und Kultur supported the project institutionally and financially. Thomas Sparr, Eva Gilmer, Petra Hardt, and Nora Mercurio of Suhrkamp Verlag assisted in both editorial and practical matters. John Thompson and Elise Heslinga at Polity Press were most helpful in the preparation of the English edition of the volume. Willi Goetschel, Paul-Mendes Flohr, and Moshe Zuckermann accompanied the work on this project from its very early stages and provided substantial assistance in both theory and practice. Further, I wish to thank the many friends and colleagues who were supportive with advice, suggestions, and information at the various stages of work on the edition: Daniel Abrams, David Biale, Dirk Braunstein, Steven Fraade, Paul Franks, Peter E. Gordon, Christine Hayes, Hannan Hever, Rahel Jaeggi, Martin Jay, Marie Luise Knott, Zvi Leshem (at the Scholem Archive and Library in Jerusalem), Stefan Litt (at the Israel National Library in Jerusalem), Christoph Menke, Michael L. Morgan, Teresa Muxeneder (at the Arnold Schönberg Center in Vienna), Adalbert and Brita Rang, Nuria Schoenberg-Nono, Paula Schwebel, Zvi Septimus, Yfaat Weiss, Kenneth Winkler, and Jörg Wyrschowy (at the Deutsches Rundfunkarchiv, Frankfurt am Main).
Asaf Angermann
Notes
1 1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Gruß an G. Scholem,” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, December 2, 1967; repr. in Gesammelte Schriften, 20.2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003), p. 479 [my translation].
2 2. Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books 1988), p. 118.
3 3. See David Biale, “The Threat of Messianism: An Interview with Gershom Scholem,” New York Review of Books, August 14, 1980.
4 4. Theodor W. Adorno, “Erinnerungen” (1964), in Gesammelte Schriften, 20.1, p. 173.
5 5. Gershom Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem: Memories of My Youth (New York: Schocken Books 1988), pp. 153–61.
6 6. Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, p. 191.
7 7. Ibid.
8 8. Theodor W. Adorno, Kierkegaard: Construction of the Aesthetic, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989); Adorno, “Notiz,” in Gesammelte Schriften, 2, p. 261.
9 9. Walter Benjamin, Origin of the German Trauerspiel, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2019).
10 10. The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, 1932–1940, ed. Gershom Scholem, trans. Gary Smith and Andre LeFevere (New York: Schocken Books, 1989), p. 84. Wiesengrund was Adorno’s original paternal last name, substituted in the first year of emigration with his mother’s Italian last name Adorno.
11 11. Benjamin and Scholem, Correspondence, p. 214.
12 12. Ibid., pp. 218–19.
13 13. Ibid., p. 226.
14 14. Scholem, Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, p. 215.
15 15. Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin, The Complete Correspondence 1928–1940, ed. Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), pp. 248–9.
16 16. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. Edmund Jephcott (London and New York: Verso, 2005), p. 238.
17 17. Gershom Scholem, “Redemption through Sin,” in The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books, 1995), pp. 78–141.
18 18. Gershom Scholem, “Zum Verständnis des Sabbatianismus: Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Aufklärung” [Towards an understanding of Sabbatianism: a contribution to the history of the Enlightenment], in Almanach des Schocken Verlags auf das Jahr 5697 (Berlin: Schocken, 1936), pp. 30–42.
19 19. Scholem, From Berlin to Jerusalem, p. 131.
20 20. See Walter Benjamin, Berliner Chronik/Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert, ed. Burkhardt Lindner and Nadine Werner - Walter Benjamin Werke und Nachlaß – Kritische Gesamtausgabe Vol. 11.2 (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019), pp. 7–57, esp. pp. 29–57. Eng. trans. as Berlin Childhood around 1900, trans. Howard Eiland (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).
21 21. Benjamin, Berliner Chronik/Berliner Kindheit um neunzehnhundert, p. 49.
22 22. Theodor W. Adorno, “Einleitung,” in Walter Benjamin, Schriften, Vol. I, p. xxvii.
23 23. Letter 2, 4.6.1939, p. 7 in this volume.
24 24. Letter 5, 8.10.1940, p. 14 in this volume.
25 25. Letter 15, 9.5.1949, p. 42 in this volume.
26 26. Letter 22, 22.2.1952, p. 59 in this volume.
27 27. Letter 23, 13.4.1952, p. 60 in this volume.
28 28. Theodor W. Adorno, “On the Meaning of Working through the Past,” in Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords, trans. Henry W. Pickford (New York: Columbia University Press 1998), pp. 89–103.
29 29. Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002).
30 30. Theodor W. Adorno, “Education after Auschwitz,” in Critical Models, pp. 191–204.
31 31. Letter 1, 19.4.1939.
32 32. Gershom Scholem, Die Geheimnisse der Schöpfung: Ein Kapitel aus dem kabbalistichen Buche Sohar (1935) (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1971). Scholem entitled the second edition from 1936 – the edition he actually sent to Adorno – “The Secrets of Creation” (“Die Geheimnisse der Schöpfung”).
33 33. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, “Preface,” p. xviii.
34 34. Letter 1, 19.4.1939.
35 35. Adorno, Minima Moralia, Aphorism 153: “Finale,” p. 247.
36 36. Letter 94, 7.11.1960.
37 37. Gershom Scholem, “Die Metamorphose des häretischen Messianismus der Sabbatianer in religiösen Nihilismus im 18. Jahrhundert”, in Judaica 3 (Frankfurt am Main: Surhkamp, 1970).
38 38. In fact, it was Horkheimer who drafted the chapter’s aphorisms, later completed with Adorno’s additions. See Stefan Muller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography (Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity, 2005), p. 280.
39 39. Adorno and Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, p. 165.
40 40. Ibid.
41 41. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London and New York: Continuum, 1973), p. 361.
42 42. In his lectures on Metaphysics from 1965, the time of writing the book, Adorno speaks of “the mystical doctrine – which is common to the Cabbala and to Christian mysticism such as that of Angelus Silesius – of the infinite relevance of the intra-mundane, and thus the historical, to transcendence, and to any possible conception of transcendence.” Adorno, Metaphysics: Concept and Problems, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), p. 100.
43 43. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, p. 372.
44 44. Fania Scholem,
