Correspondence 1930-1940 (eBook)

Gretel Adorno, née Karplus, was born in Berlin in 1902. She acquired a PhD in chemistry, and directed a company that manufactured gloves between 1933 and 1937. She was in contact with numerous intelletuals during the late 1920s including Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and Bertolt Brecht. She met Theodor W. Adorno in 1923, and they married in London in exile in 1937. In 1938 they moved to the USA together. In 1953 she returned to Germany, and lived in Frankfurt am Main until her death in 1993. Walter Benjamin was born in Berlin in 1892, and took his own life in Port Bou (France) in 1940 while fleeing from the Nazis. He was a philosopher, critic, essayist, translator and writer, and can be considered one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century.

Editors' Foreword vii

Correspondence 1930-1940 1

Index 291

"Throughout the volume's 180 letters, the editors' scrupulous referencing and the extensive footnotes help us to decode the hermetic web of enquiries about close friends, in-jokes and mutual favours spun by the correspondents. The English translation skilfully navigates Benjamin's effusive idiosyncrasies and softens the clipped directness of both authors to reveal the comfortable familiarity beneath."
Times Literary Supplement

"The correspondence between Gretel Karplus Adorno and Walter Benjamin documents a remarkable friendship. Benjamin valued "Felizitas" as a critic who was at once acute and sympathetic, and these letters bristle with some of the most challenging formulations of his thought in the 1930s. Yet their relationship also enabled Benjamin to reveal aspects of his life that remained hidden from even his closest male friends, including Adorno himself and Scholem. The letters thus offer a moving and surprisingly intimate account of the fate of a great intellectual struggling to survive - and to write - in exile."
Michael Jennings, Princeton University