Scholem and Benjamin

8/12/2019 Scholem and Benjamin

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Ben Sonnenberg

Scholem and BenjaminAuthor(s): Michael HamburgerReviewed work(s):Source: Grand Street, Vol. 1, No. 4 (Summer, 1982), pp. 128-137Published by: Ben SonnenbergStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25006447.

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SCHOLEM AND BENJAMIN

Michael HamburgerGreat deal has been written about the relationshipbetween Gershom Scholem andWalter Benjamin,most of it from a position partisanwith one or the other.

The tensions between them were carried over into thereception of three of Scholem's books-two of memoirsand one of letters between Benjamin and Scholem from1933 to Benjamin's death in 1940. Reviewing the letters-the full text ofwhich had not been available to Scholemwhen he wrote the memoirs-George Steiner calledScholem's failure to relieve Benjamin's financial stress inthe last years "the most painful aspect of this achingbook."Arnoldo Momigliano, however, concluded his review of the second book of memoirs with a sentence thatpresents Benjamin as a catalyst in Scholem's development: "It is no consolation to anyone to recognize thatby carrying on his dialogue with Scholem to the end...Walter Benjamin, that sad and noble victim of Nazism,contributed inways he perhaps never expected to securing for Israel and for the world one of the most remarkable historians of our century."More often, though, it isScholem who has been treated as a catalyst forBenjamin:both because Benjamin's fame is recent, dating from the1955 edition of his works inGermany, and because it isposthumous, that of a writer seen as a victim of theHolocaust. Steiner has not been alone in going so far asto blame Scholem for being a defective catalyst, oneunable to prevent Benjamin's suicide, his developmentleft incomplete.Gershom Scholem died on February 20, 1982, five daysafter the publication of Harry Zohn's English version ofthe earlier book of memoirs,Walter Benjamin: The Storyof a Friendship (Jewish Publication Society). Though thescholarly controversies, the quibbles and the slurs arelikely to continue-if only because Benjamin remains soenigmatic a figure and Scholem refused so categorically

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to justify the omissions or failures imputed to him intheir friendship-I will not add to them here. Even if Icould agree with Steiner in seeing Kafka's parabolic"duel or wrestling match" exemplified in the friendship(and I cannot), Scholem's death would put an end to it,as far as I am concerned. The tensions between the twomen, in any case, were not only personal but historical,bound up inextricablywith the general state of Germanand German-Jewish intellectual life.What ismore, thefriendship between them outweighed and outlasted alltheir differences of allegiance, character and circumstance. But for Scholem's personal archive of Benjamin'sscatteredwritings, and what it signified,Benjamin mightwell have given up the struggle for survival even soonerthan he did; and the same archive contributed to the reemergence of Benjamin's work after the war. NeitherScholem's loyalty to Benjamin in the teeth of their disagreements nor the honesty with which he expressedthem can be doubted by any reader of the publisheddocuments; and this against the grain of Scholem's moralintransigence and despite the bitter disappointments hesuffered in his dealings with Benjamin. Itwould be "impertinent" indeed, as George Steiner wrote beforeScholem's death, to "speculate further"about the reasonsScholem would not divulge for not sending Benjaminmoney at the most critical junctures, or to blame eitherman for the inevitable divergences that repeatedlystrained,but never broke, their friendship.The difference in the characters of the two menbecame apparent to Scholem at their very firstmeetingin 1915, though Scholem was only seventeen and Benjamin twenty-three. Three years before, Scholem hadalready committed himself to Zionism and set out on acourse he was to pursue until the end of his life. Benjamin,by contrast, had passed through a number of associations-in particular theGerman Free Students Association and Wyneken's Youth Movement-without beingable to commit himself. Scholem's description of Benjamin at their first meeting includes this observation,which goes right to the heart of their differences: "Orhe

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might offer several viewpoints in turn, as if he were conducting an experiment." It is the difference not only between the hedgehog and the fox, but also between thescholar and the literaryman, the systematizer of ideasand the synthesist. A few years later, in Switzerland,Scholem was often "utterly surprised to find a liberaldash of Nietzsche" in Benjamin's utterances, noting aswell that "Benjamin's attitude to the bourgeois worldwas so unscrupulous and had such nihilistic features thatI was outraged."Yet this was the period when Scholemand Benjamin were seemingly in agreement both in theiropposition to thewar and in an anarcho-socialism closeto that of Gustav Landauer. Nietzsche was the very prototype of the experimental, nonsystematic thinker-tothe point of blatant self-contradiction. He was also the"dynamite" that had blasted German intellectual life,leaving behind what I have called "a proliferation ofprophets," countless tiny sects, circles and factions clustered around one leaderwho was a law unto himself andoffered religious, ethical, aesthetic or political salvation,if not a compound of all four. Benjamin, unlike Scholem,was susceptible to the fascination of that phenomenon;he came close to several sects and circles, including thatof Stefan George, yet was never either a disciple or aleader in any of them. If there is anything astonishingabout Scholem's attitude toward these propensities ofBenjamin's, it is that they could continue to astonish, outrage and hurt him throughout the twenty-five years oftheir friendship; that Scholem could suppose Benjamin's"Marxism"to be more binding, unalterable and exclusivethan his friend's other ideological experiments; and that,in spite of being astonished, outraged and hurt, Scholemnever ceased to stand by him. As he wrote of the earlyphase of their friendship: "In short, then, to associatewith Benjamin took a great deal of patience and consideration-qualities that were by no means natural tomytemperament and that, to my surprise, I was able tomuster only inmy association with him."This essential difference between the two men ishardly separable from all their other differences. Benjamin'swork was as erratic and unpredictable as hischaracter. At the beginning of their acquaintance,

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Scholem was struck by Benjamin's habit of pacing theroom in conversation, and of fixing his gaze on a pointhigh above his audience while speaking in public. Hisphysical andmental restlessness alone accounts for Benjamin'sfailure to establish himself in the academic worldor in any other profession. Important though his librarywas to him, his compulsion to travel and to extemporizeseparated him from his books for long periods, wellbefore his absences from Berlin had become an emigration. Stress and insecurity would be preconditions formuch of his best work, as for the commissioned reviews,articles and broadcasts that competed with, and by faroutnumbered, his book publications and long-term projects. His addiction to gambling belongs to the samecomplex.

As for the other crucial differences between him andScholem, to do with their attitudes toward Judaism,these toowere sharply delineated from the start.As earlyas 1918, Scholemwas aware thathis friend "knewnext tonothing about Jewish affairs, let alone Eastern Jewishreality and literature.... About details of Jewish historyhe was totally uninformed." But for the friendship between them, it seemsmost unlikely thatBenjamin wouldhave made even the halfhearted attempts he did maketo learnHebrew. Yet itwas not until 1930 that Scholemcould accept the impossibility of everwinning over Benjamin to Judaism, let alone to Zionism, or of inducing hisfriend to somuch as agree to visit Palestine, even whenit had become clear to Benjamin that he could scarcelyhope to survive inEurope. Benjamin did avail himself ofthese never-ceasing efforts to the extent of accepting agrant from the University of Jerusalem for a period ofHebrew studies there, only to spend the money inEurope, thereby inflicting the hardest blow of all uponhis scrupulous friend and sponsor. After this, Scholemknew he was beaten, and extracted this rare confessionfrom Benjamin: "Living Judaism I have certainly encountered in no other form than in you. The question ofmy attitude toward Judaism is always the question as tomy attitude toward-I will not say toward you-(for my

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friendship is no longer subject to any decision)-buttoward the forces you have aroused inme." In the sameletter of 1930 Benjamin was also less than reticent, foronce, about his "vacillations," though without going sofar as to admit that vacillation was his element, theprimary stimulus for his writing, a need more constantthan that for hallucinogens, with which he experimentedfor a time.

Benjamin's collection of short prose pieces, Einbahnstrasse ("One-Way Street"),published in 1928 and one ofthe few books from this prolific and many-sided writer,contains this aphorism, under the heading For Men:"Conviction is unproductive" ("Uberzeugung ist unfruchtbar").The context of this characteristically heterogeneous collection, juxtaposingdreamswith photographicrealism, "epiphanies" (in the Joycean sense), with sociological or psychological polemics, offers no clue to theprecise application of the aphorism, or to the preciseconnotation of theword unfruchtbar,which could meanunfruitful, infertile or unproductive. It could even be apolemical sarcasm, like several other squibs in the book.Yet there can be no doubt that, in a life which to otherslooked like a succession of professional and emotionaldisasters, Benjamin's productivity and serenitywere sustained by something other than convictions. Benjaminshares not only those epiphanies with Joyce, but alsoan unaccountability summed up in the famous motto,"silence, exile and cunning."At the very time when Scholem was worrying aboutBenjamin's "conversion" to dialectical materialism andhis personal attachment to Brecht-while Benjamin continued to be engrossed in the study of Baudelaire, Mallarme, surrealism and othermatters remote fromBrecht'spolitical preoccupations-Brecht himself complained inhis diary about Benjamin's "mysticism," as adduced inBenjamin's concept of the "aura.""A lot of mysticism,"Brecht noted on July 7, 1938, "when his stance is antimystical. That's how the materialist view of history isadapted It's pretty gruesome." Commenting on Ben

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jamin's death in the same diary, Brecht expressed hisoverall approval of Benjamin's last contribution to theJournal of the Institute for Social Research, but with thisreservation: "despite all its metaphors and judaisms."Scholem lived to see the publication of those diaries. Ifthe word "judaisms"gave Scholem no comfort after allthose years, he must at least have savored the bitterirony, and even posthumously Benjamin's vacillationsproved fruitful enough. Brecht, too, was not noted forpatience or flexibility toward those with whom he disagreed. Yet, for all those coldly analytical diary entries,he was moved towrite a poem on Benjamin's death.To Scholem, who knew him better than Brecht, Benjamin's suicide at the Spanish frontier, on what was tohave been his flight fromEurope-narrated very fully inPortrait of a Friendship by an eyewitness-was a lastblow forwhich he was well prepared; suicidewas one ofthe possibilities with which Benjamin had experimentedbefore, almost carrying it out on his fortieth birthday,before the Nazi coup. The bureaucratic snag at Port Bouwas one ofmany setbacks of a kindwith which Benjaminhad learned to live; and since he had entertained no hopefor theWeimar Republic, his decision to die at that juncturewas political only in the very wide and large sensethat concerned Benjamin at any time.That he should dieinEurope was right for him, symbolically, in away thatScholem understood. Benjamin's last book publication,after theNazi coup and under a pseudonym, was his miscellany of letters Deutsche Menschen, 18th- and 19thcentury documents offered to German readers as anindirect reminder of their best traditions. Among itsprecedents were the compilations of George, Hofmannsthal,KarlWolfskehl and Rudolff Borchardt-writers associated not with dialectical materalism but with the"conservative revolution"-between 1900 and 1926.And ifthat is shocking toBenjamin'sMarxist exegetes, theymustalso come to termswith the following: that itwas Hofmannsthal who published two importantworks by Benjamin in his "elitist"periodical Neue Deutsche Beitrdge,at a timewhen no other editor hadmuch use forBenjamin;

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and that Benjamin owed Hofmannsthal's acceptance tothe mediation of Florens Christian Rang, a "gnosticChristian"-Scholem calls him-to whom Benjamin wasdevoted.Scholem liked Benjamin's last book-self-effacing

though it had to be. Scholem's early commitment toZionism and his emigration toPalestine in 1923 had sprungfrom his radical realization that theGerman-Jewish diaspora was doomed to perish-by assimilation, if not byextermination. Benjamin had rejected Scholem's alternative. But whatever the more personal and immediatereasons for Benjamin's suicide, it was consistent withboth Scholem's realization and Benjamin's choice infavor of his European ties.

"Benjamin,"Scholem wrote, "was an outsider in a dualsense: in regard to scholarship (which in largemeasurehe has remained to thisday) and in regard to the literaryscene. Only a few of his fellow writers had any use forhim; to many he was insufferable."Yet, with very fewexceptions, all the remarkablewriters of Benjamin's timein the German-speaking countries were outsiders, because the inside had been blasted and fragmented.Giventhat fragmentation of the center, Benjamin's very multiplicity, his capacity to combine modes of perception andvision that seemed mutually exclusive to others, hasmade him a seminal figure since his death. If he remainsan outsider to this day, it is because he refused to commit himself to any of the monstrous and divisive simplifications that have passed as "ideologies" in his timeand ours. Because of this basic independence of outlook,fed by the most various traditions, influences and concerns, Benjamin remains difficult to read,more difficultstill to place. He would not recognize the categories intowhich writers and scholars are divided-for no betterreason than that those categories

are convenient andmarketable-but instead cut through them freely,writingphilosophy, art criticism, literary criticism, theology,aesthetics, autobiography, fiction and prose poetry; andso he remains as baffling to specialists as he is invigorat

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ing to readerswhose minds have not been too thoroughlyprocessed by a single "discipline."When Scholem complained to Benjamin in 1934, "Bynow I simply don't know any more where you stand,"Benjamin did explain very forcefully and succinctly thatMarxism, to him, was anything but an orthodoxy; thatBrecht, for him, was not an alternative toKafka (whomBrecht also liked and approved), since Kafka "had nottaken up one of those positions which Communismrightly opposes"; and thatBenjamin's own recognition ofthe need for economic and social change did not mean abreak with anything he had said or written in the past.For Benjamin, then, Communism was not a philosophyor a creed, beyond its economic applications. Because itwas neither, it did not impinge on his esotericism orplace any obligation on him to restrict his literary freedom. In thememoir, Scholem did not consider this letterof Benjamin's or come to grips with the implication thathis taunts about Benjamin's "dialectical materialism"might point to a break on his part with the socialismboth he and Benjamin had professed in their youth. Inview of the continuing controversies about Benjamin'ssupposed "dialectical materialism," and his habitual reluctance tomake his position clear, this document oughtto have been appended to the belated American editionof the memoir, together with others bearing on thosevery issues.Still, what makes Scholem's record so gripping andharrowing is that, because the friendshipwas not a "duelorwrestling match," it nowhere raises a question of whowas right, who was wrong. The differences and divergences between the two would have led to simpleestrangement if there had been no common ground.Scholem was trained to be a mathematician, and hadplanned to earn his living inPalestine by teachingmathematics in a school.Yet not only did he alsowrite poemsas Benjamin did, too, though neither thought of himselfas a poet-and prove his literary sensibility in his translations of fiction by S. Y. Agnon, but he was to devote hislife to the study of Jewish religion, and of Jewishmysti

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cism above all. Compared to Benjamin's many-facetedbrilliance, Scholem's approach tohis subjectswas methodical, scholarly and dry; but he applied hismathematician'srigor tomatters beyond pure rationality. Benjamin, for hispart,was capable of sticking to one subject, pursuing oneline of inquiry, at some length, as in his dissertation onGerman tragedy of the Baroque period; it was his approach, his manner, that betrayed themysticism so distasteful to Brecht. He was also a master of a form ofinterpretation inwhich Scholem recognized a Jewish tradition of theological exegesis.Throughout their friendship,Scholem showed his appreciation of Benjamin's mostimaginative prose; and Scholem's insights into theworksof Kafka, evident in his letters and other writings, wereone of several meeting-points with Benjamin's literaryconcerns.

Scholem's drastic break with his family's assimilationcould never be complete. One of his brothers was anearly victim of Nazism as a politician of the Left, not asa Jew. Before and after the war not only his scholarlyresearch took him back to Europe. Since, for nearlytwo thousand years, the history of the Jews had beenbound up with Europe, Scholem also found it necessaryto extend his studies to Christian theology. ArnoldoMomigliano, a writer much better qualified than I todisentangle the intricate threads of Scholem's esotericstudies, concluded his review of Scholem's From Berlinto Jerusalem by linking Benjamin with "all the patiencethat Scholem... has put into understanding his own relation toChristian thought, and especially tomodem Germany." To his intimates, Scholem remained Gerhard,rather thanGershom. To hear him lecture inGerman afterthe war, in the "Old Berlin" accent he distinguishedfrom Benjamin's "Western Berlin" accent, was to bemade aware how much of his dry humor and forthrightness Scholem owed to his place of birth. I last metScholem inBerlin a fewmonths before his death, asmembers of the literature section of theAcademy of Arts, andover lunch with his wife, Fania, at a restaurant on the

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Kurfiirstendamm.Not only had he made the long journeyfrom Israel for theAcademy session-in his eighties andinpoorer health than Ihad expected-but he had acceptedan invitation to spend thewinter inBerlin. And his booksbearing on Benjamin were not his only oneswritten-andfirstpublished-in German after thewar.Neither did Scholem's Zionism absolve him from thetensions and conflictsmore conspicuous inhis friend's lifeand work. In an important letter of 1931 to Benjamin,he defined Zionism as a "religious-mysticalquest for a regeneration of Judaism" that had become wholly opposedto the "empiricalZionism,whose point of departure is animpossible and provocative distortion of an alleged 'solution to the Jewish Question.'... I do not believe that thereis such a thing as a 'solution to the Jewish Question' inthe sense of a normalization of the Jews, and I certainlydo not think that this question can be solved in Palestinein such a sense."The Zionist Congress of that year andthe growing Arab resistance to Jewish settlement hadbrought home to Scholem that his kind of Zionism wasnow isolated and threatened by a nationalistic strugglenot wholly different in kind to the recurrent threats tothe survival of the Jews throughout their history-abouttobecome more acute than ever inGermany andEurope.His opposition to amerely political "solution,"one basedon force,was of the same order as his opposition to Benjamin's supposed Marxism-a self-deception in the eyesof Scholem, who challenged Benjamin to put it to thetest by joining the Communist Party. On the politicalplane, then, there could be no "final solution" for eitherman; and even Hitler's "final solution" of the "JewishProblem" in Europe was to prove less than final on theplane thatmattered to Scholem and to Benjamin. Spiritually and intellectually, through their works, both survived Hitler's "final solution";and, as Scholem suggested,itmay well have been Benjamin's certainty about thatsurvivalwhich made him ready for an early death, whenall the other odds were against him.

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