Introduction: Rolande Glicenstein’s Walter Benjamin Chapter 1

Brad Prager (bio)
University of Missouri

The panels that compose Rolande Glicenstein’s exquisitely illustrated graphic work depict the genesis of the bond between Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, whose friendship and correspondence has been extensively documented. The originality of Glicenstein’s piece lies in her technique: the density of the lines, alternately thick and thin, taken together with the depth she achieves through creatively contrasting foregrounds and backgrounds, demonstrates an understanding of these two thinkers’ personal connection, and of their varying degrees of integration into the German and Jewish worlds they inhabited.

To choose one example: Glicenstein’s distinctive style underscores Scholem’s recollections of Benjamin’s comportment as a speaker, about which Scholem claims to have retained vivid memories. He writes in his memoir: “The first thing that struck me about Benjamin—indeed it was characteristic of him all his life—was that he never could remain seated quietly during a conversation but immediately began to pace up and down in the room as he formulated his sentences. At some point, he would stop before me and in the most intense voice deliver his opinion on the matter. Or he might offer several viewpoints in turn, as if he were conducting an experiment” (Story of a Friendship 8). The initial images in Glicenstein’s depiction present Benjamin-in-motion, a hydra of a man who occupies the right halves of two consecutive panels. These panels, with their vacant centers, their lack of dialogue, and their tandem depictions of Scholem observing Benjamin’s erratic movements from a safe distance, contrast with the many well-known likenesses of Benjamin in repose, the images that make up the finite photographic archive we have by now grown accustomed to seeing. Benjamin appears here in the dynamics of a relationship because Glicenstein resists the temptation to sanctify him. Unlike many other portraits, hers is hardly hagiographic.

The subjective standpoint inherent in Glicenstein’s depictions acknowledges that Benjamin’s bearing is seen through Scholem’s eyes. He is this work’s narrator, and the author-artist relies on a first-person indirect perspective, just as one would expect to see in a cinematic adaptation. This is, by and large, a graphic retelling of Scholem’s recollections: we know what we know about their friendship mainly from his memoirs. The movement of Benjamin’s body in that first encounter, nearly bowing, echoes Scholem’s own description in which Benjamin presents himself with an “almost Chinese courtesy” (On Jews 174). He is an object of Scholem’s adoration and fascination, and he makes for a curious interlocutor, moving in and out of this story, woven into its frames. His orbital motions reflect the paths of these thinkers’ ongoing discussions and follow the tangential tendencies symptomatic of Scholem’s account of their friendship. The two rove improvisationally in their conversations, touching on an assortment of books, essays, and ideas. The many stations of the conversation that brings the two of them, for example, from Kant to Henri Poincaré to Schelling, as depicted in these pages, are derived entirely from Scholem’s own writings (Story of a Friendship 11).

More than a mere adaptation of Scholem’s memoirs, this representation is commentary; its form uniquely underlines a range of cultural and interpersonal dynamics. Throughout the conversations that are depicted here, Benjamin, who was five years older than Scholem, seems to take up more space than his counterpart. Scholem brushes up against the margins, sometimes crowded out by his own speech bubbles, and Benjamin looms larger. For these psychically weighted compositions, expressionist film is surely a point of reference. 1915, the year of Benjamin and Scholem’s first conversation, was the year Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen’s Der Golem was released. Accordingly, a number of Glicenstein’s panels highlight the expressionistic play of light and shadow. One notes, for example, the panel in which Scholem’s father, entirely enshrouded by darkness, says a prayer over his tobacco. Glicenstein makes use of the chiaroscuros typical of that cinematic moment, drawing attention to the scale of Scholem’s Oedipal dramas.

Where she gestures toward expressionism, the artist’s style deliberately reflects her subjects’ era. Glicenstein also persistently calls her readers’ attention to the specter of the First World War. Some may not be aware of how doggedly Benjamin worked to avoid military service, starting in late 1914 when, at an appropriate age to serve, he was exempted for exhibiting a type of palsy (Story of a Friendship 11). His avoidance of the military became especially arduous as the war dragged on and his brother Georg entered the service. As noted by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings, Benjamin would stay up all night (in Scholem’s presence) drinking large amounts of coffee so that he would fail his medical examinations (78), and when, at the end of December 1916, Benjamin was classified by the draft board as “fit for light field operations,” his partner Dora undertook to induce illnesses in him through hypnosis (91). Scholem recalls: “[Dora] revealed to me in the strictest confidence that she was using hypnosis—to which Benjamin was very susceptible—to produce sciaticalike symptoms, thus making it possible for the doctor to give him a certificate for the military authorities. A medical committee came…for an investigation, and Benjamin was actually given a few months’ deferment. The sciatica story was kept up, and Benjamin remained incommunicado to everyone but Dora” (Story of a Friendship 35–36). In the pages of the present work, Dora can be seen hypnotizing a remarkably wide-eyed and helpless Benjamin.

In Anson Rabinbach’s assessment, both Benjamin and Scholem “abhorred and avoided” the First World War. They likewise shared a strong reaction against “the culture of the middle-class” and against “assimilated German Jewry” (xi). With a similar distaste for ideology, they turned against Martin Buber, who was busily articulating his brand of Zionism. Up to a point, Scholem had been under Buber’s influence. He writes, “I had undertaken to unite the two paths of socialism and Zionism in my own life and presented this quest to Benjamin, who admitted that both paths were viable. Of course, like every Zionist in those days, I also was influenced by Martin Buber…. Even in our first conversation Benjamin expressed strong reservations about Buber” (Story of a Friendship 6–7). Buber’s ideas were later collected under the title “The Jewish Movement” (Die jüdische Bewegung – gesammelte Aufsätze und Ansprachen 1900–1915), which includes his perspectives on Zionism, his disagreements with Theodor Herzl, and the nationalistic ideas that subsequently came to be known as his “Hebrew humanism.”¹

Scholem and Benjamin’s disputation over Buber is well represented in these pages. In 1916 Buber initiated the publication of the journal Der Jude, and Benjamin wrote a brief letter declining an invitation to contribute. His reluctance, according to Eiland and Jennings, was a function of his enduring opinions about politically engaged prose, which he believes sacrifices the complexities associated with writing’s fundamentally literary character.² Benjamin can be intensely disdainful of Buber. Scholem recalls Benjamin criticizing Buber in sharp terms: “[H]e told me in parting that if I should run into Buber I should hand him a barrel of tears in our names.… He said derisively that if Buber had his way, first of all one would have to ask every Jew, ‘Have you experienced Jewishness yet?’” (Story of a Friendship 29). For his part, Scholem finds Buber’s Zionism intriguing and is apprehensive about rebuffing him.

Glicenstein conveys this in a series of panels that illustrate Scholem’s feelings of isolation. Shrouded in darkness, Scholem resembles an alien figure from one of Alfred Kubin’s drawings. Kubin is not named here, but Benjamin and Scholem were quite enthusiastic about his illustrated novel The Other Side (Die andere Seite 1909) as well as his drawings for Paul Scheerbart’s science fiction novel Lesabéndio (1913). Scholem’s words about Benjamin and Der Jude, expressed here in thought bubbles, come from a letter he wrote to Buber on 25 June 1916.³ As Scholem composes this letter in his head, we sense his anxiety: he is little more than an extension of his lone, wide-open eye, diminished by the densely crosshatched blanket of darkness. By the time one reaches the third panel on that page, Scholem’s figure has been nearly entirely absorbed by the thick, dark pen strokes. Here, he comes to realize with disappointment that Benjamin will not be an appropriate contributor for Der Jude, and that his friend’s Judaism is less politically engaged than his own. There and then, he has to turn away from Benjamin, at least for a moment, which is precisely what we see: not Scholem’s face, but merely his back as he, during the night, resolves to put pen to paper.

This is only one among several superbly illustrated pages in Glicenstein’s work. I would draw a reader’s attention to a wealth of other subtle details, including the moment when Scholem notices the ring on Grete Radt’s finger (after Benjamin had somewhat inadvertently proposed to her). Scholem’s startled gaze falls directly on it, a vivid moment drawn from his memoir (Story of a Friendship 12). That encounter takes place on the street and, owing to its depiction of central Europeans during the First World War, readers may think of the odd physiognomies that pervade Max Beckmann’s paintings, or of the urbanites who commingle with the metropolis in Ernst Kirschner’s works. Glicenstein’s flat figures play against the backgrounds, calling attention to the transformations in the cityscape, and to the looming 1920s, the unrestrained years that were to come.

But to refer the reader only to paintings would diminish the work’s narrative qualities. In her skillful storytelling—the many ways the narrative voice intermixes with the illustrations—Glicenstein recalls the style of the Jewish Brooklyn-born graphic novelist Ben Katchor. In works such as The Jew of New York (1998), Katchor plays similarly with light and shadow, and even with comparably architectural lines. Glicenstein’s work is certainly fascinating to look at, but it also serves as a comment on the dynamics of a friendship. The flow of the narrative does a great deal to bring these two figures to life. Glicenstein effectively highlights not only their shared personal circumstances, but also the intellectual tensions, including the preferred languages of scholarship, the significance of translation, and much else that goes hand in hand with the literary and philosophical air these two German Jewish thinkers spent those years breathing.

Footnotes

1. Buber’s “Hebrew humanism” was a political movement that would, according to Mendes-Flohr, “heal the division between morality and politics and ultimately between Kultur—our inner, private spiritual reality—and our public life.” It aimed to “exemplify for all the nations of the world the possibility of healing the rift between Kultur and Zivilisation, between spirit and life” (164).

2. On Benjamin’s 1916 letter to Buber, see Eiland and Jennings 86. See also Brodersen 87–89.

3. Scholem’s letter to Buber is translated and transcribed in Scholem (A Life in Letters 28–29).

Works Cited

• Brodersen, Momme. Walter Benjamin: A Biography. Trans. Malcolm R. Green and Ingrida Ligers. Ed. Martina Derviş. New York: Verso, 1996. Print.
• Eiland, Howard, and Michael W. Jennings. Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2014. Print.
• Mendes-Flohr, Paul. “Nationalism as a Spiritual Sensibility: The Philosophical Suppositions of Buber’s Hebrew Humanism.” The Journal of Religion 69.2 (1989): 155–168. Print.
• Rabinbach, Anson. Introduction. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932-1940. By Gershom Scholem, ed. Trans. Gary Smith and Andre Lefevere. New York: Schocken Books, 1989. vii-xxxviii. Print.
• Scholem, Gershom. A Life in Letters, 1914-1982. Trans. and Ed. Anthony David Skinner. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2002. Print.
• —. On Jews and Judaism in Crisis: Selected Essays. Ed. Werner J. Dannhauser. New York: Schocken Books, 1976. Print.
• —. Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship. Trans. Harry Zohn. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981. Print.