Correspondence, 1939 - 1969. Gershom Scholem

with an offer to hold an additional lecture and a seminar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Adorno was enthusiastic and at the same time reluctant to undertake the visit, which he considered “eminently encumbered.”⁵⁶ Whereas questions of scheduling remained a subject of endless negotiations, the content of Adorno’s prospective lectures was essentially established. Presenting his work for the first time to an Israeli audience, Adorno intended to deliver lectures on two topics he had deemed most relevant and most representative of his thought: one lecture was either to address a topic from his recently published Negative Dialectics, preferably the book’s final chapter, “Meditations on Metaphysics,” which discusses the possibility and the meaning of philosophical thought after the Holocaust, or else to discuss ideas from his work in progress, Aesthetic Theory, which was published posthumously. The second lecture was meant to concern his philosophy of music, either his philosophical interpretation of Mahler or that of Schoenberg, with a preference for the latter, who, Adorno wrongly assumed, was less known in Israel. The language in which Adorno was to speak presented another dilemma. Although it was rather probable that the audience would consist mostly of academics of European background – native German speakers and natives of other countries who had mastery in the German language – delivering a lecture in German in 1960s Israel might have been seriously offensive to many survivors. “Naturally, it is easier for me to speak about very difficult and complex things in German than in English,” he wrote to Scholem, “but I would under no circumstances want to commit any kind of mistake. Precisely when one lives in Germany, one may not forget even for a moment what happened.”⁵⁷ Although it was repeatedly postponed – in his very final letter to Scholem from May 1969, Adorno still considered scheduling the journey for September 1970 – the visit was ultimately rendered impossible by Adorno’s sudden death. Nevertheless, what remains as pressing as ever are the theoretical – and hypothetical – questions concerning the probable reception and discussion of Adorno’s thought in Israel, in particular regarding the possibility of philosophy after the Holocaust and of dealing with the German past.

      Scholem traveled to Frankfurt for Adorno’s funeral immediately after Adorno’s death. In the following years he continued to pursue his fruitful relationships with Suhrkamp Verlag and other German contacts, including, first and foremost, Gretel Adorno, his friend’s widow. Scholem produced a host of new material to be published in German in the 1970s. He continued to publish his collected essays with Suhrkamp in the Judaica volumes, alongside autobiographical work, which included Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (1975), his own autobiography From Berlin to Jerusalem (1977), and the edition of his correspondence with Benjamin (1980). Despite his profoundly negative experiences in the immediate post-war years, when he traveled to Europe in search of the destroyed Jewish libraries, Scholem was frequently in Europe, and especially in Germany, in his last years. It is also noteworthy that his collection of texts about Walter Benjamin, published in 1983, a year after his death, as well as the fourth volume in the Judaica series, published the following year, were both edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Adorno’s student and assistant, the co-editor of both Adorno’s and Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften [Collected works], and subsequently the director of the Adorno Archive in Frankfurt.

Rolf Tiedemann was the first scholar ever to write a doctoral dissertation on Benjamin’s work. As Tiedemann’s doctoral advisor, Adorno arranged a first meeting between Tiedemann and Scholem during one of the latter’s numerous visits to Frankfurt in the early 1960s. Tiedemann maintained a close working relationship with Scholem, especially after 1968 as work on the edition of Benjamin’s writings began. He was one of the few people who witnessed at first hand the relationship between Adorno and Scholem in its later phase. In what could be seen as almost the mirror image of Adorno’s alienation in his own homeland, Tiedemann could attest to Scholem’s rediscovery of post-war Germany and of his increasing alienation and frustration in his adopted homeland of Israel. Despite Scholem’s rejection of the “myth” of German-Jewish dialogue, he expressed a most welcoming attitude toward young Germans and their newly discovered interest in matters of Jewish thought, theology, and history. He was, indeed, open to dialogue. “After Scholem’s death,” Tiedemann wrote, “I have encountered in Israel friends of his, German Jews who were unwilling ever again to set foot on German land and who were unable to understand why he traveled to Germany so often.”⁵⁸ At the same time, he gives an account of Scholem’s ever more problematic situation in Israel and his changing attitude toward its politics. Although internationally recognized as the leading scholar of Jewish mysticism and nationally respected not only as a scholar but also as a public intellectual and the president of the Israeli Academy of Sciences, Scholem had grown ever more powerless in Israel, where there was a growing sense of hostility toward the ideas that he represented. Paradoxically or not, after the 1967 war and the occupation of the West Bank, a growing messianic movement of right-wing Zionist nationalists settled in the Occupied Territories, holding on to many of the ideas that he discussed in his work and embodied in his existence: ideas concerning the mystical and messianic origins of Jewish political rebirth and sovereignty. It was probably “Scholem’s Golem” – his own creation coming to life against his own intention – that turned against what he claimed to believe in and pursue.⁵⁹ Tiedemann wrote that, in his final years, Scholem seemed desperate about the situation in his homeland and to have lost any hope in the Zionist project that he had supported for his entire life: “Perhaps for the first time ever,” Tiedemann noted, “I comprehended what that hope is, of which Benjamin wrote that we have been given it only for the sake of the hopeless ones.”⁶⁰

      Just as Scholem carefully assisted Tiedemann and his co-editor Hermann Schweppenhäuser in their work on the edition of Benjamin’s writings, so was Tiedemann most helpful and supportive in the edition of the original German version of the present volume. He dedicatedly clarified matters that remained uncertain and graciously elucidated aspects that required personal knowledge of the events and individuals involved. In particular, he helped to shed light on a matter that had remained so obscure over the years that all the available sources either contained misguided information or were insufficient to determine its historical truth – that is, until Tiedemann clarified it for the present edition.⁶¹ The matter in question concerns Paul Klee’s painting Angelus novus, to which Benjamin prominently alluded in his thesis “On the Concept of History” and which eventually became emblematic of both his life and his thought.

Benjamin purchased the painting in 1921, and its long and winding road began on the way from Munich to Berlin, where Benjamin had initially left it with Scholem until he could find a permanent residence in the latter city. After his escape from Germany, the painting was brought, by a Berlin acquaintance of Benjamin’s, to him in Paris. In his flight from Nazi-occupied Paris in 1940, Benjamin cut the painting out of its frame and stowed it in a suitcase in which he had also stored his papers. A friend, the French intellectual George Bataille, who then worked as a librarian in the French Bibliothèque nationale, hid the suitcase there, where it survived the war. After the war, the suitcase was sent to Adorno in America, and he brought the painting back with him to Germany in 1949. Yet, the question of who was to gain possession of the painting after Benjamin’s death remained undetermined over the years. In a will written when he contemplated suicide in 1932, Benjamin initially bequeathed it to Scholem. But, since he did not pursue his desperate plan at that time, the painting was eventually bequeathed, together with his other belongings, to his son Stefan Benjamin, who was living as a bookseller in London.⁶² In 1961, Adorno happily reported to Scholem of Stefan Benjamin’s consent to lend him the painting “for life, while also stipulating that it should be mine if I survive him.”⁶³ However, it was eventually Stefan Benjamin who survived Adorno. After Adorno’s death in 1969, the painting remained in the house on Kettenhofweg in Frankfurt where he had lived with wife Gretel.⁶⁴ Either during his visit to Frankfurt to attend Adorno’s funeral, or shortly thereafter, Scholem asserted his claim of ownership against Stefan Benjamin. According to Tiedemann, this led to a bitter dispute, which could not be settled until Stefan Benjamin’s sudden death in February 1972.⁶⁵ After Stefan Benjamin’s death, Scholem impelled Siegfried Unseld, then director of Suhrkamp Verlag, to remove the painting from Gretel Adorno’s house and to keep it at his place. Unseld, eager to settle the matter, flew to London to reach an agreement with Janet Benjamin, Stefan’s