Briefwechsel 1930-1940

by Walter Benjamin, Gretel Adorno, Christoph Gödde (Editor)

Die Korrespondenz zwischen Gretel Adorno und Walter Benjamin, die 1930 einsetzt, aber erst mit Benjamins Emigration nach Frankreich ihre volle Intensität erreicht, ist nicht nur ein spätes Zeugnis des intellektuellen Berlin der zwanziger Jahre, sondern auch das Dokument einer großen Freundschaft, die unabhängig von der Beziehung Benjamins zu Theodor W. Adorno bestand. Während Benjamin, neben seinen Alltagssorgen, insbesondere über jene Projekte schreibt, an denen er in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens mit Hochdruck gearbeitet hat – vor allem über den »Baudelaire« –, war es Gretel Karplus-Adorno, die mit aller Macht versuchte, Benjamin in der Welt zu halten. Sie drängte ihn zur Emigration, berichtete von Adornos Plänen und Blochs Aufenthaltsorten und hielt so die Verbindung zwischen den alten Berliner Freunden und Bekannten aufrecht. Sie half ihm durch regelmäßige Geldüberweisungen über die schlimmsten Zeiten hinweg und organisierte eine finanzielle Unterstützung aus dem anfänglich noch vom Deutschen Reich unabhängigen Saarland. In New York angekommen, versucht sie mit ihren Beschreibungen der Stadt und der Neuankömmlinge, Benjamin nach Amerika zu locken. Aber Benjamin schreibt im Frühjahr 1940: »Wir müssen sehen, unser Bestes in die Briefe zu legen; denn nichts deutet darauf hin, daß der Augenblick unseres Wiedersehens nahe ist.«

Genres: Nonfiction

434 pages, Hardcover

First published March 28, 2005

About the author

Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic, media theorist, and essayist. An eclectic thinker who combined elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, Jewish mysticism, and neo-Kantianism, Benjamin made influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was related to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin Günther Anders, though the friendship between Arendt and Benjamin outlasted her marriage to Anders. Both Arendt and Anders were students of Martin Heidegger, whom Benjamin considered a nemesis.
Among Benjamin's best known works are the essays "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1935) and "Theses on the Philosophy of History" (1940). His major work as a literary critic included essays on Charles Baudelaire, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Franz Kafka, Karl Kraus, Nikolai Leskov, Marcel Proust, Robert Walser, Trauerspiel and translation theory. He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.
Of the hidden principle organizing Walter Benjamin's thought Scholem wrote unequivocally that "Benjamin was a philosopher", while his younger colleagues Arendt and Theodor W. Adorno contend that he was "not a philosopher". Scholem remarked "The peculiar aura of authority emanating from his work tended to incite contradiction". Benjamin himself considered his research to be theological, though he eschewed all recourse to traditionally metaphysical sources of transcendentally revealed authority.
In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin died by suicide at Portbou on the French Spanish border while attempting to escape the advance of the Third Reich. Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown.

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a devastating collection. It is a catalogue of a deep friendship built on love, mutual respect, and moments of joy, paradoxically made stronger by distance and time spent away from each other. And distance predominates, along with isolation, estrangement, longing, loneliness, anxiety, and fear. "Felicitas" and "Detlef", as they refer to each other, both suffer from migraines and other long bouts of illness, moving about the continent (and, in Gretel's case, across the ocean) only as allowed by visas, permits, passports, nationalities, and all the other bureaucracies affected by the rise of Nazism. Mutual friends and acquaintances, dozens if not hundreds of them, equally displaced, interned (like Benjamin), exiled, stateless, trapped or adrift (if there's even a difference), come and go, passing along news of one to the other, while Gretel and Walter are able to meet in person only a handful of times across a harrowing and ultimately tragic decade. Their letters were what they had and what remains. Perhaps the last letter he ever posted is addressed to her: "It is possible, even probable, that we have only a limited time at our disposal."

Here you will find the famous letter from Detlef to Felicitas, dated 12 October 1939 at Nevers (Nièvre). Despite his internment, or perhaps because of it, Benjamin experiences a state of pure joy following a dream, in which he spoke that now-famous phrase "Il s’agissait de changer en fichu une poésie", inspiring Derrida's "Fichus" and, in turn, Cixous's Hyperrêve (Hyperdream). It is unfortunate that Hoban did not include this phrase in its original French, instead offering only an English translation: "It is a matter of changing a poem into a scarf." My only other criticism is that some of the letters from or by both Adornos appear in, in my opinion, slightly better form in the collected correspondence of "Teddy" and Benjamin translated by Nicholas Walker, which makes me wonder about Hoban's translations in general.

These are minor issues, though, in a work that is otherwise a true testament to the human condition, marked as it is by joy and despair, hope and hopelessness, but above all, a sense of friendship that ignores the boundaries that otherwise determine our fates.

[Tatyana · Rating 5 out of 5]

"You asked so kindly how I am. And the only sincere answer I can give is: pitiful …"

"… and as ever I am turning to you when
there is something special on my mind that I cannot quite deal with by myself."

"It is not so much books that I lack as someone with whom to exchange a few words."

"I have the feeling you understand me, even if I do not talk a great deal about myself, your
friendship is so unegotistical. And where, ultimately, is the fine line
between friendship and love ?"

"there is no one to whom I feel so close in letter, and there is nothing in the world as tender as the words you merely hint at."

"It is a great shame that I cannot speak to you, there is so much to say and to clear up, and everywhere nothing but obstacles."

"I would like to write more. But I fear that such a letter would exhaust the recipient no more than the author. And what could I add
that has not already been sown between its lines as if they were furrows ?"

"… being together for only a few weeks and then separated once more for months is a state that will sadly continue for years in our case."

"Every word I say is connected to him, and if I lose that bond I will no longer exist."

"My nervousness, which has a variety of causes, has reached a level that can hardly be surpassed; the impossibility of written communication of any prospect of change completely deadens, and I fear you would not have much joy with me."

"I know that one cannot, unfortunately, escape from one’s own life, but it is only now that I have reached the point where I am prepared for anything, any loss, and without any joy at all."