Walter Benjamin : the story of a friendship
By: Gershom Scholem ; translated from the German by Harry Zohn ; introduction by Lee Siegel.
Series: New York Review Books classics
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2002
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 302
Subjects: Benjamin, Walter, -- 1892-1940 -- Friends and associates; Scholem, Gershom Gerhard, -- 1897-1982; Authors, German -- 20th century -- Biography
Genres: Biography.
Work titles: Walter Benjamin.
Description: "Gershom Scholem is celebrated as the twentieth century's most profound student of the Jewish mystical tradition; Walter Benjamin, as a master thinker whose extraordinary essays mix the revolutionary, the revelatory, and the esoteric. Scholem was a precocious teenager when he met Benjamin, who became his close friend and intellectual mentor. His account of that relationship - which was to remain crucial for both men - is both a celebration of his friend's genius and a lament for the personal and intellectual self-destructiveness that culminated in Benjamin's suicide in 1940." "Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship is an absorbing memoir with the complication of character and motive of a novel. As Scholem revisits the passionate engagements over Marxism and Kabbala, Europe and Palestine that he shared with Benjamin, it is as if he sought to summon up his lost friend's spirit again, to have the last word in the argument that might have saved his life."--Jacket.
Notes: Includes index.