Strange Friends
The Lives and Letters of Benjamin, Scholem and Adorno
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Strange Friends
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Such strangeness in the midst of intimacy forms the heart of this foray into the lives and friendships of Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem. Drawing on archival letters (some of which are translated here for the first time), Howard Eiland reconfigures these enduring 20th-century thinkers in the context of their mutual entanglement – tracing their intellectual interdependence from the 1920s to the late 1960s.
From Benjamin's individual friendships with Scholem and Adorno to the brotherly relationship born of their shared concern with preserving Benjamin's post-humous legacy, Eiland’s rendering of this relational triangle moves deftly between its moments of strain, reconciliation and ambivalence. Political and theoretical tensions provide fascinating insights into the characters of these men, and the threads of other connections are spun out: from the presence of Benjamin’s first wife, Dora – instrumental in the friendship between Benjamin and Scholem, to the enduring influence of Hannah Arendt.
Hovering between biography, theory and love letter, Strange Friends is a meditation on the weird affinities, ruptures and collaborations that constitute a friendship.
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Critic reviews
Philosophy is often associated with friendship. Strange Friends beautifully traces this aspiration through the correspondence of Scholem, Benjamin, Adorno, and others. Providing a riveting, thoughtful, and meticulous account of how friendship was sought by three determined individuals during times of devastating upheaval and disappointment, Eiland’s book will fascinate readers interested in their works, the times in which they lived, and the possibilities and challenges for philosophical friendship.
This fascinating book shows us how to read the letters exchanged by Benjamin, Adorno, and Scholem as an estranging medium, even among friends. This is especially illuminating from the perspective of our own age in which letter writing is disappearing. Along the way, Howard Eiland introduces us to what becomes the enigmatic focus of a “strange friendship” – the philosophical, political, and personal matters that held these individuals together without requiring or resulting in consensus.
Strange Friends is required reading for anyone interested in modern German-Jewish thought, or indeed in modern intellectual history. Eiland’s insightful, nuanced reading of the epistolary exchanges between Adorno, Benjamin, and Scholem animates a study that is in equal parts biography and philosophical analysis. He presents characterizations of these three brilliant, prickly figures that surpass anything yet written; and these analyses of the character of these three men enable soundings of key debates—Benjamin and Scholem on the role of mysticism in theology, Benjamin and Adorno on the place of immediacy in historical analysis—that stand among the very best that we have. Along the way, Eiland offers profound meditations on the nature of (intellectual) friendship. The book concludes, movingly, with a characterization of Dora Sophie Kellner, Benjamin’s former wife; like Adorno and Scholem, she escaped the horrors of Nazism and stayed loyal to Benjamin until the end.
Intimacy and distance are woven together in Eiland's account of the affinities as well as the tensions that pervaded the friendships of Scholem, Adorno and Benjamin. The epistolary exchanges Eiland masterfully brings together are a testimony to Benjamin’s powerful personality as well as a moving account of the devotion his friends showed in securing for him an afterlife in memory.
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