4
" It began to be apparent to me that although Benjamin and Dora recognized the supremacy of the religious sphere of revelation (and for me this was still tantamount to the acceptance of the Ten Commandments as an absolute value in the moral world), they did not feel bound by it; rather, they undermined it dialectically, where their concrete relationship to the circumstances of their lives was concerned. This was first revealed during a long conversation about the question to what extent we had a right to exploit our parents financially. Benjamin’s attitude toward the bourgeois world was so unscrupulous and had such nihilistic features that I was outraged. He recognized moral categories only in the sphere of living that he had fashioned about himself and in the intellectual world. Both of them reproached me for my naiveté, telling me that I let myself be dominated by my gestures and that I offended with an “outrageous wholesomeness” that I did not have but that had me. Benjamin declared that people like us had obligations only to our own kind and not to the rules of a society we repudiated. He said that my ideas of honesty—for example, where our parents’ demands were involved—should be rejected totally. Often I was utterly surprised to find a liberal dash of Nietzsche in his speeches. What was strange about all this was that such arguments, no matter how vehemently they were conducted, often ended with particular cordiality on Benjamin’s part. After one such tempest, both he and Dora were of an “almost heavenly kindness,” and when Benjamin saw me out, he clasped my hand for a long time and looked deep into my eyes. "
― Gershom Scholem , Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship
5
" Beneath the previously mentioned disappointments on both sides and the disputes I have mentioned there lurked a deep-seated bitterness and disillusionment over the images of one another that we had fashioned for ourselves. Occasionally such feelings were expressed under the veil of an exchange of letters that the infant Stefan and I would leave out for each other. Stefan’s letters were in Dora’s handwriting, but they were written with Walter’s knowledge and possibly even with his participation. On June 20—six weeks after my arrival!—Stefan wrote me with reference to a letter of mine that, as far as I recall, never existed:
Dear Uncle Gerhardt [sic]:
Herewith I am sending you a better photo of me which has arrived in the meantime. Thank you very much for your letter; various things may be said about it, and that is why I am writing you, for if I visit you, you will again tell me so many things that I won’t be able to get a word in edgeways. Well then, first I must tell you that you ought to know I no longer remember. For if I could remember, I certainly would not be here, where it is so unpleasant and you are creating such a bad atmosphere; no, I long since would have returned where I came from. That’s why I can’t read the end of your letter. My mother read the rest to me. Incidentally, I have very strange parents; but more about that later.
When I was in town yesterday, something occurred to me: When I grow up, I’m going to be your pupil. Better start thinking now. Best of all, start keeping a little book in which you note everything down.
Now I will tell you something about my parents. I won’t say anything about my mother, because she is, after all, my mother. But I have all sorts of things to tell you about my father. You are wrong in what you write, dear Uncle Gerhardt. I believe you really know very little about my Papa. There are very few people who know anything about him. Once, when I was still in heaven, you wrote him a letter that made all of us think that you did know him. But perhaps you don’t after all. I think a man like that is born only once in a great while, and then you just have to be kind to him and he will do everything else by himself. You, dear Uncle Gerhardt, still think that one has to do a great deal. Perhaps I shall also think that way when I am a grown man, but now I think more like my Mama, that is, not at all or very little; and so all this to-do and the great excitement over everything seems much less important to me than which way the wind is blowing.
But I don’t want to be smart-alecky, for you know everything much better. That’s the whole trouble.
Many regards from
Stefan "
― Gershom Scholem , Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship
6
" Of course, everything we had been speaking about was closely bound up with his interest in the philosophy of history. We discussed that subject for a whole afternoon, in connection with a difficult remark of his to the effect that the succession of the years could be counted but not numbered. This led us to the significance of sequence, number, series, direction. Did time, which surely was a sequence, have direction as well? I said that we had no way of knowing that time does not behave like certain curves that demonstrate a steady sequence at every point but have at no single point a tangent, that is, a determinable direction. We discussed the question whether years, like numbers, are interchangeable, just as they are numerable. I still possess a record of that part of the conversation, having written in my diary: “Benjamin’s mind revolves, and will long continue to revolve, around the phenomenon of myth, which he approaches from the most diverse angles: from history, with Romanticism as his point of departure; from literature, with Hölderlin as the point of departure; from religion, with Judaism as that point; and from law. If I ever have a philosophy of my own, he said to me, it somehow will be a philosophy of Judaism. "
― Gershom Scholem , Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship
7
" In those years—between 1915 and at least 1927—the religious sphere assumed a central importance for Benjamin that was utterly removed from fundamental doubt. At its center was the concept of Lehre [teaching], which for him included the philosophical realm but definitely transcended it. In his early writings he reverted repeatedly to this concept, which he interpreted in the sense of the original meaning of the Hebrew torah as “instruction,” instruction not only about the true condition and way of man in the world but also about the transcausal connection of things and their rootedness in God. This had a great deal to do with his conception of tradition, which increasingly assumed a mystic note. Many of our conversations—more than may be perceived from his written notes—revolved about the connections between these two concepts. Religion, which is by no means limited to theology (as, for example, Hannah Arendt believed in writing about his later years), constituted a supreme order for him. (The terms Ordnung [order] or geistige Ordnung [intellectual order] were among his most frequently used in those years. In the presentation of his own thought it usually took the place of “category.”) In his conversations of the time he had no compunctions about speaking undisguisedly of God. Since we both believed in God, we never discussed His “existence.” God was real for Benjamin—from his earliest notes on philosophy to letters written in the heyday of the Youth Movement to his notes for his first projected Habilitation thesis on the philosophy of language. I am acquainted with an unpublished letter on this subject to Carla Seligson, dated June 1914. But in these notes, too, God is the unattainable center of a system of symbols intended to remove Him from everything concrete and everything symbolic as well. Although in his Swiss period Benjamin spoke of philosophy mostly as the doctrine of intellectual orders, his definition, which I took down at the time, extends into the religious sphere: “Philosophy is absolute experience, deduced in the systematic-symbolic context as language.” Thus it is a part of the “teaching.” The fact that he later abandoned this specifically religious terminology, although the theological sphere remained very close and alive to him, is not in contradiction to this. "
― Gershom Scholem , Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship
8
" Among the things I owe to Benjamin is my acquaintance with the grotesque tales (a literary form that became impossible after Hitler and is virtually inaccessible today) of Mynona, particularly the volume entitled Rosa die schöne Schutzmannsfrau [Rosa the beautiful policeman’s wife], an unsurpassed work in this genre that almost knocked me off my chair with laughter at the time; unfortunately, I can read it today only with utter indifference. The philosophical background of these tales engaged Benjamin’s attention and then led him to a great appreciation of Mynona’s magnum opus, Schöpferische Indifferenz [Creative indifference], published under the author’s real name, Salomo Friedländer. Friedländer was an orthodox Kantian as well as a strict logician and moral philosopher in theory, but in practice he was, if anything, the prototype of a cynic, or at least he wore that mask. Since the days of the Neopathetisches Kabarett he had been acquainted with Benjamin, who frequently spoke of him in rather positive terms. Friedländer was one of the most prominent personalities in the Expressionist circle, which he himself tended to regard with amusement. "
― Gershom Scholem , Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship
9
" Thus we were able to compare our prospects of Habilitation in the spring of 1922 and conclude that our situations were quite different. Both of us stood at a crossroads. Benjamin was still pursuing his aim of achieving an academic career via a Privatdozentur; this was his clear-cut ambition, and because he sought to obtain the resources for it from his parents, his relations with them were in constant turmoil. To me, however, the renunciation of ambition was a primary factor in my decision to go to Palestine, a plan that now approached the stage of realization. Anyone who went over there in those days could not think of a career, and that I would have one later could not be foreseen. The Hebrew University in Jerusalem was not yet in existence, and no one believed that it would become a reality in the foreseeable future. To be sure, I had published a few German essays that had made some impression, as well as a book that no one was going to read. But I had to expect that in Judaic studies there would be far more thoroughly trained experts than I, one of the first in my generation who had taken up such studies quite independently and without any intention of becoming a rabbi. I believe it was the moral element in this decision that contributed to Benjamin’s great trust in me, a trust that he continued to entertain for a long time to come. "
― Gershom Scholem , Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship
12
" I continue to find it very strange that around 1930 Benjamin told at least two men (Max Rychner and Theodor Adorno) that only someone familiar with the Kabbalah could understand the introduction to his book on tragic drama—which for all practical purposes left me as the only reader who was close at hand. Each of the two men independently had heard him make this remark and asked me twenty years later whether this was correct and, if so, to what extent. But to me, who would have been, so to speak, the most likely recipient of such a message, he never directly expressed himself in this vein either in writing or in person, unless he did so implicitly in my dedication copy of his book: “To Gerhard Scholem, donated to the ultima Thule of his kabbalistic library”—as though that work somehow belonged in a kabbalistic library. Did he perhaps believe that this contiguity with ideas of the kabbalistic theory of language, even though greatly modified, should be obvious to me and required no explanation—which is true to a certain extent—or was he indulging in a game of hide-and-seek with me? Did he succumb to the temptation to indulge in some showing off, or did he wish to shroud the reproach of incomprehensibility that this introduction must have suggested to him, like few other pages in his writings, by referring to something even more incomprehensible (which is how the Kabbalah must have seemed to these men)? I do not know. I am reminded of one of my own statements, also from the thirties, that students of mine used to quote. Apparently I told them that in order to understand the Kabbalah, nowadays one had to read Franz Kafka’s writings first, particularly The Trial. "
― Gershom Scholem , Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship
