and lectures to be broadcasted on German radio. Adorno, initially eager to return to the “new” Germany and to assume academic and political-pedagogic responsibilities there, now found himself disillusioned and isolated, a stranger in his own land, estranged by his own students. In addition to these developments at the university, Adorno experienced a form of overt and aggressive anti-Semitism during these years. As the correspondence reveals for the first time, Adorno even faced concrete and intimidating murder threats. Beginning in 1965, he received letters from a person of German origin and Ecuadorian citizenship, who initially expressed admiration for his work and sought his advice on intellectual matters, as well as his support in the professional quest for academic employment in both Germany and Israel. The letters then escalated to anti-Semitic clichés, complaining that all academic positions were occupied by Jews, whereas a man of German origins – “although,” as he emphasized, he “hadn’t personally murdered any Jews” – remained unemployed.55 In 1967, the man threatened to murder Adorno should the latter not assist him in securing academic employment. He then announced his intention to travel to Jerusalem to commit murderous attacks. Adorno shared his knowledge of the matter and his concerns with Scholem. He also reported the information to the German authorities, who located and arrested the man. But Adorno, out of compassion, eventually dropped the charges against him, having realized that he suffered from mental illness. The case is significant not only biographically but also in a broader perspective, since the man’s threats and anti-Semitic letters allow for a better understanding of the scope of anti-Semitism in post-war Germany, giving expression to widespread views and opinions on Jews, notwithstanding the process of “de-Nazification.” It was precisely the man’s mental illness and instability that allowed him openly to express views that were widely shared but socially suppressed and therefore only reluctantly and rarely overtly articulated.
As the violent and hostile events at the university were escalating, Adorno died of a heart attack while on vacation in August 1969. His untimely and sudden death occurred during an intense and momentous time of significant developments, both in a social-political perspective and within the scope of his friendship with Scholem. The final letters in the correspondence document in detail Adorno’s hitherto largely unknown plans of a journey to Israel. In November 1968 he received a formal invitation from the Israeli National Council of Culture and Art to deliver lectures on music at a festival in Tel Aviv. In consultation with Adorno, Scholem enhanced the invitation with an offer to hold an additional lecture and a seminar at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Adorno was enthusiastic and at the same time reluctant to undertake the visit, which he considered “eminently encumbered.”56 Whereas questions of scheduling remained a subject of endless negotiations, the content of Adorno’s prospective lectures was essentially established. Presenting his work for the first time to an Israeli audience, Adorno intended to deliver lectures on two topics he had deemed most relevant and most representative of his thought: one lecture was either to address a topic from his recently published Negative Dialectics, preferably the book’s final chapter, “Meditations on Metaphysics,” which discusses the possibility and the meaning of philosophical thought after the Holocaust, or else to discuss ideas from his work in progress, Aesthetic Theory, which was published posthumously. The second lecture was meant to concern his philosophy of music, either his philosophical interpretation of Mahler or that of Schoenberg, with a preference for the latter, who, Adorno wrongly assumed, was less known in Israel. The language in which Adorno was to speak presented another dilemma. Although it was rather probable that the audience would consist mostly of academics of European background – native German speakers and natives of other countries who had mastery in the German language – delivering a lecture in German in 1960s Israel might have been seriously offensive to many survivors. “Naturally, it is easier for me to speak about very difficult and complex things in German than in English,” he wrote to Scholem, “but I would under no circumstances want to commit any kind of mistake. Precisely when one lives in Germany, one may not forget even for a moment what happened.”57 Although it was repeatedly postponed – in his very final letter to Scholem from May 1969, Adorno still considered scheduling the journey for September 1970 – the visit was ultimately rendered impossible by Adorno’s sudden death. Nevertheless, what remains as pressing as ever are the theoretical – and hypothetical – questions concerning the probable reception and discussion of Adorno’s thought in Israel, in particular regarding the possibility of philosophy after the Holocaust and of dealing with the German past.
Scholem traveled to Frankfurt for Adorno’s funeral immediately after Adorno’s death. In the following years he continued to pursue his fruitful relationships with Suhrkamp Verlag and other German contacts, including, first and foremost, Gretel Adorno, his friend’s widow. Scholem produced a host of new material to be published in German in the 1970s. He continued to publish his collected essays with Suhrkamp in the Judaica volumes, alongside autobiographical work, which included Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship (1975), his own autobiography From Berlin to Jerusalem (1977), and the edition of his correspondence with Benjamin (1980). Despite his profoundly negative experiences in the immediate post-war years, when he traveled to Europe in search of the destroyed Jewish libraries, Scholem was frequently in Europe, and especially in Germany, in his last years. It is also noteworthy that his collection of texts about Walter Benjamin, published in 1983, a year after his death, as well as the fourth volume in the Judaica series, published the following year, were both edited by Rolf Tiedemann, Adorno’s student and assistant, the co-editor of both Adorno’s and Benjamin’s Gesammelte Schriften [Collected works], and subsequently the director of the Adorno Archive in Frankfurt.
Rolf Tiedemann was the first scholar ever to write a doctoral dissertation on Benjamin’s work. As Tiedemann’s doctoral advisor, Adorno arranged a first meeting between Tiedemann and Scholem during one of the latter’s numerous visits to Frankfurt in the early 1960s. Tiedemann maintained a close working relationship with Scholem, especially after 1968 as work on the edition of Benjamin’s writings began. He was one of the few people who witnessed at first hand the relationship between Adorno and Scholem in its later phase. In what could be seen as almost the mirror image of Adorno’s alienation in his own homeland, Tiedemann could attest to Scholem’s rediscovery of post-war Germany and of his increasing alienation and frustration in his adopted homeland of Israel. Despite Scholem’s rejection of the “myth” of German-Jewish dialogue, he expressed a most welcoming attitude toward young Germans and their newly discovered interest in matters of Jewish thought, theology, and history. He was, indeed, open to dialogue. “After Scholem’s death,” Tiedemann wrote, “I have encountered in Israel friends of his, German Jews who were unwilling ever again to set foot on German land and who were unable to understand why he traveled to Germany so often.”58 At the same time, he gives an account of Scholem’s ever more problematic situation in Israel and his changing attitude toward its politics. Although internationally recognized as the leading scholar of Jewish mysticism and nationally respected not only as a scholar but also as a public intellectual and the president of the Israeli Academy of Sciences, Scholem had grown ever more powerless in Israel, where there was a growing sense of hostility toward the ideas that he represented. Paradoxically or not, after the 1967 war and the occupation of the West Bank, a growing messianic movement of right-wing Zionist nationalists settled in the Occupied Territories, holding on to many of the ideas that he discussed in his work and embodied in his existence: ideas concerning the mystical and messianic origins of Jewish political rebirth and sovereignty. It was probably “Scholem’s Golem” – his own creation coming to life against his own intention – that turned against what he claimed to believe in and pursue.59 Tiedemann wrote that, in his final years, Scholem seemed desperate about the situation in his homeland and to have lost any hope in the Zionist project that he had supported for his entire life: “Perhaps for the first time ever,” Tiedemann noted, “I comprehended what that hope is, of which Benjamin wrote that we have been given it only for the sake of the hopeless ones.”60
Just as Scholem carefully assisted Tiedemann and his co-editor Hermann Schweppenhäuser in their work on the edition of Benjamin’s writings, so was Tiedemann most helpful and supportive in the edition of the original German version of the present volume. He dedicatedly clarified matters that remained uncertain and graciously elucidated
