Briefe und Briefwechsel

This volume contains all the surviving letters and cards from the correspondence between Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin in chronological order. Undoubtedly, a significant loss for the correspondence is that Adorno's replies are missing until early 1933: they were left behind in Benjamin's last Berlin apartment on Prinzregentenstrasse when he had to leave Germany in March 1933 and have since been lost.

"For all reification is a forgetting: objects become things at the moment they are held, without being present in all their parts: where something of them is forgotten." Few better characterizations could be imagined than this sentence from Adorno's letter of February 29, 1940, to Walter Benjamin, to illustrate the crucial difference between the discussions that took place in the Critical Theory of the 1930s and the representation that summarizes the results of those discussions in contemporary secondary literature.

There are worlds between the criticism that Adorno and Benjamin mutually exercised on each other's work during their exile and the crystallized form in which these central works are received and transmitted by later generations, fragmented and clumsily reassembled. A considerable part of Benjamin's correspondence remained fragmentary in his "Passagen-Werk," which aimed to decipher the 19th century from a philosophical-historical perspective, and the advance payment for the Baudelaire essay for the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung. The letters overall, exchanged primarily between Benjamin and Adorno during their exile starting in 1934, revolve around the binding theoretical representation of those fundamental experiences of bourgeois culture that were irretrievably lost with fascism, and whose forgetting was not the fortunate shedding of burdens by the wanderer who sees the goal within reach.