scholem increasingly discovered that the main audience for his developing scholarship could not be limited to the Hebrew University or, for that matter, to the newly established State of Israel. Remarkably, only a few years after the end of the Second World War, and only one year after the establishment of the State of Israel, where Scholem had been one of the leading academic figures, he gradually – intentionally or not, consciously or not – transferred the centerpiece of his scholarly activities to Europe – not to Germany, but to Switzerland, and indeed to the German language. Beginning in 1949, he delivered most, if not all, of his substantial work at the Eranos conferences in Ascona and published it in German in the Eranos- Yearbook. Despite his own objections and against all odds, Scholem practically returned after the war to his native German culture, motivated by both pragmatic reasons of potential readership and publication context and by a certain disillusionment with the Zionist project he so eagerly pursued earlier in his life.⁴⁶

      Despite his gradual return to his native language and to European intellectual surroundings, Scholem nevertheless refused to speak publicly in Germany and to publish his German writings with a German publisher. In 1953 he wrote to Adorno that he deemed it impossible to speak in Germany after the war.⁴⁷ Three years later, Adorno informed Scholem of newly acquired funds for the initiative to hold at the Goethe University of Frankfurt guest lectures by distinguished scholars on central topics in Judaism.⁴⁸ The first speaker was Leo Baeck, in 1956. When Adorno formally invited Scholem to deliver a lecture in Frankfurt, Scholem responded: “Perhaps it is the time to speak up. I will think about it.” (In German: “Vielleicht ist es an der Zeit, mal den Mund zu öffnen. Ich denke darüber nach.” Literally: “Perhaps it is time to open the mouth. I will think about it.”) Scholem eventually agreed. He delivered the Loeb Lectures on the Kabbalah in Safed in July 1957, speaking for the first time publicly in post-war Germany.

      It was also Adorno’s suggestion that motivated Scholem to publish again in Germany. Until the early 1960s, he published his German-language work with the Swiss publisher Rhein Verlag, directed by his friend Daniel Brody, which was also the publisher of the Eranos Yearbooks. Adorno personally introduced Scholem to Peter Suhrkamp, director of Suhrkamp Verlag, but Scholem initially rejected the idea of having his books of essays on Jewish mysticism published with Suhrkamp, maintaining that he was already committed to Rhein Verlag. However, a few years later, Siegfried Unseld, who replaced Peter Suhrkamp as director of Suhrkamp Verlag after the latter’s death, proposed, once again, that Scholem publish a small volume of essays to be made available to a large German readership. This time Scholem accepted the offer. His first volume of essays, entitled Judaica, appeared with Suhrkamp Verlag in 1963, followed by five additional volumes under the same title (Judaica II–VI), alongside licenced editions of previously published works with Rhein Verlag. This marked the completion of Scholem’s reluctant and critical return to Germany. Nevertheless, he did not discard his critique of the “myth of a German-Jewish dialogue,” which was the title of an essay (originally published in 1964) included in the second of the Judaica volumes in 1970, alongside other essays on German-Jewish relations and the (im)possibility of Jewish life in Germany.

In contrast, Adorno’s practical and theoretical response to the Holocaust and to the questions concerning German-Jewish relations was, at least at the outset, an antithesis to Scholem’s. Adorno, for whom emigration to Palestine was never even a consideration, spent the years from 1933 to 1949 in exile. But as early as 1949, only four years after the end of the war, he decided to return to Germany. The decision is significant, especially in the light of Adorno’s own diagnosis, which he still maintained ten years later, namely that “National Socialism lives on, and even today we still do not know whether it is merely the ghost of what was so monstrous that it lingers on after its own death, or whether it has not yet died at all, whether the willingness to commit the unspeakable survives in people as well as in the conditions that enclose them.”⁴⁹ It is difficult to determine exactly what motivated Adorno and Horkheimer to return to their homeland so soon, relatively speaking, after the end of the war. Adorno himself suggested various reasons – ranging from what he considers his close, intimate relationship with the German language to his sense of moral and political responsibility to circumvent a return of the catastrophe.⁵⁰ Fifteen years after he had left Germany and eleven years after his arrival in the United States, Adorno returned to Frankfurt in October 1949. It was five months after the post-war Federal Republic of Germany was established in the areas occupied by the American, British, and French allies in West Germany. Frankfurt, the center of German finance, was located in the American Zone of Occupation. This might have given Adorno, a Frankfurt native, the sense of some continuity between his American and German experiences.

During his years in exile in America, Adorno participated in numerous research projects and was prolific in producing texts that would prove highly influential; alas, no prospect of an academic career was in sight for him. After returning to German academia in 1949, he initially only replaced Horkheimer, whose pre-war professorship at the University of Frankfurt had been renewed but who had not yet returned to the city to take up the position. Only in 1953 was Adorno offered an ordinary professorship. In the time between his return and his formal appointment, he traveled to the United States twice to participate in research activities and to cultivate further his research and scholarly contacts, but also – especially with the long stay from October 1952 to August 1953 – first and foremost in order to ensure that he retained his newly acquired naturalization as a US citizen.⁵¹