Arendt and Scholem

Nathan Goldman reviews The Correspondence Between Hannah Arendt and Gershom Scholem for the L.A. Review of Books.  Reflecting on the intimacy of letter writing, and the intensity of their often sombering correspondence, Goldman focuses on the nearness and distances that shaped Arendt and Scholem’s relationship.

Scholem and Arendt, too, understood letter-writing in relation to the face-to-face encounter, though their analyses of the relation tended to be less dire than Kafka’s. In a diary entry, a young Scholem mused about the possibility of the “messianic moment” in letters, which are, as editor Marie Luise Knott describes, “simultaneously the place of both deferred and expected encounters.” Indeed, both kinds of encounters play a role in Arendt and Scholem’s correspondence. In the early years, while the war still rages, they look forward to meeting immediately after its end. Arendt, in a letter from January 1945, writes that she has sent Scholem some copies of articles that they might discuss when they’re finally able to see one another. She adds, wistfully, that “the only question now is in which cafe [they’ll] meet,” and that the meeting will occur at “five o’clock sharp.” She goes on: “This is gallows humor, for the question of when we’ll see one another again is beginning to play an ever-greater role for me personally — the Greeks rightly located the dramatic heart of tragedy to be the scene in which people recognize each other again.” She ends the letter with an acknowledgment of the relationship between letter-writing and face-to-face encounters and a reminder of the playfully set time: “Write soon — letters are a kind of surrogate. And don’t forget: after the war, five o’clock sharp!”