Introduction: Rolande Glicenstein’s Walter Benjamin Chapter 1

The panels that compose Rolande Glicenstein’s exquisitely illustrated graphic work depict the genesis of the bond between Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem, whose friendship and correspondence has been extensively documented. The originality of Glicenstein’s piece lies in her technique: the density of the lines, alternately thick and thin, taken together with the depth she achieves through creatively contrasting foregrounds and backgrounds, demonstrates an understanding of these two thinkers’ personal connection, and of their varying degrees of integration into the German and Jewish worlds they inhabited.

To choose one example: Glicenstein’s distinctive style underscores Scholem’s recollections of Benjamin’s comportment as a speaker, about which Scholem claims to have retained vivid memories. He writes in his memoir: “The first thing that struck me about Benjamin—indeed it was characteristic of him all his life—was that he never could remain seated quietly during a conversation but immediately began to pace up and down in the room as he formulated his sentences. At some point, he would stop before me and in the most intense voice deliver his opinion on the matter. Or he might offer several viewpoints in turn, as if he were conducting an experiment” (Story of a Friendship 8). The initial images in Glicenstein’s depiction present Benjamin-in-motion, a hydra of a man who occupies the right halves of two consecutive panels. These panels, with their vacant centers, their lack of dialogue, and their tandem depictions of Scholem observing Benjamin’s erratic movements from a safe distance, contrast with the many well-known likenesses of Benjamin in repose, the images that make up the finite photographic archive we have by now grown accustomed to seeing. Benjamin appears here in the dynamics of a relationship because Glicenstein resists the temptation to sanctify him. Unlike many other portraits, hers is hardly hagiographic.

The subjective standpoint inherent in Glicenstein’s depictions acknowledges that Benjamin’s bearing is seen through Scholem’s eyes. He is this work’s narrator, and the author-artist relies on a first-person indirect perspective, just as one would expect to see in a cinematic adaptation. This is, by and large, a graphic retelling of Scholem’s recollections: we know what we know about their friendship mainly from his memoirs. The movement of Benjamin’s body in that first encounter, nearly bowing, echoes Scholem’s own description in which Benjamin presents himself with an “almost Chinese courtesy” (On Jews 174). He is an object of Scholem’s adoration and fascination, and he makes for a curious interlocutor, moving in and out of this story, woven into its frames. His orbital motions reflect the paths of these thinkers’ ongoing discussions and follow the tangential tendencies symptomatic of Scholem’s account of their friendship. The two rove improvisationally in their conversations, touching on an assortment of books, essays, and ideas. The many stations of the conversation that brings the two of them, for example, from Kant to Henri Poincaré to Schelling, as depicted in these pages, are derived entirely from Scholem’s own writings (Story of a Friendship 11).

More than a mere adaptation of Scholem’s memoirs, this representation is commentary; its form uniquely underlines a range of cultural and interpersonal dynamics. Throughout the conversations that are depicted here, Benjamin, who was five years older than Scholem, seems to take up more space than his counterpart. Scholem brushes up against the margins, sometimes crowded out by his own speech bubbles, and Benjamin looms larger. For these psychically weighted compositions, expressionist film is surely a point of reference. 1915, the year of Benjamin and Scholem’s first conversation, was the year Paul Wegener and Henrik Galeen’s Der Golem was released. Accordingly, a number of Glicenstein’s panels highlight the expressionistic play of light and shadow. One notes, for example, the panel in which Scholem’s father, entirely enshrouded by darkness, says a prayer over his tobacco. Glicenstein makes use of the chiaroscuros typical of that cinematic moment, drawing attention to the scale of Scholem’s Oedipal dramas.

Where she gestures toward expressionism, the artist’s style deliberately reflects her subjects’ era. Glicenstein...