Читать книгу Correspondence, 1939 - 1969 - Gershom Scholem - Страница 7

“Overall, my memory of this might involve much retrospective fantasy,” Theodor W. Adorno reminisced about his first encounter with Gershom Scholem, which must have taken place sometime around 1923.

Anyway, the setting was the Frankfurt Civic Hospital; it seems to me that it was the garden. He was wearing a bathrobe, if I didn’t retroactively make that up, associating it with the impression of a Bedouin prince, which he invoked in me with his blazing eyes – at a time when I was blissfully ignorant of the situation in the Near East. It was this ignorance that made me irreverently say to him that I was envious of his imminent travel to Palestine – it was nothing other than the emigration itself. I imagined the Arab girls to be so appealing, wearing copper chains on their slender ankles. Scholem responded, in that truly down-to-earth Berlin dialect, which he kept through forty-five years of Zion and which the great Hebraist, as a rumor has it, faithfully preserved even in his Hebrew pronunciation: “Well, then you could readily get a knife stuck between your ribs.”¹

This recollection, which may seem to be rather sexist and orientalist, filled, however, with fascination and admiration, featured in Adorno’s congratulatory article on Scholem’s seventieth birthday in December 1967. The concrete occasion for that first encounter was a visit to Siegfried Kracauer, the philosopher and cultural critic, who, as Scholem later recalled, had been hospitalized that day for a “minor malady.” Kracauer was a mutual friend of Adorno and Walter Benjamin, and it was Benjamin who had brought Scholem along for the hospital visit. For his part, Scholem was hardly aware of Adorno’s presence at that visit and was only reminded of it by Adorno decades later.² For Adorno, Scholem not only represented the Jewish sage – knowledgeable in all matters religious, especially regarding the mystical and esoteric – but he also seemed to be the conduit to a realm of cognition that transcends the given social reality, with its instrumental mores. Adorno’s nebulous memory of their first encounter includes such esoteric, mystical, and indeed orientalist elements, which he associated with Scholem’s life and work, as well as the latter’s harsh, pragmatic words of caution: getting carried away with such fantasies could result in being knifed between the ribs. Adorno, the rational critic of irrational society, sought an alternative to instrumental rationality in Scholem’s worldview, while Scholem, the renowned scholar of Jewish mysticism, was himself never weary of warning of mysticism’s temptations and dangers.³ “It was my first information about the conflict that reverberates in the world today,” Adorno concluded his reminiscence, which he published in the widely read German-language Swiss newspaper Neue Zürcher Zeitung six months after the Arab–Israeli “Six-Day War” of June 1967.

The first brief encounter at the Frankfurt Hospital was followed by a decade and a half in which there was no communication whatsoever between Adorno and Scholem. However, each of them was virtually present in the other’s exchanges with their mutual friend Walter Benjamin. Benjamin’s continuous efforts to bring about an amicable relationship between his two close friends were often met with suspicion, skepticism, and presumably also some envy. Scholem – who had known Benjamin since 1915, when the two were eighteen and twenty-three years old, respectively – persistently resisted any closer bond with Adorno. Adorno, born in 1903, met Benjamin in 1923 in Frankfurt, either during a sociology seminar that both attended – Adorno as a student, Benjamin while pursuing his Habilitation (a second doctorate required in Germany for academic posts) – or else at a meeting arranged by Kracauer in a Frankfurt café. Adorno was not able to recall which of these occasions occurred first.⁴ Scholem had also lived for a short time in Frankfurt, before leaving for Palestine to pursue his Zionist political belief in a new Jewish national beginning. He had arrived in Frankfurt from Berlin in April 1923 and stayed until August of that year, before returning to Berlin, from which he left for Palestine in September.⁵ During that brief stay in Frankfurt, in which his fleeting first encounter with Adorno took place, there was ample opportunity for the two to develop a more substantial personal or scholarly relationship. Not only were Adorno and Scholem mutual friends of Benjamin’s, but they also socialized in intersecting intellectual circles. Both Benjamin and Kracauer, alongside, for example, Erich Fromm and Leo Löwenthal – all four would later belong to the wider circle around the Frankfurt Institute of Social Research – attended the Freies Jüdisches Lehrhaus (“Free Jewish House of Learning”), an institute for Jewish education established in 1920 by philosopher Franz Rosenzweig in Frankfurt. Among other attendees – who were at the same time instructors, as the Lehrhaus was based on communal learning rather than teacher-centered classes – were Martin Buber and Ernst Simon, as well as Scholem, who taught and studied Kabbalistic texts in Hebrew while there. Adorno kept his distance from the happenings at the Lehrhaus, however. Born to a Jewish father and a Catholic mother, Adorno entertained no particular interest in Jewish matters, religious, cultural, or otherwise. In fact, he reportedly referred derisively to his friends Fromm and Löwenthal as “Berufsjuden” (“professional Jews”), on account of their involvement in the Lehrhaus.

Scholem, for his part, made no effort to conceal his disdain for Adorno. “A strange reluctance kept me from an encounter with Adorno, which was due at that time and which he probably expected,” he recalled almost half a century later.⁶ “I wrote Walter about this. He replied that my reserved remarks about Adorno could not keep him from drawing my attention to Adorno’s recently published first work on Kierkegaard.”⁷ Adorno’s first book, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, was published in 1933 – “on the very same day in which Hitler seized the dictatorship,” as Adorno himself noted.⁸ The book, based on Adorno’s Habilitation, which was written under the direction of the theologian Paul Tillich, was considerably indebted to the method that Benjamin had developed in his own work, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, based on his failed effort at a Habilitation. Benjamin’s method involved reading material and social phenomena allegorically so as to decipher their hidden “truth-content.”⁹ Both Benjamin and Scholem received the page proofs of Adorno’s Kierkegaard book before publication. Following months of Benjamin’s persistent attempts to persuade Scholem to read Adorno’s book, Scholem finally wrote to Benjamin, in October 1933: “to my mind the book combines a sublime plagiarism of your thought with an uncommon chutzpah, and it will ultimately not mean much for a future, objective appraisal of Kierkegaard, in marked contrast to your analysis of the Trauerspiel. I regret that our opinions probably differ in this matter.”¹⁰ Whether Scholem’s scathing critique of the book was motivated by political aversion due to Adorno’s Marxist approach (which Scholem generally rejected, although he critically tolerated Benjamin’s own Marxist positions), because of Adorno’s detachment from Frankfurt’s Jewish circles and from Judaism altogether (which Scholem interpreted as assimilatory and opportunistic self-denial), or perhaps motivated by his envy of Adorno’s close friendship with Benjamin, the latter’s attempts to establish an amicable and productive relationship between these two great Jewish-German minds repeatedly led to a dead end. At least this was the case when both men lived in Frankfurt, surrounded by the same friends, arguably concerned with similar questions of identity, tradition, and prejudice.

This state of affairs had dramatically changed a few years later, on the other side of the Atlantic, as the world was sinking into murderous chaos. Adorno and Scholem encountered each other again in New York in 1938. Adorno had just arrived in the city, joining Horkheimer at the Institute for Social Research’s new incarnation in exile at Columbia University, and also working on the Princeton Radio Research Project directed by an Austrian-Jewish émigré, sociologist Paul Lazarsfeld. Scholem traveled to New York from Jerusalem – via Paris, where he saw Benjamin for the last time – to deliver the Hilda Stich Stroock Lectures on Jewish mysticism at the Jewish Institute of Religion. On the ship from France, Scholem met Paul Tillich. It was Tillich who succeeded in initiating the contact between Adorno and Scholem, despite the difficult premises. Scholem reported to Benjamin on March 25, 1938: “Wiesengrund wasn’t aboard the ship, and he hasn’t been in touch with me either. However, I did meet with Tillich and his wife, who are resolutely determined to bring me together with Horkheimer and Wiesengrund, with whom, they said, they are very close, which placed me in a somewhat embarrassing position.”¹¹

But, as soon as the meeting took place, both sides readily overcame their predispositions. Scholem’s disdain and mistrust of Adorno was transformed into a careful appreciation motivated by the discovery of mutual interests (although he retained an unrelenting aversion toward Horkheimer). Adorno’s animadversion toward Scholem’s demonstrative Jewish-theological approach, while not overcome, was softened by the latter’s enthusiasm for those radical, heretical dimensions of Judaism which might have resonated, to some extent, with the drives behind the project of critical theory. Both eagerly conveyed their impressions of that meeting, and of each other, to Benjamin. Their accounts shed much light on the origins and foundations of the long-lasting and wide-ranging dialogue that ensued. On May 6, just a few weeks after his arrival in New York, Scholem wrote to Benjamin that he:

was able to establish a very sympathetic relationship [with Wiesengrund-Adorno]. I like him immensely, and we found quite a lot to say to one another. I intend to cultivate relations with him and his wife quite vigorously. Talking with him is pleasant and engaging, and I find it possible to reach agreement on many things. You shouldn’t be surprised by the fact that we spend a great deal of time mulling over your situation.¹²

Benjamin responded from Paris two months later: “I was pleased to see that some things go smoothly as soon as my back is turned. How many complaints have I heard de part et d’autre about you and Wiesengrund! And now it all turns out to have been much ado about nothing. Nobody is more pleased about that than I am.”¹³

Decades later, Scholem explained his sudden change of heart at these meetings, further elucidating his perspective on the beginning of his friendship with Adorno:

The good spirit that prevailed in the meetings between Adorno and me was due not so much to the cordiality of the reception as to my considerable surprise at Adorno’s appreciation of the continuing theological element in Benjamin. I had expected a Marxist who would insist on the liquidation of what were in my opinion the most valuable furnishings in Benjamin’s intellectual household. Instead I encountered here a man who definitely had an open mind and even a positive attitude toward these traits, although he viewed them from his own dialectical perspective.¹⁴

Adorno reported to Benjamin on this remarkable meeting in a letter from March 1938:

You may find this hard to believe, but the first time we got to meet him [Scholem] was at the Tillichs…. Not exactly the best atmosphere in which to be introduced to the Sohar; and especially since Frau Tillich’s relationship to the Kabbala seems to resemble that of a terrified teenager [Backfisch: also, literally, fried fish] to pornography. The antinomian Maggid was extremely reserved towards me at first, and clearly regarded me as some sort of dangerous arch-seducer…. Needless to say, nothing of the kind was actually said, and Scholem contrived to sustain the fiction, with considerable brash grace, that he knew nothing at all about me except that a book of mine had been published by the blessed Siebeck [publisher of Adorno’s book on Kierkegaard]. Nevertheless, I somehow succeeded in breaking the spell and he began to show some kind of trust in me, something which I think will continue to grow.

We have spent a couple of evenings together, as the ringing in your ears has presumably already told you by now; once on our own, in a discussion which touched in part upon our own last conversation in San Remo concerning theology, and in part upon my Husserl piece, which Scholem read with great care, as if it were some intelligence test. We spent the second evening in the company of Max, and Scholem, who was in great form, regaled us in detail with the most astonishing things in connection with Sabbatian and Frankist mysticism; a number of which, however, sounded so clearly reminiscent of some of Rosenberg’s notions about “the people,” that Max was seriously concerned about the prospect of more of this kind actually appearing in print. It is not altogether easy for me to convey my own impression of Scholem. This is indeed a classic case of the conflict between duty and inclination. My personal inclination comes into play most strongly when he makes himself the advocate [Anwalt] of the theological moment of your, and perhaps I might also say of my own, philosophy.¹⁵

It is remarkable, though perhaps not surprising, that in this letter Adorno critically and presciently diagnoses exactly what Scholem would write years after his death, namely of the theological element not only in Benjamin’s but also in his – Adorno’s – own thought. Already during their first conversations, Adorno and Scholem discovered that they shared much more with each other than they had initially themselves presumed. Scholem displayed what seems to be a genuine and profound interest in Adorno’s work. Although he dismissed the main thesis of Adorno’s Kierkegaard book and accused its author of plagiarism, Scholem was indeed intrigued by the materialist, dialectical reading of a theological thinker. Adorno’s work on Husserl, which began as his dissertation and continued – with various versions of papers published along the way – until the publication in 1956 of his book on Husserl, Zur Metakritik der Erkenntnistheorie [trans. as Against Epistemology: A Metacritique], seems to have sparked Scholem’s own philosophical interest. Scholem’s initially critical and often dismissive approach toward Adorno’s work (in letters to Benjamin and others) was increasingly overturned, and he ultimately came to discover a common language with the dialectical social philosopher. His interest in Adorno’s work, although motivated at first by Benjamin and the proximity to his work, largely transcends their shared interest in all things Benjamin. Adorno and Scholem’s correspondence reveals, for the first time, the full scope of the thematic resonance that they found with each other.

Adorno, for his part, was – cautiously – fascinated by Scholem’s work on religious mysticism and its heretical, transgressive offshoots. Baptized as a Catholic and raised in an assimilated Jewish family, which kept its distance from anything “professionally Jewish,” Adorno was never a religious thinker, and even less so a Jewish thinker – at least not conspicuously. His interest in Kierkegaard’s theological thought was philosophical and predominantly aesthetic. Furthermore, as a harsh critic of irrationality and the occult, Adorno had an attitude toward Kabbalah and the mystical dimensions of life that could not, at first glance, have been more apprehensive. But in Scholem’s writings he did not perceive an irrational relapse into mythical thinking of the sort he critically diagnoses, for example, in Minima Moralia, as occultism. “The tendency to occultism,” he notes there, “is a symptom of regression in consciousness. This has lost the power to think the unconditional and to endure the conditional.”¹⁶ On the contrary, Scholem’s work on mysticism represented for Adorno an alternative to the all-consuming power of instrumental reason, a realm of possibilities beyond the given social order and the limitations that this social order imposed on thought and the imagination. As Adorno understood Scholem’s project, mysticism does not necessarily seek to transcend the given reality in order to escape to an imaginary realm outside of it. Rather than fleeing the conditional into a regressive and escapist form of metaphysical surrogate for this world, it translated concrete, material, earthly life into mystical categories, thereby allowing for a critical perspective on this life.

At the time of their first encounter in 1938, Scholem had already published a significant body of work on various aspects of Jewish mysticism. His Munich dissertation, a German translation of the Bahir, the first book of the Kabbalah, was published in 1922. His annotated German translation of a chapter from the Zohar, the most central book of the Kabbalah, furnished with his detailed introduction on the book’s historical and conceptual aspects, was published in 1935. In his lectures at the Jewish Institute of Religion in New York, held at the time of his first conversations with Adorno, Scholem elaborated on this topic, which was the subject, in part, of their discussion. But at that time Scholem was enthusiastically pursuing pioneering research into another dimension of Jewish mysticism, namely heretical messianism. In 1937, he published a text that would become a signpost of modern scholarship on Sabbatianism and Frankism, the Jewish heretical movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that followed the self-proclaimed messiahs Sabbatai Sevi (1626–1676) and Jacob Frank (1726–1791), respectively. “Mitzvah ha-ba’ah ba’averah” – literally: a commandment fulfilled by transgression – initially published only in Hebrew, was translated into English only decades later, in 1971, as “Redemption through Sin.”¹⁷ Aware of the subject’s delicate, controversial dimensions and its inflammatory potential, Scholem insisted on keeping a discussion of its topic within the boundaries of Jewish communities. He published an abbreviated, expurgated German version of the text, excluding all the transgressive and contentious elements.¹⁸ The Sabbatian and Frankist movements, Scholem explained, drew from Kabbalistic cosmogonic theories, especially Lurianic Kabbalah – the teachings of Rabbi Isaac Luria of Safed in the sixteenth century – on the notions of good and evil, and concluded that, in order to achieve redemption in times of exile and catastrophe, the messiah and his followers are commanded to transgress prevailing norms and laws, to commit evil deeds, overturning divine law and religious commandments. The original Hebrew text discusses such transgressions in detail – from moral crimes to forbidden sexual acts and religious blasphemies, culminating in apostasy: Sabbatai Sevi converted to Islam, Jacob Frank to Christianity. The followers of both, however, retained their Jewish faith beneath the ostensive practice of their newly acquired religions as crypto-Jews, forever the subject of suspicion and aversion. But the need to transgress the given law, to challenge predominant morality for the sake of true redemption and liberation, was the main motif of Scholem’s own modern rendering of the Sabbatian and Frankist doctrines. This was the subject of Scholem’s conversations in New York with Theodor and Gretel Adorno, attended by Max Horkheimer, who, as noted above, feared that such scholarship might only affirm certain anti-Semitic prejudices (the year was 1938), and he was “seriously concerned about the prospect of more of this kind actually appearing in print.” Adorno himself, however, must have been better able to relate to Scholem’s theory, in particular to its disobedient, anti-normative, and anti-authoritarian – one might also suggest: anarchist – elements. Additionally, Scholem’s historical reading of heretical messianism emphasized the materialistic, social, and psychological aspects of such soteriological theories. Rather than explaining them from a merely theological point of view, Scholem offered an interpretation that analyzed the heretical mysticism of the Sabbatian and Frankist movements – as well as Lurianic Kabbalah in which they originated – as giving expression to the material, social, and psychological needs of the exiled Jewish communities. Later on, in his autobiography From Berlin to Jerusalem, he in fact referred to Adorno and the Frankfurt School as a latter-day incarnation of such heretical sects.¹⁹

Nevertheless, whereas the personal meetings transformed Scholem’s perception of Adorno, enabling him to transcend his initially skeptical premises and suspicions, Adorno, for his part, experienced this encounter as more complex. Along with his fascination for Scholem’s anarchist mystical theories and his respect for the latter’s erudition in both German philosophy and Jewish history, Adorno was also somewhat perplexed by his theological – one might add, arguably, political-theological – worldview. Specifically, as he noted in his report to Benjamin, Adorno was definitely uneasy about Scholem’s heavyhanded effort to advance the theological element in Benjamin’s – and in his own – thought. Scholem, Adorno suspected, claimed authority not only over Benjamin’s thought, which conspicuously merged theology with materialism, but also over Adorno’s own philosophy, in which – despite numerous theological references and metaphors – theology ultimately plays a rather marginal role.

Such proximities of interest and differences of perspective did, however, allow Adorno and Scholem to establish a fruitful and profound dialogue. At the same time, it is important to note that their differences and dissensions were initially expressed only covertly, mainly in letters to Benjamin. After Benjamin’s death, they were transmuted into a less tangible, underlying tenor of the exchange. As the correspondence shows, these differences were not detrimental to their relationship but contributed, rather, to the sensitive and nuanced communication. They added an underlying facet of irony that continuously conceals but never eliminates the discrepancies. Precisely because of these proximities and differences, much is left unsaid in the correspondence. What the authors agree on is assumed as a given; what they disagree about is softened in order to avoid confrontations. Although continuously kept at bay, however, the tensions – interpersonal and, more substantially, theoretical, conceptual, and perspectival – are hard to overlook. The correspondence therefore requires a form of active reading between the lines, of filling in the gaps with information available through other sources. What the authors write to each other gains an additional dimension once it is read in the light of their exchanges with Benjamin and others, as well as their published and unpublished writings.

Benjamin’s suicide in 1940 – which took place when he was attempting to escape the Nazi occupation of France but was turned back at the French border in Port-Bou, Spain – deeply affected his two close friends. Their correspondence, which began a year before Benjamin’s death, grew more intense as they shared reports about his precarious situation, and their concerns about his fate became grave. After his death, their recently forged friendship was strengthened by their mutual efforts to preserve Benjamin’s legacy. Adorno and Scholem joined forces in the project of editing and publishing Benjamin’s writings and letters. Although not completely unknown, Benjamin’s work eluded widespread public attention during his lifetime. His numerous newspaper articles and literary reviews, along with the four books he published between 1920 and 1928 (with an annotated edition of letters written by German intellectuals, entitled Deutsche Menschen [German men and women], in 1936), could not have guaranteed him the reputation he enjoyed in the succeeding decades. This reputation is entirely indebted to his friends’ efforts – against all odds and in the face of countless obstacles. The correspondence provides extensive evidence of the struggles Adorno and Scholem undertook to establish Walter Benjamin as the outstanding seminal figure of modern European thought that he has meanwhile become. Readers familiar with Benjamin’s work may find it surprising to discover in the correspondence that, without Adorno and Scholem’s monumental efforts and harsh struggles, Benjamin’s writings – and his status as an intellectual figure – would most likely have been doomed to oblivion. It is perhaps no exaggeration to suggest that Walter Benjamin as we know him today, as a writer, philosopher, and cultural critic, is, to a certain degree, a “product,” a “creation” fashioned by his two close friends. Not only did Adorno and Scholem struggle to bring Benjamin’s writing into the light of the public, they were also concerned with each and every detail of the way Benjamin – both the man and his work – would be received and perceived. As editors of the first publication of his collected writings, they made careful choices as to which texts to include and how to present them, bringing to the fore those writings that they considered significant and representative of his thought and omitting those that they would rather not have seen published. In any event, this was the harsh critique leveled at the two editors following the publications of Benjamin’s collected writings and correspondence. They were charged with manipulating the content and the reception of his work, reclaiming his thought as either too Marxist or too theological. Wherever one falls with respect to these accusations, the correspondence between Adorno and Scholem shows that their editorial work, and their efforts to establish Benjamin’s intellectual legacy, involved substantial theoretical and practical debates on how to decipher, interpret, and present his thought.

In 1950, Adorno published Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood around 1900, a collection of literary, autobiographical aphorisms, which Benjamin intended, without success, to publish in book form. (Some of these aphorisms were published in journals, most of them pseudonymously).²⁰ Adorno edited the book based on the manuscript he had previously received from Benjamin and on their earlier conversations. He also wrote an afterword, which he did not sign. The volume was published by the newly established Suhrkamp Verlag, as the second title in its prestigious series Bibliothek Suhrkamp. It was a colossal commercial failure.²¹ A first collection of Benjamin’s writings, under the modest title Schriften [Writings], was published a few years later, edited by Gretel and Theodor Adorno, together with Friedrich Podszus, the editor for Suhrkamp. They were substantially assisted by Scholem, who, as Adorno writes in the introduction (this time signed with his name), “provided the manuscripts of the early writings and altogether contributed to the realization of the project with his advisory participation.”²² The two-volume edition was published in 1955, making Benjamin’s work available to a broader audience for the first time. In the following years, Adorno collaborated with Scholem on an edited collection of Benjamin’s letters. Published in 1966, the collection received significant attention and led to a wide-ranging discussion of Benjamin’s life and work. Whereas Benjamin’s early writings had received hardly any attention, and the publisher – reluctant to avoid another unmarketable Benjamin volume – balked even at the idea of a volume collecting his letters, the response to this publication was spectacular. In fact, the debates on Benjamin’s legacy were so intense – especially among the German student movements, which were overwhelmingly inspired by his thought – that Adorno actually felt compelled to lock Benjamin’s manuscripts away inside a vault – far from the madding crowd. It was at this point that Adorno and Scholem were accused – by the political student movements in Berlin and West Germany, and by literary scholars and journalists, even in East Germany – of manipulating the reception of Benjamin’s work according to their own views. The main concern of these critics was that Adorno and Scholem had overemphasized the theological moment in Benjamin’s thought at the expense of his Marxism. Whatever the historical truth in the case might be, if it is at all determinable, the correspondence testifies to its authors’ unwavering commitment to establish Benjamin’s legacy, against all odds, while defending their own authority, as editors and self-appointed estate managers, against attacks from a multiplicity of sides.

Whereas, at the outset of their correspondence, Benjamin was the connecting link between Adorno and Scholem, after his death he becomes the missing – yet ever present – link. Likewise, the correspondence between Adorno and Scholem is the hitherto missing angle in a triangle. It completes a triangle that began in 1980, when Scholem edited for publication his own exchange with Benjamin from the years 1933 to 1940. The impetus behind this publication was the unearthing of his own correspondence with Benjamin, previously considered lost. Scholem learned in 1966 that large portions of this correspondence with Benjamin had survived in Paris and were stored in the East German archives. As it turned out, Scholem’s earlier letters to Benjamin, left in the latter’s Berlin apartment, were confiscated by the Gestapo, but the letters sent to Benjamin in Paris were discovered – in boxes related to the Pariser Tageszeitung, a journal of German émigrés in Paris – by the Red Army. They were transferred to Moscow from Paris, and from there they were sent to the East German Central Archives in Potsdam. Later on, they were moved to the Literary Archives in East Berlin, which Scholem visited in 1966. More than ten years elapsed before Scholem received copies of these letters, in 1977, which made possible the publication – edited and annotated by Scholem – of his own correspondence with Benjamin. The correspondence between Adorno and Benjamin constituted the next angle of the triangle. It includes letters from 1928, when Benjamin lived in Berlin and Adorno in Frankfurt, until Benjamin’s death in 1940. From the years preceding Benjamin’s escape to Paris, only Benjamin’s letters survived. Adorno’s pre-1934 letters, like Scholem’s – presumably left behind in Benjamin’s Berlin apartment – are irretrievably missing. The correspondence, edited by Henri Lonitz from the Frankfurt Adorno archive, was published by Suhrkamp in 1994, as the first volume of Adorno’s correspondences with friends, colleagues, and his parents.

The present volume, which formally completes the triangle, was originally published in 2015 as the eighth volume in the series of Adorno’s collected correspondence. As Jürgen Habermas wrote in his review of the German volume, the correspondence is “documentation of one of the finest hours of German-Jewish intellectual history – after the Holocaust … a reminder of the widely ramified network of relationships between a grand generation of German-Jewish intellectuals – including rivalries and viciousness in this small academic-literary world in which Ernst Bloch and Georg Lukács, Martin Buber and Siegfried Kracauer, Helmuth Plessner, Hannah Arendt, and Herbert Marcuse lived next-door to one another” (Die Zeit, April 2015). The volume virtually begins where the two others end. Already in the second letter of the correspondence, Scholem writes: “I am extremely worried about the fate of Walter Benjamin, from whom I have received very troubling news from Paris.”²³ The following letters discuss possibilities for saving Benjamin’s life, until in the fifth letter, from October 1940, Adorno conveys that “Walter Benjamin has taken his life.”²⁴ From there, efforts are made to understand the exact circumstances of Benjamin’s death and to rescue his work and legacy. Despite the authors’ diverging viewpoints of Benjamin’s thought, they succeed in overcoming their differences to unfold a comprehensive – critical, but constructive – conversation regarding the substance, meaning, and power of Benjamin’s work.

Nevertheless, the intellectual relationship between Adorno and Scholem encompasses far more than their joint efforts to establish and sustain their mutual friend’s legacy. The present correspondence documents their substantial, wide-ranging, and far-reaching dialogue. In particular, it shows that Adorno and Scholem read each other’s work with serious interest and enthusiastically reported to each other of their reading experiences. Adorno, the Marxist social philosopher and cultural critic, emerges as a dedicated reader and admirer of Scholem’s work on Jewish mysticism. As he reported to Scholem, Adorno read the latter’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (based on Scholem’s 1938 New York lectures and published in 1941) “repeatedly [and] internalized it as well as anyone can who does not speak Hebrew. In substance, I was most powerfully moved by the chapter on Lurianic mysticism, the basic concepts of which appear infinitely productive to me.”²⁵ It is not surprising, therefore, that Kabbalistic motifs found their way into Adorno’s own writings. Scholem, the anti-Marxist historian of religion, read Adorno’s various writings with great care, often critically – but respectfully and constructively – pointing out problems and difficulties and not hesitating to suggest his own interpretations of his friend’s work. Having read Minima Moralia: Reflections from a Damaged Life, Adorno’s first book to be published in post-war Germany, a collection of social and cultural critical aphorisms on life in late capitalism, Scholem was inclined to assign the book to the long tradition of esoteric writings of negative theology: “I am not sure,” he wrote, “whether I always fully grasped your intentions, which, in keeping with a great esoteric tradition, lie hidden within the dialectic; nonetheless, your treatise appears to me to be one of the most a remarkable documents of negative theology.”²⁶ Adorno, for his part, responded that, “as for [the] reading of my book of aphorisms in terms of a negative theology, I have no objections, provided that this reading remains as esoteric as the subject itself. If, however, one translates the book straightforwardly into theological categories … then neither the book nor, presumably, the categories feel quite at ease.”²⁷ Instead of rejecting each other’s work from their divergent and, arguably, opposed perspectives on life, philosophy, and scholarship, Adorno and Scholem both chose to make each other’s work applicable to their own. Accordingly, the correspondence sheds light on Adorno’s hitherto unknown interest in Kabbalah and its impact on his own thought and writings. It also reveals Scholem’s interest in critical theory, as well as the dialectical-materialist dimensions of his own scholarship on Jewish mysticism.

The letters comprising this volume provide a rare insight into a relationship that spans thirty years in a most turbulent time in history. The correspondence begins in 1939, only a year after Adorno’s arrival in the US from England, where, having escaped Nazi Germany, he had spent the years between 1934 and 1938 unsuccessfully attempting to establish a scholarly career at the University of Oxford. It ends in 1969, with Adorno’s death during a summer vacation in Switzerland. The underlying tone of the letters is implicitly shaped by the protagonists’ divergent portentous life decisions and responses to the rise of anti-Semitism and Nazism in Germany. Scholem’s wish for a new life of Zionist self-determination motivated him as a young man, as early as 1923, to emigrate from his native Germany to the unknown shores of Palestine. This decision remains constantly at odds with Adorno’s preference to remain in his hostile homeland for as long as possible, temporarily relocating when no alternative was at hand, first to England, and then to the United States, and returning to his home city of Frankfurt in 1949, only four years after the war ended.²⁸

These personal and political choices were arguably related to – influenced by and influencing – the philosophical, historical, social, and political questions addressed in Adorno’s and Scholem’s scholarships. Scholem’s decision to leave his native Germany behind and begin a new life in what he considered to be the promised land of the Jewish people was a political decision supported by and anchored in his scholarly work. For his part, Adorno continuously reflected philosophically on the meaning of life in exile, as well as on the meaning of a life in Germany in the wake of the Nazi Holocaust. During his years in exile, he made collaborative efforts with Max Horkheimer to understand – from the perspective of a philosophy of history – the Urgeschichte – that is, the primordial, underlying conception of history that could give an account of the relapse from progress to regression, from Enlightenment to destructive irrationality, as was elaborated in the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944/1947).²⁹ After his return to Germany, Adorno sought to elucidate not only the mechanisms that lead to fascism and authoritarianism but also the methods for educating the masses, in particular the younger generations, to resist and combat prejudice and oppression.³⁰

Thematically, the correspondence begins with an in-depth textual analysis, namely, Adorno’s own interpretation of the Zohar, the Kabbalistic “Book of Splendor.”³¹ Adorno refers to Scholem’s own translation, which the two discussed during their first conversations in New York, a copy of which Scholem sent to Adorno after his return to Jerusalem. The chapter translated by Scholem is entitled “Sitrei Torah” [The secrets of the Torah]. It provides a mystical interpretation of the biblical story of the world’s creation in Genesis.³² Now it was Adorno’s turn to suggest his own interpretation – and this interpretation is not only illuminating in itself, it also provides a lens for understanding some of Adorno’s most central concepts. In his reading of Scholem’s translation, Adorno presents two substantial remarks: one concerns, as he writes, the history of philosophy, while the other concerns epistemology. Although the relation to Adorno’s own work is not conspicuous at first glance, a close examination will reveal the intrinsic relation between his reading of the text and his own work from the same time: the “philosophical fragments” that will comprise his seminal Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-authored with Horkheimer just a few years later. The proximity raises the question as to whether Adorno “ha[s] not read out of it anything other than what [he has] read into it,” as he is willing to admit, or whether these ideas found their way – directly or indirectly – into the reflections that constitute the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s main theses.

Firstly, Adorno detects in the Zohar chapter a proximity between Jewish mysticism and the Neoplatonic gnostic tradition. He aligns the Zohar with the Western tradition of gnostic metaphysics, in which knowledge of the unknowable is sought in a negative way, through a search for the “remainders” of a presumed original experience, without presupposing such an experience. Adorno calls this a process of disintegration and emphasizes that, for him, the concept of disintegration carries no pejorative implications. On the contrary, understanding the process of disintegration is a most valuable method for a philosophy of history that seeks to detect historical truth by examining its demise. Although not explicitly stated in the letter, Benjamin’s theories of truth and allegory – as presented in Origin of the German Trauerspiel are most decisive here: both Adorno and Scholem were familiar with it (Adorno, in fact, held seminars on the book in the early 1930s in Frankfurt), and it arguably shaped their views on the concept of historical truth. For Adorno, such disintegration of experience and truth is the process that generates myth. When truth and experience can no longer be recognized or communicated in their immediacy, they tend to be translated into myth. These are the historical origins of myth and of mythical thinking. These are, at the same time, the very mystical truths and experiences that the Enlightenment sought to annihilate, but failed to do so, since it could revert back to myth only by creating ever newer mythologies. Adorno describes this process here as “the transformation of spiritualism into myth.” This, in a nutshell, is the argument that will be unfolded in the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s diagnosis, namely that “Myth is already enlightenment, and enlightenment reverts to mythology.”³³

Secondly, Adorno asks about the nature of symbolic representation in Jewish mysticism – namely, whether the symbols conceal a hidden reality which can become tangible through a process of deciphering that would allow us to see reality as it is, or whether we can only face an endless chain of symbols: as he puts it, “whether there is any ground in this hierarchy of symbols or whether it represents a bottomless fall.”³⁴ The latter case raises the question of what Adorno calls “the context of delusion” [Verblendungszusammenhang]. This concept, which will become ever more central and decisive in Adorno’s work, in the Dialectic of Enlightenment and in subsequent writings, is introduced here for the first time. It concerns the epistemological question as to the possibility of seeing beyond social and ideological delusion. If we are continuously being deceived by the mechanisms of power and domination, and if these mechanisms affect, first and foremost, our consciousness and our ability to see clearly and critically, then how is it possible to “see through the delusion”? This epistemological but, at the same time, social and political question is one of the most essential questions both in Adorno’s work and in the Frankfurt School’s critical theory overall. It is noteworthy that it is developed here, probably for the first time, by means of an interpretation of the Zohar.

It is fair to suggest that, while Adorno has never truly delved into the depths of Kabbalistic mysticism – or, for that matter, of any theological doctrine as such – he was indeed interested in its content and familiar with its ideas to the extent that he could reappropriate them for his own philosophical purposes. As noted above, having read Scholem’s Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Adorno acknowledged the significance and productive potential of Lurianic Kabbalah. Initially developed by Rabbi Isaac Luria (1534–1572) in the community of Safed, located in the Galilee region of Palestine, and further articulated by his disciples (Luria himself produced no written texts; his teachings were transcribed by his disciples), Lurianic Kabbalah is a mystical theory of redemption. It provides a cosmogonic theory of the world’s creation, as formed by an omnipotent God and shattered by His very omnipotence. Such shattering is deemed a crisis of destruction, which places the potential of mending and restitution in the hands of human beings. Metaphysical redemption depends, accordingly, on human agency. Luria calls it “Tikkun,” mending. Although it is impossible to assert with absolute evidence, there is good reason to consider Adorno’s final aphorism of Minima Moralia to be a response to such Lurianic metaphysics of shattering and restitution:

The only philosophy which can be responsibly practiced in face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption. Knowledge has no light but that shed on the world by redemption: all else is reconstruction, mere technique. Perspectives must be fashioned that displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light.³⁵

Beyond the use of theological, soteriological, and arguably Kabbalistic terminology, it seems that Adorno’s very argument on the scope of redemption provides a response – which requires human agency and action – to what he perceives as “damaged life”: the destruction of natural, individual life by late capitalism and its ideology. Viewed from this perspective, the subject of Adorno’s book of aphorisms largely resonates with the destruction of divine powers in the mystical story of the world’s creation in Luria’s Kabbalistic metaphysics. In both cases – and this point is crucial to Adorno as much as it is crucial for Luria – metaphysical, theological redemption depends on ethics: on human, moral action.

To what extent, however, and in what sense can one speak of messianism in Adorno’s philosophy? And how much of it is indeed indebted to Scholem’s scholarship? This is one of the central and most intriguing questions that emerge from their correspondence. There are numerous hints and indications in Adorno’s writings and throughout the correspondence, which call for various interpretations. But one version of messianism is decidedly pertinent in this context, namely that of heretical messianism. Before reading any of Scholem’s published texts, Adorno learned at first hand of Scholem’s research on the topic during their first conversations. Adorno had most likely not received a copy of Scholem’s German text on the topic from 1937 (a copy of which Scholem sent to Benjamin), but he had read the relevant chapters in Major Trends. He also kept track of Scholem’s papers for the Eranos conference, an annual meeting of scholars of religion, which took place in Ascona, Switzerland. Scholem participated regularly in these meetings and published his papers in the Eranos Yearbook. From the mid-1950s onward, Scholem’s main research papers were first presented at these conferences, and published in the Eranos Yearbook, before finding their way into his own published collections of articles. Adorno attested to collecting and reading these works, some of which – especially on the topic of messianism, as he wrote – meant a great deal to him personally.³⁶

An opportunity for Adorno to learn more about these matters presented itself in 1963. Scholem, who was probably inclined to make Adorno aware of the proximity between heretical messianism and the latter’s own project of critical theory, suggested that he could contribute an article to the Festschrift celebrating Adorno’s sixtieth birthday. The title of his initial suggestion was “Heretical Messianism and Jewish Society,” implying a connection between his research on Sabbatianism and Adorno’s social philosophy. The paper, included in the volume Zeugnisse: Theodor W. Adorno zum 60. Geburtstag [Testimonials: for Theodor W. Adorno’s 60th birthday], edited by Max Horkheimer, was eventually entitled “Die Metamorphose des häretischen Messianismus der Sabbatianer in religiösen Nihilismus im 18. Jahrhundert” [The metamorphosis of the Sabbatians’ heretical messianism into religious nihilism in the 18th century].³⁷ This is a remarkable but underexplored text. In it, Scholem seems to be conducting historical research into the formation of Frankism and its radical doctrine of unlawfulness and transgression as a means to redemption; however, under the guise of historical scholarship, he brings to light some remarkable affinities between this heretical doctrine and Adorno’s own philosophy. For example, Scholem emphasizes the Frankists’ understanding of the existing social order as governed by unjustified, oppressive laws. Therefore, Frank and his followers believed it to be the task of the individual to question, challenge, and transgress these laws. In this text, Scholem conjoins heretical theology with the critique of unjust laws and oppressive social normativity. The Frankist anti-authoritarian movement, Scholem surmises, resonates with some aspects of Adorno’s philosophy – those aspects, one may assume, to which Scholem could relate positively, namely the anarchist dimensions of critical theory, which, by contesting the existing social order, aspired to a certain vision of utopian life.

In most cases, Adorno and Scholem maintained an amicable, gentle tone in their replies to each other, often suppressing and concealing dissensions and disagreements. But such dissensions and disagreements belong to the overall conversation, both on personal and on scholarly matters. Scholem, in particular, did not spare his critique of Adorno’s writings, especially when they touched upon two matters about which he had profound views: Marxism and Zionism. The latter was particularly important to Scholem. The Dialectic of Enlightenment’s analyses of myth, culture, and human history conclude with a chapter entitled “Elements of Anti-Semitism.” Overall, the book’s topics largely converge with Scholem’s various scholarly and historical-political interests. However, while Scholem generally accepted the premises and the arguments of the first historical-philosophical chapters on the dialectics of progress and regression and on the relation between myth and enlightenment, he was infuriated by the analysis of modern anti-Semitism in the book’s final chapter. He left Adorno’s queries about his response to the book unanswered, but he did study the text thoroughly, as the notes that he wrote in his own copy of the book and on the back of one of Adorno’s letters attest.

In the sixth thesis of the “Elements of Anti-Semitism,” Adorno and Horkheimer contend that³⁸

Only the liberation of thought from power, the abolition of violence, could realize the idea which has been unrealized until now: that the Jew is a human being. This would be a step away from the anti-Semitic society, which drives both Jews and others into sickness, and toward the human one.³⁹

“Awful in his Marxist mendacity,” Scholem commented. “So in Zion the Jew cannot be a human being?” Adorno and Horkheimer’s insistence on the essential separation between thinking and power as the foundation of emancipation and the abolition of violence appears opposed to Scholem’s understanding of Zionism as a recoupling of thought and power. Instead of liberating thought from its entanglement with power, thereby redeeming Jews from their continual subjection to those in power, as Adorno and Horkheimer demand, Scholem views Zionism as itself a reclamation of power, placing it in the hands of a Jewish political sovereignty. Scholem never expresses his critique explicitly in his letters to Adorno (and one may presume that it never became a subject of personal conversations either). Nonetheless, the matter continues to haunt their exchanges in a subterranean fashion. At the same time, Scholem was pleased to detect what he considered to be his own influence on Adorno’s writings. When, in the chapter on anti-Semitism, Adorno and Horkheimer explain that “Reconciliation is Judaism’s highest concept, and expectation its whole meaning,”⁴⁰ Scholem notes on the page margin: “Das hat er von mir” – “this he got from me.”

To be sure, it is uncertain whether Adorno and Horkheimer – particularly Horkheimer, with whom Scholem shared a deep mutual antipathy – gained this knowledge from Scholem. However, Scholem’s influence cannot be overlooked in Adorno’s later writings. While it is debatable whether ideas such as in the aphorism from Minima Moralia cited above do indeed allude to Kabbalistic texts, Adorno’s late magnum opus of 1966, Negative Dialectics, unquestionably draws on Scholem’s scholarship to explicate some of the main tenets of Adorno’s central question on the possibility of philosophy after the Holocaust. At the beginning of the book’s final part, under the title “Meditations on Metaphysics” and its opening section “After Auschwitz,” Adorno writes:

One of the mystical impulses secularized in dialectics was the doctrine that the intramundane and historic is relevant to what traditional metaphysics distinguished as transcendence – or at least, less gnostically and radically put, that it is relevant to the position taken by human consciousness on the questions which the canon of philosophy assigned to metaphysics.⁴¹

Scholem, who had also thoroughly read and extensively annotated Negative Dialectics, noted in the margin next to these lines: “Kabbalah.” Indeed, it was a central characteristic of mystical theories, including – but not limited to – Jewish Kabbalistic theories (Christian mysticism, and even the Christian reception of Kabbalah may be counted in this view),⁴² to emphasize that actions and events that take place on earth, committed by human beings, effect and shape transcendence – that is, they have an impact on the divine. The intersection and interaction between worldly and transcendent entities play central roles in Kabbalah. Adorno introduces this mystical idea into his own re-evaluation of metaphysics: the catastrophe of the Holocaust makes it evidently clear, for Adorno, that worldly events shape the structure of metaphysics, of any realm beyond the here and now, and of any possible understanding of this realm. Understanding this context and the allusion to mystical impulses that connect the worldly with the transcendent sheds special light on Adorno’s unique concept of metaphysics. Against Scholem’s anti-Marxist view, such an intersection between concrete-material and abstract-metaphysical (or theological) elements conspicuously corresponds to Marx’s historical dialectics, on which Adorno elaborates here. Adorno’s concept of metaphysics, in its substantive difference from the long tradition of metaphysical thought in the Western canon, does not exclude the temporal, historical, material elements – the “intramundane” – from metaphysics. Metaphysics, for Adorno, is the study not of immediate and absolute essences and categories but, rather, of contingencies, eventualities, and possibilities.

Furthermore, in Adorno’s emphasis on the mediated character of metaphysics – that is, on the fact that no metaphysics can ever claim to be immediate, unrelated to given, contingent historical and material matters – he draws again from theories of Jewish mysticism. “It has been observed,” he argues, “that mysticism … establishes social traditions and comes from tradition, across the lines of demarcation drawn by religions that regard each other as heretical. Cabbala, the name of the body of Jewish mysticism, means tradition. In its farthest ventures, metaphysical immediacy did not deny how much of it is not immediate.”⁴³ In his own copy of the book, Scholem noted in the margin next to these lines “Scholem.” Indeed, it was Scholem who explained – in his first letter to Adorno, in response to the latter’s own remark on the Zohar – that the literal meaning of Kabbalah is tradition, emphasizing its historically mediated character over any understanding of primordial immediacy. Kabbalah, similar to Adorno’s philosophy, seeks not to understand any absolute proto-historical or meta-historical essence or experience but, rather, to draw an idea of transcendence – of material and utopian possibilities – from given historical experience, handed down over times and generations. Against this backdrop, Adorno’s social philosophy and metaphysics, as a theory of political redemption and emancipation, may indeed appear to follow in the footsteps of the mystical heretics whom Scholem explored in his scholarship.

In addition – and not unrelated – to their scholarly interests, the experience of the Holocaust and the analysis of its meaning played a significant role in Adorno’s and Scholem’s thought and writings, though with divergent emphases and implications. For Adorno, the Holocaust marked the line of demarcation, after which it becomes impossible to continue adhering to any theory of meaning that does not take into metaphysical, philosophical consideration the historical events of the destruction. For Scholem, however, the Holocaust does not mark any line of demarcation at all: he viewed it as the radical but imminent result of a long process of Jewish assimilation, self-oblivion, and loss of agency. It is nevertheless remarkable that, despite – or perhaps because of – the radical impact of these events on the life of both authors (Scholem’s brother Werner, a communist politician in the Weimar Republic, was deported to the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1938 and executed by the Nazis in 1940), their letters do not include an assessment or an interpretation of the meaning of the Holocaust, personally, historically, or ideologically. This, too, remains a decisive underlying facet of their exchange. In the post-war years, one of the central questions in their published writings, as much as in their private correspondence, concerns their relation to Germany and the possibility of a German-Jewish dialogue. Here, the biographical differences could not be more conspicuous. On behalf of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Scholem traveled to Europe in the post-war years to examine the situation of Jewish books and manuscripts that were either looted by the Nazis or left behind by their persecuted, and in most cases exterminated, owners. His first journey took place in 1946, as part of a two-man delegation alongside Avraham Yaari of the National Library in Jerusalem. Their expedition included cities that were centers of Jewish life and culture before the war, which were subsequently covered in debris and destruction. Beginning their journey in London and Paris, Scholem and Yaari traveled to Zurich, Prague, Frankfurt, Offenbach, Heidelberg, Munich, and Berlin. Scholem was devasted by the situation he faced in Europe. For one thing, he felt that it was impossible for him to accomplish the task he was assigned. He was deeply disappointed by the failure to find many of the manuscripts he was seeking and by the disarray of the depots housing the books whose original owners could not be identified. He was also dismayed by the unwillingness of the personalities responsible for the materials to allow for their 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 Despite his commitment to return to Germany and to contribute to post-war enlightenment, and political education in particular, his uncertainty was still significant enough to necessitate these journeys. Adorno’s long-term professional instability and insecurity in American exile was at odds with Scholem’s secure and influential position in his newly adopted homeland in Palestine. This might have held implications for the differences between their views on diasporic life and the question of a return to Germany. After emigrating in 1923, Scholem initially worked as a librarian, directing the departments of Hebrew and Judaica at the Jerusalem National Library. But, shortly after the Hebrew University of Jerusalem was formally established in 1925, he was appointed as a lecturer, and in 1933 he was promoted to a full professorship of Jewish mysticism. It is noteworthy that this is the very year in which the Nazis revoked Adorno’s license for academic teaching. Scholem’s profound ideological faith in the Zionist idea as a solution to all theological, social, and political problems of the Jews was also, even more substantially, at odds with Adorno’s skepticism about any such ideological, nationalist, and particularist solutions. The Holocaust and the Jewish catastrophe only strengthened Scholem’s views on the need for a national Jewish home, whereas they only intensified Adorno’s skepticism about such absolute solutions, deepening his worries about the threat of nationalism of any sort.

Such differences in worldviews are tacitly present throughout Adorno and Scholem’s entire correspondence. Both aware of the fundamental discrepancies in their political thought, particularly regarding German-Jewish life, the two men remained cautious not to let these differences harm their friendship. But the differences were insurmountable: Scholem opted for a decisively particularist worldview, in which Jewish life and responsibility for fellow Jews were at the center of any ethical and political consideration, while Adorno, wary and vigilant of any such kind of political bias, held on to a universalist position – especially in reflections on the ethical meaning and political lessons to be learned from the experience of the Holocaust. He famously contended: “A new categorical imperative has been imposed by Hitler upon unfree mankind: to arrange their thoughts and actions so that Auschwitz will not repeat itself, so that nothing similar will happen.”⁵²

In his new role as a philosopher and public intellectual in post-war Germany, Adorno was increasingly dedicated to the task of educating the new generation of Germans to think critically, both philosophically and politically: not to accept unquestioned authorities, not to be tempted by any form of social prejudice or political chauvinism. He was committed to a “new categorical imperative” that would make a recurrence of the Holocaust impossible. Whereas Scholem’s scholarly and political efforts focused on strengthening the Jewish moral and political consciousness in the form of Jewish nationalism, Adorno emphasized the necessity of a prevention of the recurrence of Auschwitz – that is, of the Jewish catastrophe (one should keep in mind here that, in Auschwitz, not only Jews were murdered) – and of anything “similar”: “so that nothing similar will happen.” Adorno was never content with a purely particularistic position. The new ethical responsibility, engrained in him by the experiences of the Holocaust, was for him, unlike for Scholem, universal. Such discrepancies also suggest themselves at the level of their intended readership: Adorno’s writings, especially following his return to Germany, were aimed first and foremost at a German audience. From the late 1950s onward Adorno regularly, and enthusiastically, participated in radio conversations, progressively assuming the role of an engaged public intellectual. Scholem, who equally enjoyed the role of a public intellectual in the newly established State of Israel, was engaged in social and political matters of Israeli society. He published on matters of Jewish and Israeli politics, some of which were far removed from his immediate scholarly research on mysticism, such as the formation of Israeli political parties, dialogue with the Arab states, Israeli education, and the political-theological meaning of the Jewish diaspora. But over time Scholem’s intended audience changed, along with his change of attitude regarding the prospect of public appearances and publications in Germany. His texts were now addressed predominantly to a German readership (not exclusively Germans, but readers of the German language) – and this shift of focus implied a shift of content as well.

In their letters from the 1960s, Adorno and Scholem both express a remarkable change of heart, resulting, presumably, from changing social and political constellations. Adorno, eager to return to his German homeland after the war in order to reform and educate the German masses to critical thought and enlightenment, was increasingly alienated in what was simultaneously his native and newfound home. A new generation of students, profoundly influenced by his critical theory and by his call for anti-authoritarian progressive thinking, now charged him, their own educator, with conservatism, bigotry, and resignation.⁵³ Struggling, since his return, with the national conservative tendencies in post-war West-German society, in which regime change had done little to alter the actual balance of power since many public offices continued to be filled by the very same people who had held them during the Nazi era, Adorno found himself in a new and unexpected situation in the late 1960s. His own students, demanding a full de-Nazification and a thorough democratic reform of German public universities, as well as protesting against the Vietnam War and the colonial politics in developing countries, now demanded their teacher’s support and solidarity. Although Adorno supported many of these causes, he was reluctant to participate in what he considered barbaric and violent demonstrations of power, and he compared the students’ revolts to fascist brutality. In December 1968, he reported to Scholem: “[A]ll hell has literally broken loose here, with a Walpurgis Night of the students, in which the pseudo-revolution is spinning out of control in the most ludicrous actions … they are committing atrocities.”⁵⁴

In what both Adorno and Scholem might have described as a dialectical paradox, toward the end of the 1960s their views and their experiences somewhat transformed and crossed paths: Scholem, who for decades had been reluctant to participate in any dialogue with German audiences, and who addressed his writings almost exclusively to Jewish, mostly Israeli, readers, now enthusiastically published his writings with Suhrkamp Verlag, held public lectures at the University of Frankfurt, and even recorded speeches and lectures to be broadcasted on German radio. Adorno, initially eager to return to the “new” Germany and to assume academic and political-pedagogic responsibilities there, now found himself disillusioned and isolated, a stranger in his own land, estranged by his own students. In addition to these developments at the university, Adorno experienced a form of overt and aggressive anti-Semitism during these years. As the correspondence reveals for the first time, Adorno even faced concrete and intimidating murder threats. Beginning in 1965, he received letters from a person of German origin and Ecuadorian citizenship, who initially expressed admiration for his work and sought his advice on intellectual matters, as well as his support in the professional quest for academic employment in both Germany and Israel. The letters then escalated to anti-Semitic clichés, complaining that all academic positions were occupied by Jews, whereas a man of German origins – “although,” as he emphasized, he “hadn’t personally murdered any Jews” – remained unemployed.⁵⁵ In 1967, the man threatened to murder Adorno should the latter not assist him in securing academic employment. He then announced his intention to travel to Jerusalem to commit murderous attacks. Adorno shared his knowledge of the matter and his concerns with Scholem. He also reported the information to the German authorities, who located and arrested the man. But Adorno, out of compassion, eventually dropped the charges against him, having realized that he suffered from mental illness. The case is significant not only biographically but also in a broader perspective, since the man’s threats and anti-Semitic letters allow for a better understanding of the scope of anti-Semitism in post-war Germany, giving expression to widespread views and opinions on Jews, notwithstanding the process of “de-Nazification.” It was precisely the man’s mental illness and instability that allowed him openly to express views that were widely shared but socially suppressed and therefore only reluctantly and rarely overtly articulated.

As the violent and hostile events at the university were escalating, Adorno died of a heart attack while on vacation in August 1969. His untimely and sudden death occurred during an intense and momentous time of significant developments, both in a social-political perspective and within the scope of his friendship with Scholem. The final letters in the correspondence document in detail Adorno’s hitherto largely unknown plans of a journey to Israel. In November 1968 he received a formal invitation from the Israeli National Council of Culture and Art to deliver lectures on music at a festival in Tel Aviv. In consultation with Adorno, Scholem enhanced the invitation 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 widow (an agreement she reportedly still considered unjust in the following years). In July 1972, Scholem visited Frankfurt again to participate in a conference commemorating 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