Uncovering Walter Benjamin: Volume 1

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.