Correspondence 1930-1940
The correspondence between Gretel Adorno and Walter Benjamin, published here in its complete form for the first time, is the document of a great friendship that existed independently of Benjamin’s relationship with Theodor W. Adorno. While Benjamin, alongside his everyday worries, writes especially about those projects on which he worked so intensively in the last years of his life, it was Gretel Karplus-Adorno who did everything in her power to keep Benjamin in the world. She urged him to emigrate to the USA and told him about Adorno’s plans and Bloch’s movements, thus maintaining the connection between the old Berlin friends and acquaintances. She helped him through the most difficult times with regular money transfers, and organized financial support from the Saar region, which was initially still independent from the Third Reich. Once in New York, she attempted to entice Benjamin to America with her descriptions of the city and the new arrivals from Europe – though ultimately to no avail.
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.