Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem

by Robert Alter

In four elegant chapters, Robert Alter explains the prismlike radiance created by the association of three modern Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. The volume pinpoints the intersections of these divergent witnesses to the modern condition of doubt, the no-man’s-land between traditional religion and modern secular culture.

Scholem, the devoted Zionist and master historian of Jewish mysticism, and Benjamin, the Marxist cultural critic, dedicated much of their thought and correspondence to Kafka, the explorer in fiction of radical alienation. Kafka’s sense of spiritual complexities was an inspiration to both thinkers in their resistance to the murderous simplification of totalitarian ideology. In Necessary Angels , Alter uncovers a moment when the future of modernism is revealed in its preoccupation with the past. The angel of the title is first Kafka’ on June 25, 1914, the writer recorded in his diary a dream vision of an angel that turned into the painted wooden figurehead of a ship. In 1940, at the end of his life, Walter Benjamin devoted the ninth of his Theses on the Philosophy of History to a meditation on an angel by the artist Paul Klee, first quoting a poem he had written on that painting. In Benjamin’s vision, the figure from Klee becomes an angel of history, sucked into the future by the storm of progress, his face looking back to Eden. Benjamin bequeathed the Klee oil painting to Scholem; it hung in the living room of Scholem’s home on Abarbanel Street in Jerusalem until 1989, when his widow placed it in the Israel Museum.

Alter’s focus on the epiphanic force of memory on these three great modernists shows with sometimes startling, sometimes prophetic clarity that a complete break with tradition is not essential to modernism. Necessary Angels itself continues the necessary discovery of the future in the past.

Genres: Philosophy

131 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 1991

About the author

Robert Bernard Alter is an American professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967, and has published many acclaimed works on the Bible, literary modernism, and contemporary Hebrew literature.

Reviews

[Carol · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book because it was by Robert Alter and because I was curious if someone could help me make sense of modernity
. Alter's book is so helpful. He has taken Kafka (who I know is important and whom I've read with little understanding), Gershom Scholem (the great re-discoverer of Jewish Mysticism (Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism is his masterpiece) and Walter Benjamin and shows their interrelationship and how they deal with both the attraction of religious tradition and their feeling that we cannot go back that way again. They area drawn to exegesis and commentary and want to transcend nihilism but haven't really found what can allow them to do that. The book serves, for me, as a place to dialog with some of these ideas and as such is a very welcome gift.

[Damian Murphy · Rating 5 out of 5]

An excellent extended meditation on Scholem, Benjamin, and Kafka and their views on tradition, revelation, and exegesis (among other things).

"The text cannot be and should not be a stable entity. A gap always yawns between signifier and signified, however the interpreter seeks to close it."