Correspondence, 1939 - 1969. Gershom Scholem

1932–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andre LeFevere (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), p. 84. Wiesengrund was Adorno’s original paternal last name, substituted in the first year of emigration with his mother’s Italian last name Adorno.

      11 11. Benjamin and Scholem, Correspondence, p. 214.

      12 12. Ibid., pp. 218–19.

      13 13. Ibid., p. 226.

      14 14. Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, p. 215.

      15 15. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 248–9.

      16 16. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London and New York: Verso, 2005), p. 238.

      17 17. Gershom Scholem, “Redemption through Sin,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), pp. 78–141.

      18 18. Gershom Scholem, “Zum Verständnis des Sabbatianismus: Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Aufklärung” [Towards an understanding of Sabbatianism: a contribution to the history of the Enlightenment], in Almanach des Schocken Verlags auf das Jahr 5697 (Berlin: Schocken, 1936), pp. 30–42.

      19 19. Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, p. 131.

      20 20. See Walter Benjamin, Berliner Chronik/Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert, ed. Burkhardt Lindner and Nadine Werner - Walter Benjamin Werke und Nachlaß – Kritische Gesamtausgabe Vol. 11.2 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019), pp. 7–57, esp. pp. 29–57. Eng. trans. as Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).

      21 21. Benjamin, Berliner Chronik/Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert, p. 49.

      22 22. Theodor W. Adorno, “Einleitung,” in Walter Benjamin, Schriften, Vol. I, p. xxvii.

      23 23. Letter 2, 4.6.1939, p. 7 in this volume.

      24 24. Letter 5, 8.10.1940, p. 14 in this volume.

      25 25. Letter 15, 9.5.1949, p. 42 in this volume.

      26 26. Letter 22, 22.2.1952, p. 59 in this volume.

      27 27. Letter 23, 13.4.1952, p. 60 in this volume.

      28 28. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Meaning of Working through the Past,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press 1998), pp. 89–103.

      29 29. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).

      30 30. Theodor W. Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” in Critical Models, pp. 191–204.

      31 31. Letter 1, 19.4.1939.

      32 32. Gershom Scholem, Die Geheimnisse der Schöpfung: Ein Kapitel aus dem kabbalistichen Buche Sohar (1935) (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1971). Scholem entitled the second edition from 1936 – the edition he actually sent to Adorno – “The Secrets of Creation” (“Die Geheimnisse der Schöpfung”).

      33 33. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, “Preface,” p. xviii.

      34 34. Letter 1, 19.4.1939.

      35 35. Adorno, Minima Moralia, Aphorism 153: “Finale,” p. 247.

      36 36. Letter 94, 7.11.1960.

      37 37. Gershom Scholem, “Die Metamorphose des häretischen Messianismus der Sabbatianer in religiösen Nihilismus im 18. Jahrhundert”, in Judaica 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp, 1970).

      38 38. In fact, it was Horkheimer who drafted the chapter’s aphorisms, later completed with Adorno’s additions. See Stefan Muller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography (Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity, 2005), p. 280.

      39 39. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 165.

      40 40. Ibid.

      41 41. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London and New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 361.

      42 42. In his lectures on Metaphysics from 1965, the time of writing the book, Adorno speaks of “the mystical doctrine – which is common to the Cabbala and to Christian mysticism such as that of Angelus Silesius – of the infinite relevance of the intra-mundane, and thus the historical, to transcendence, and to any possible conception of transcendence.” Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 100.

      43 43. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 372.

      44 44. Fania Scholem, “Beshulei ha’hakdamah’ ha’avudah shenitgaltah,” in Gershom Scholem, Shabtai Tzvi vehatnu‘ah hashabta’it beiyemei chaiyav. 2nd edn, Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1988, pp. 27–9; trans. and cited in Noam Zadoff, Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back, trans. Jeffrey Green (Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2018), p. 144.

      45 45. Gershom Scholem, “Against the Myth of the German-Jewish Dialogue,” in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, ed. Werner J. Dannhauser (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), pp. 61–2.

      46 46. See Zadoff, Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back.

      47 47. Letter 32, 9.7.1953.

      48 48. Letter 53, 9.3.1956.

      49 49. Adorno, “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” p. 90.

      50 50. Adorno, “On the Question: ‘What is German?” in Critical Models, pp. 205–14, and “The Meaning of Working through the Past.”

      51 51. Letter 23, 13.4.1952, p. 60 in this volume.

      52 52. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 365.

      53 53. Adorno, “Resignation,” in Critical Models, pp. 289–93.

      54 54. Letter 216, 11.12.1968, p. 380 in this volume.

      55 55. Letter 191, 18.9.1967 – annotation, p. 323 in this volume.

      56 56. Letter 220, 21.3.1969, p. 387 in this volume.

      57 57. Ibid., p. 388 in this volume.

      58 58. Tiedemann, “Erinnerung an Scholem,” in Scholem, Walter Benjamin und sein Engel, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp, 1983), p. 213.

      59 59. See Benjamin Lazier, God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton, NJ, and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008), pp. 191–200.

      60 60. Tiedemann, “Erinnerung an Scholem,” p. 215; citation from Benjamin’s “Goethe’s Elective Affinities,” trans. Stanley Corngold, in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 5 vols, 2004–6), Vol. 1, p. 356.

      61 61. Just as he writes of Scholem, Tiedemann himself also preferred to read the published book rather than page proofs. Upon the publication of the German edition of the correspondence, he enthusiastically commented on the edition and commented that the annotation regarding the history of the Angelus novus after Adorno’s death, based on available sources, is incorrect. He then elucidated the matter in an e-mail to me from May 2015 – a month after the publication of the German original edition – which is the source and the basis of the full account of the painting’s history, published here for the first time.

      62 62. See annotation to letter 110, 24.10.1961.

      63 63. Letter 110, 24.10.1961.

      64 64. Available sources on the matter all include misguided information. For example, even Stefan Müller-Doohm’s outstandingly erudite and lucid biography of Adorno inaccurately notes that he owned only a reproduction of the painting, while the original was in the possession of Gershom Scholem (Stefan Müller-Doohm: Adorno: A Biography, trans. Rodney Livingstone, Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity, 2005, p. 571n92).

      65 65. Rolf Tiedemann in a letter to the editor, May 2015.

      66 66. See Uwe Johnson and Eberhardt Klemm, Brief vom 19. Juli