Walter Benjamin by GERSHOM SCHOLEM

Author:GERSHOM SCHOLEM
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590175736
Publisher: New York Review Books

Mach mich wie den Erich Fromm,

Dass ich in den Himmel komm.[1]

[Make me just like Erich Fromm

That into heaven I may come.]

Fromm and Benjamin later became colleagues at the Institut für Sozialforschung [Institute of Social Research], when Fromm was one of the most influential advocates of a synthesis of psychoanalysis and Marxism. In those days Agnon had taken up residence in Bad Homburg together with a number of important Hebrew writers like Ahad Ha’am and Bialik. I often went out there, and once or twice I took Benjamin along. Shortly before my emigration I frequently met at Agnon’s home Fritz Sternberg, who later established a relationship with Benjamin in the circle around Brecht to which Sternberg preached Marxism from 1925 on. He lived in Homburg and was already working on his first major work, Der Imperialismus (1926). A short time earlier he had broken away from Buber and the Zionist “Volkssozialisten” [People’s Socialists] among whom he had been a leader between 1918 and 1922, and during the next three or four years he sought a Marxist road within Zionism among the Poalei Zion [Labor Zionists]. He was still considered one of the ablest minds of the younger generation of Zionists. Like me he was a great admirer of Agnon, and he took a lively interest in my future projects in Palestine, a country whose socialist reconstruction he had written so much about. Sometimes I would go directly from a visit with Benjamin to Agnon’s home, where Sternberg would be sitting with his wife, Genia. I could have no idea, of course, that Benjamin, who would not have been interested in Sternberg’s works at that time, would a few years later meet Sternberg under entirely different circumstances and that Sternberg would be one of his Marxist mentors. I never saw Sternberg again, heard nothing about him, and was very surprised in 1938 when in response to a question I posed about the attitude of the Brecht circle and the Institut für Sozialforschung toward the Communist Party, Benjamin casually mentioned Sternberg (who would not have anything to do with the KPD). I said in astonishment: “Do you mean the Fritz Sternberg of Der Imperialismus?” “Of course,” Benjamin replied. “Do you know him?” “Of course,” he said, “through Brecht.” “You could have had that acquaintance a few years earlier, at the home of another great writer.”

Once Benjamin also took me along on a visit to Siegfried Kracauer of the Frankfurter Zeitung who was in the hospital with a minor malady, and there was a disputatious conversation in which Kracauer, despite all his respect for Benjamin, expressed distinct reservations about his “ontology.” All of us had fairly sharp intellects. Much later Adorno told me that he had been present at the hospital visit as a young student, and had met me for the first time on that occasion.

The abyss which Germany faced in 1923 and the measure of desperation that filled Benjamin when he contemplated German conditions found its full expression in the farewell present that he handed me in Berlin shortly before my departure.

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