Bøger i Uncovering Walter Benjamin serien

Characters of days. In slow time the unspoken passions of the two young men transform into signals of their purity for each other, even as they disappoint. Millions of men their age from all walks of Europe and the Middle East are casually wiped out in days. Characters of days. Big stick figures make pronouncements and plans. Big weapons turn their aim as liberally as the sun. No one seems to believe they are not alone until they can pour their heart into a written letter.

A graphic biography, first installment. It opens in Berlin at the start of World War I. 23-year-old Walter Benjamin meets Gerhard Scholem, 17. They become fast friends. Benjamin is already a strikingly original thinker with a voracious curiosity. Scholem is forming the commitments that sent him to Palestine in 1923 and led him eventually to write the definitive book on Jewish mysticism. This is the story of a friendship between two extraordinary young men in a world that is falling apart. Author/illustrator Rolande Glicenstein is fascinated by the two men's preoccupations: war, Zionism, language, philosophy. She is charmed by their brilliance, their attachment to each other, their competitiveness. The comic form enables her to touch many notes without pounding any. She is not a cartoonist; every page is original. Volume I introduces a noisy, colorful crowd of German intellectuals in a time when socialist politics, mysticism, gender relations and the idea of a Jewish state were red-hot topics. Glicenstein attends closely to the heedless slaughter of World War I, to the blossoming and abrupt suppression of Socialism in Germany during and after World War I, and to the varieties of Zionism that were in the air, notably Martin Buber's utopian version.