The Unnamable Present by Roberto Calasso

Author:Roberto Calasso [Calasso, Roberto]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780374279479
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2019-04-08T18:30:00+00:00

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March 20, 1933. Walter Benjamin writes to Gershom Scholem that the latest urge to leave Germany has come from the “almost mathematical simultaneousness with which practically all the centers I was in contact with have returned my manuscripts, have broken off negotiations pending or almost ripe for completion.” Germany has become the country where “when talking to someone you fix your eyes on the lapels of their jackets, preferring not to look anyone in the face anymore.”

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April 29, 1933. Bored by her corrections to “that silly book” Flush, Virginia Woolf noted her impressions of Bruno Walter, whom she had just met: “He is a swarthy, fattish, man; not at all smart. Not at all the ‘great conductor.’ He is a little Slav, a little semitic. He is very nearly mad; that is, he cant get ‘the poison’ as he called it of Hitler out of him. ‘You must not think of the Jews’ he kept saying. ‘You must think of this awful reign of intolerance. You must think of the whole state of the world. It is terrible—terrible. That this meanness, that this pettiness, should be possible! Our Germany—which I loved—without our tradition—our culture—We are now a disgrace.’ Then he told us how you cant talk above a whisper. There are spies everywhere. He had to sit in the window of his hotel in Leipzig? a whole day, telephoning. All the time soldiers were marching. They never stop marching. And on the wireless, between the turns, they play military music.” Woolf adds: “He has the intensity—genius?—which makes him live every thing he feels.”

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