Cartas de Walter Benjamin e Gershom Scholem: temáticas do fascismo e do antissemitismo

Abstract

Walter Benjamin’s thinking occupies a particular and special position in the history of modern critical thought. His work, fragmented, unfinished, hermetic, current, anachronistic, and complex, allows various flâneurs to wander through a diversity of themes that encompass literature, sociology, philosophy, art, history, among others. Working with a thinker of this stature is, at the very least, a challenge that presents itself from the outset. It means accepting the fact that his critiques take on, at various moments, literary, theological, and philosophical forms, and that they are imbued with a lucid, tragic (like your life) and, at times, even ironic perspective. It is to understand that his conception of the world is almost always derived from a triumvirate that accompanied him until the end of his existence: Jewish messianism, German romanticism, and Marxism. Such complexities have not, however, prevented the proliferation of a variety of studies the author has or that have his ideas as the main object (Matos, 2010; Löwy, 2005, 2019; Otte; Sedlmayer; Cornelsen, 2010). Dialogues with Walter Benjamin can thus be “remembered” in departments such as Modern Languages, Philosophy, Arts, Sociology, and Architecture (especially in these “modern” times, when history insists on repeating itself). Given this scope, the objective of this thesis is to shed new light on the epistolary production of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, two important German thinkers, especially regarding their reflections on the themes of antisemitism and fascism. To this end, 116 letters and postcards exchanged by Benjamin and Scholem between 1933 and 1940 are used; and, in greater depth, the last two letters exchanged by the two friends and confidants are studied. These missives – which were published by the latter in the 1970s in a book entitled Correspondence – cover a significant moment in both German history and the lives of Benjamin and Scholem (the rise and strengthening of the Nazi Party, the beginning of World War II, and Benjamin’s suicide in 1940). This thesis therefore proposes, through the observation of this epistolary production, to contribute to a historical approach (anticipated by Benjamin himself) which, contrary to the assumptions of historicism, advocates a new political interpretation of memory and history, as well as an original ethical and aesthetic representation of the past. Such an approach (which is suspicious of universal categories and focuses on fragmentary memory, based on individual and community experience, as well as an attachment to symbolic places) aims, basically, to carry out a dialectical analysis between memory and history as two modes of relating to the past. Re-presenting the history of the period through the lens of the correspondence sent by Benjamin to Scholem and vice versa seems not only a reparative historical duty, which recalls and redeems the memory of those who died through the cruel violence of National Socialism, but also an ethical commitment that approaches the present time, insofar as it denounces, in some way, the contemporary faces of the fascist phenomenon.