Description

Immediate dispatch from Somerset. Nice book in great condition. Pages in excellent condition. Softcover. English. See images for condition.

About the book >.>.> What began with a visit to Berlin one rainy summer a few years after the fall of the wall burgeoned into the following study of the intellectual partnership of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Sc-holem which I wrote over a period of nine years at the Free Uni-versity of Berlin. Metaphysics of the Profane: The Political Theology of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem concerns an early phase in the thinking of both authors bound in many ways to the period surrounding the First World War. Their friendship could have begun as early as the fall of 1913 when Scholem’s Zionist youth group Jung Juda met the Sprechsaal der Jugend which was formed under the influence of the anarchist pedagogue Gustav Wyneken. Benjamin had been chosen that evening by Wyneken’s group to speak on the question of Zionism. Yet the first en-counter between the two actually took place on July 16 1915 in the library of the University of Berlin. Following this initial meeting their friendship was to span twenty-five years until Benjamin’s suicide in 1940 while fleeing the Nazis. The most intensive phase of this intellectual partnership began in 1915 and probably reached a peak during the highly creative but also isolated period of the authors’ residence in the town of Muri. Switzerland in 1918. It most definitely culminates in 1923 with Sc-holem’s departure for Palestine. (LL)