Korespondence

The correspondence with the eminent religious philosopher Gerhard (Gershom) Scholem begins at a time when Hannah Arendt is struggling for her bare existence in French exile. The link between them is the fate of Scholem's friend Walter Benjamin, whom Arendt met in exile in Paris and who entrusted her with his manuscripts before her departure for the USA. Benjamin, however, was unable to escape Europe, committing suicide on the French-Spanish border in 1940. In one of his first letters, he informs Scholem, who had been living in Palestine for almost two decades at the time, of his tragic fate. A long-standing dialogue between New York and Jerusalem and between two contradictory figures - the independent political theorist Arendt and the convinced Zionist Scholem, professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and author of a seminal work on Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah (Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism) - is thus set in motion.

Czech edition