Walter Benjamin

(Paperback, Main)

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Gershom Scholem was a precocious teenager when he became Walter Benjamin's close friend. His account of that relationship - crucial for both men until Benjamin's suicide in 1940 - is at once a tribute to his friend's genius and a lament for his personal and, as Scholem sees it, intellectual self-destructiveness. Prickly but also poignant, this book revisits passionate engagements with Marxism and the Kabbalah, Germany and Palestine, as if Scholem sought to summon up his friend's spirit, to have the last word in the argument that might have saved his life.

Reviews

"The force of this remarkable memoir derives as much from the insights it offers into the mind and beliefs of the writer as into those of its subject." Publishers Weekly

"Walter Benjamin [was] perhaps the most subtle, intuitive, and creative critic of the age....Since Scholem is himself a great scholar and thinker, since the intellectual comradeship between the two was so intense for a long time, the commingling of their thoughts comes to be even more revealing than the life-facts themselves....An invaluable document about not merely one but two of the centurys most profound minds." Kirkus Reviews

Author Bio

Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) was born in Berlin and emigrated to Palestine in 1923. He was a scholar of Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah. Lee Siegel is an associate editor of Artnews.