Correspondence, 1939 - 1969. Gershom Scholem

Walter Benjamin’s eightieth birthday, on the occasion of which the first published volumes of Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften were presented. Scholem presented at the conference a paper entitled “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” which included an account of the painting’s history from the time that Benjamin purchased it until its return to Germany with Adorno. At the conclusion of this visit, Scholem added another ironic twist to the painting’s tumultuous history when he – apparently cutting it out of its frame again and sewing it into his jacket – smuggled it, concealed from the Israeli customs duty officials, from Germany to Israel.⁶⁶ Subsequently, it hung in his own apartment in Abarbanel Street in Jerusalem. After Scholem passed away in 1982, the painting was given as “a gift of Fania and Gershom Scholem” to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem – a gift that was “financially made possible” by a weighty donation from the art dealers John and Paul Herring and the philanthropists Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder. It is perhaps emblematic to the triangular and tri-continental relationship of Adorno, Benjamin, and Scholem that the long story of the Angelus novus, designated as the angel of history, began in Germany, continued in America, and ended up – through power plays, instrumental interests, and possibly some possessive trickery – in Jerusalem.

Does the history of the painting Angelus novus correspond to the concept of history presented in the theses inspired by the painting’s subject? Does the angel of history, whose “face is turned toward the past [and] where a chain of events appears before us, he sees one single catastrophe,”⁶⁷ represent the painting’s tumultuous history and the painting owner’s turbulent biography? Or is he perhaps even emblematic of the German-Jewish catastrophe? Benjamin’s angel encounters the storm that prevents him from going back to the past, “mak[ing] whole what has been smashed,” and redeeming the past’s promise from the destructive storm of progress, of an unrelenting thrust into the future. Benjamin’s intention here, like that of his friends Adorno and Scholem, is by no means anti-progressive or conservative but, rather, heretical. The angel – a figure that was arguably inspired by the Kabbalistic images studied by Scholem and that was inarguably influential for Adorno’s critical theory of the Enlightenment’s progress and regression – represents the wish, introduced by Benjamin in an earlier thesis, to “brush history against the grain.” It is, accordingly, the task of the historical materialist to critically challenge and counteract the seemingly unwavering, unalterable course of history. The angel of history is a figure in which Scholem’s heretical mysticism converges with Adorno’s heretical social critique, contesting prevailing presumptions about the relationship between tradition and progress, myth and reason, religion and materialism. By heretically disputing simple binaries in religion, philosophy, and society, and by carefully attending to complex dialectical relationships and setting these in new and radically non-conforming constellations, Benjamin’s angel of history – the painting and the figure depicted in it – thus represents a substantial point of intersection between Scholem’s and Adorno’s life and thought.

“Among certain Jews, all of whom are great authors in German,” Rolf Tiedemann wrote in his “Reminiscence of Scholem,” “at first in Bloch, then in Benjamin and Adorno, and even in Scholem, we find a word that no German dictionary knows: Eingedenken [remembrance]. According to Benjamin, Eingedenken makes ‘every second … the small gateway … through which the messiah might enter’ to ‘awaken the dead.’”⁶⁸ This notion originates, according to Benjamin, from the Jewish prohibition on inquiring into the future: “the Torah and the prayers instructed them in remembrance.”⁶⁹ It is precisely such remembrance – a concept that, for Benjamin, draws equally on Jewish sources (presumably mediated by Scholem) and on Marcel Proust – that makes possible a different concept of the future, different from any that is positively calculable (Benjamin differentiates it from the soothsayers’ concept of the future) and allows for a messianic concept, anchored in a remembrance of the past, which facilitates a radically different, revolutionary and utopian future. Tiedemann connects precisely this messianic, utopian concept to Scholem’s perception of the concrete past and future of German-Jewish life. In a sense that may apply as well to Adorno’s view, he wrote: “I think, for the sake of such Eingedenken, that Scholem was time and again willing to also speak with us” – that is, with the generation of Germans, the very generation that Adorno sought to educate to autonomous thinking, individuality, and responsibility, and which Scholem rediscovered after his disenchantment with his own “metaphysics of youth.”

      * * *

      Rolf Tiedemann passed away in July 2018. His meticulous work on the editions of the writings of Benjamin and Adorno, as well as some of Scholem’s, is invaluable in that, without it, it would be impossible to imagine how – and if at all – their work would have been available to contemporary readers in such masterfully prepared critical editions. As I mentioned earlier, the present volume greatly benefited from Tiedemann’s support and advice. I would like to dedicate it to his memory and legacy.

Michael Schwarz, of the Berlin Dependance of the Adorno Archive within the Walter Benjamin Archive at the Akademie der Künste, endorsed and supported this project from its pre-conception stages and closely accompanied the work up to its current rendering into English. He has provided innumerable suggestions and invaluable advice on both conceptual and historical matters. The present volume, initially conceived in conversations with Michael Schwarz, would be inconceivable without his support. Erdmut Wizisla and Ursula Marx from the Benjamin Archive in Berlin – where the Adorno Archive Dependance is located and where much of the work on this volume was conducted – were most helpful in the research for the edition and were always available with advice and suggestions. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz from the Frankfurt Adorno Archive helped in deciphering Adorno and Scholem’s almost illegible handwriting and provided information that was crucial for the annotations. Professor Jan Philipp Reemtsma and Joachim Kersten of the Hamburger Stiftung zur Förderung von Wissenschaft und Kultur supported the project institutionally and financially. Thomas Sparr, Eva Gilmer, Petra Hardt, and Nora Mercurio of Suhrkamp Verlag assisted in both editorial and practical matters. John Thompson and Elise Heslinga at Polity Press were most helpful in the preparation of the English edition of the volume. Willi Goetschel, Paul-Mendes Flohr, and Moshe Zuckermann accompanied the work on this project from its very early stages and provided substantial assistance in both theory and practice. Further, I wish to thank the many friends and colleagues who were supportive with advice, suggestions, and information at the various stages of work on the edition: Daniel Abrams, David Biale, Dirk Braunstein, Steven Fraade, Paul Franks, Peter E. Gordon, Christine Hayes, Hannan Hever, Rahel Jaeggi, Martin Jay, Marie Luise Knott, Zvi Leshem (at the Scholem Archive and Library in Jerusalem), Stefan Litt (at the Israel National Library in Jerusalem), Christoph Menke, Michael L. Morgan, Teresa Muxeneder (at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna), Adalbert and Brita Rang, Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, Paula Schwebel, Zvi Septimus, Yfaat Weiss, Kenneth Winkler, and Jörg Wyrschowy (at the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, Frankfurt am Main).

      Asaf Angermann

Notes

      1 1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Gruß an G. Scholem,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, December 2, 1967; repr. in Gesammelte Schriften, 20.2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), p. 479 [my translation].

      2 2. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books 1988), p. 118.

      3 3. See David Biale, “The Threat of Messianism: An Interview with Gershom Scholem,” New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980.

      4 4. Theodor W. Adorno, “Erinnerungen” (1964), in Gesammelte Schriften, 20.1, p. 173.

      5 5. Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth (New York: Schocken Books 1988), pp. 153–61.

      6 6. Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, p. 191.

      7 7. Ibid.

      8 8. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Adorno, “Notiz,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 2, p. 261.

      9 9. Walter Benjamin,