Letter from Gretel Karplus Adorno to Walter Benjamin, August 28, 1935
Gretel Karplus to Walter Benjamin
Berlin
28 August 1935.
My dear Detlef,
You have to wait too terribly long for a letter from me, but I think you sensed my absence from time to time nonetheless. Quite a number of things have happened in the meantime. It was very pleasant in the Black Forest, though in the low mountain range we certainly mourned for our beloved Dolomites, but I did have quite a good rest, and feel quite passable at the moment; I hardly dare say any more about my condition for fear of invoking a sudden change for the worse. – You asked me kindly about my business; so far I cannot say anything at all; as I am mainly producing winter gloves, I am very much hoping that we will have a severe, early winter. Let us hope for the best. – As my father constantly has to mind his health, our apartment, with its two floors and the spiral staircase, has proved somewhat impractical, so we will be moving at the start of October to Westphalischestr. 27, by the Hochmesiterplatz. To avoid any resulting interruptions to our correspondence, you should then write to me care of Tengler at Dresdenerstr. 50. If you need any of your books and journals, I would gladly send them now, to avoid any unnecessary damage resulting from the move. – My sister just spent a few weeks visiting America, has incredibly interesting stories to relate and hopes she will soon be able to move there for good. – Teddie is in Frankfurt at the moment, will then be coming to Berlin for 2 weeks, and then return to Oxford around 10 October, though he will be in Frankfurt again and in London for a few days before he does.
I was so very happy to be able to discuss the response to your exposé with Teddie, and your reply is just as I would have wished – no, in its nuance of being directed at me it even surpassed my boldest expectations, and I am especially grateful for it. It is very reassuring to me that you yourself mention that first sketch and the other, thus preventing the assumption that you gave up after the first. Thus you share our opinion that the second is on no account final; one would never suspect the hand of WB in it. I already eagerly await your second letter to Teddie.
Have you meanwhile received the essay by Haselpeter? – Unfortunately I only spoke to him on the telephone in Frankfurt, and he told me of his plan for a new study on the Alps.1 He is a great alpinist, you see, and knows quite a lot of the literature on the subject. He thinks that the Alps were only really discovered as a landscape in the 19th century, and then people recognized the models for the great cities and their buildings in them. – Regarding ‘Berliner Kindheit’, I would consider it most advantageous if you wrote to Krenek first, to see if he can find an opening for the manuscript. How are things in this respect with Ernst Bloch? He has always been superb at it with his own writings.
You made me extremely happy by sending Baba. And I am always up for a good detective novel. That reminds me: what do you think of the new Kafka edition with the different readings? – Do you think it would be possible to send me the book Machines es Asie 2 by Frédérix? – I know you cannot read English, but perhaps you have heard of T. S. Eliot, who has amazingly also written some very interesting surrealist poems in French? 3
How is your sister? I hope for your sake that she will not turn up very soon. Are you in contact with Fränkel, incidentally? Going on what I have heard about him, I could almost suppose it. – I would truly love to have a conversation with Helen Grund, and not only about the fashion products of the major companies, but also about the laws according to which fashions ultimately move socially downwards in the provinces and the middle classes. I am encountering this problem almost daily in my work, but I am not interested in it purely for professional reasons; this cycle has always interested me, and I would almost go so far as to say that the closer I am to it, the more difficult it seems to find the solution, and the more questionable I find the notion of taste.
I hope this mammoth letter is not too boring to read, but I did want to compensate for the dearth of recent weeks. Fond regards
ever your Felicitas
Unknown. ↩
See Pierre Frédérix, Machines en Asie: Oural et Sibirie soviétiques (Paris, 1934). ↩
Gretel Adorno may be thinking of the four French poems ‘Le Directeur’, ‘Mélange adultére de tout’, ‘Lune de miel’ and ‘Dans le restaurant’ from Eliot’s collection Poems (New York, 1920), which also included ‘The Hippopotamus’ and ‘Mr. Eliot’s Sunday Morning Service’. ↩