Four Jews on Parnassus-a Conversation: Benjamin, Adorno, Scholem, Schönberg

by Carl Djerassi, Gabriele Seethaler (Illustrator)

Overview

This book features a CD of rarely performed music, including a specially commissioned rap by Erik Weiner of Walter Benjamin's "Thesis on the Philosophy of History."

Theodor W. Adorno was the prototypical German Jewish non-Jew, Walter Benjamin vacillated between German Jew and Jewish German, Gershom Scholem was a committed Zionist, and Arnold Schönberg converted to Protestantism for professional reasons but later returned to Judaism. Carl Djerassi, himself a refugee from Hitler's Austria, dramatizes a dialogue between these four men in which they discuss fraternity, religious identity, and legacy as well as reveal aspects of their lives-notably their relations with their wives-that many have ignored, underemphasized, or misrepresented.

The desire for canonization and the process by which it is obtained are the underlying themes of this dialogue, with emphasis on Paul Klee's Angelus Novus (1920), a canonized work that resonated deeply with Benjamin, Adorno, and Scholem (and for which Djerassi and Gabrielle Seethaler present a revisionist and richly illustrated interpretation). Basing his dialogue on extensive archival research and interviews, Djerassi concludes with a daring speculation on the putative contents of Benjamin's famous briefcase, which disappeared upon his suicide.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231518307
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	11/25/2008
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	232
File size:	42 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Carl Djerassi, novelist, playwright, and emeritus professor of chemistry at Stanford University, is one of the few American scientists to have been awarded both the National Medal of Science (for the first synthesis of an oral contraceptive) and the National Medal of Technology. He has published an autobiography, a memoir, a collection of short stories, a poetry chapbook, five novels, and eight plays that have been staged all over the world.

Gabriele Seethaler, an Austrian biochemist who became a photographer and artist, began to fuse art and science in a project entitled Identity Genotype-Phenotype. The Viennese Gallery Heike Curtze has shown her work since 2000.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Preface
1. Four Men
2. Four Wives
3. One Angel (by Paul Klee)
4. Four Jews
5. Benjamin's Grip
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Biographical Sketches
Illustration Sources

What People are Saying About This

Jack Zipes

What is important is this book's originality. Carl Djerassi is highly innovative, amusing, and insightful. He is also not afraid to ask touchy questions. By writing a docudrama, he can and does raise questions about intellectual integrity and the personal integrity of 'godlike' intellectuals.

— Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota

Susannah Heschel

Reading this book was one of the most glorious experiences of my life. The writing is magnificent and appropriate both for reading and staging in a theater.

— Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College

Martin Jay

Audaciously conceived and masterfully executed, Four Jews on Parnassus is more than a delightful jeu d'esprit. Combining serious research with a lively imagination, Carl Djerassi succeeds in evoking an entire lost world of human—all-too-human German Jewish intellectuals, whose chatter proves anything but idle.

— Martin Jay, Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor of History, University of California, Berkeley

Editorial Reviews

A beautiful book.

Times Literary Supplement - Frederic Raphael

The prodigiously illustrated book is a readable treatment of an important subject.

Booklist

Djerassi's latest project probably works better in theory than in practice: a "dramatized conversation" among "four extraordinary intellectuals of the twentieth century," philosopher Walter Benjamin, intellectuals Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem, and composer Arnold Schönberg. Djerassi decided on this group, he says, because they "belonged to the peculiar subset of German and Austrian bourgeois Jews of the pre-World War II generation... more Berlinish or Viennese than their non-Jewish compatriots" (not incidentally the same subset to which Djerassi assigns himself). In an attempt to provide further insight into the Jewish struggle with identity and the overlooked parts of these men's private lives, he imagines separate conversations among their wives as well (each an "accomplished and energetic" woman). Author, playwright and chemist (who developed the birth control pill) Djerassi (Cantor's Delimma: A Novel, This Man's Pill: Reflections on the 50th Birthday of the Pill) will pique readers' curiosity, but will probably only hold the attention of academics who don't mind a surfeit of esoteric references and philosophical flights of fancy.
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Publishers Weekly

In the hands of wittily sardonic award-winning chemist Djerassi (professor emeritus, Stanford Univ.), also a novelist and playwright, these four titular mid-20th century Jewish intellectuals from Germany and Austria come back to life with vigor. Djerassi playfully-but with solid scholarship-places them in Plato-like dialog atop mythological Parnassus, home to the relevant Muses of poetry, music, and erudition. And these four fellows aren't just chin-wagging among themselves about prewar concepts: in one of the five scenes, their wives-most of whom figured either directly or indirectly in their husbands' adulterous affairs-are included. Paul Klee's viewpoints on Hitler are bandied about in another, and-in the only scene Djerassi creates from informed conjecture rather than documents-Walter Benjamin is implicated as a former-day hippie. Liberally peppered throughout, Seethaler's artwork illustrating the thinkers' supposed conversational gambits and philosophical points show how useful Photoshop could have been to any of them when he was writing during his lifetime. Some broad humor is laugh-out-loud (as when they can obtain new editions of each other's recently published letters from the Internet), but the imaginative text is faithful to their pursuits of intellectual truth and cultural relevance. For all academic and most public library collections.
—Francisca Goldsmith

Library Journal

The prodigiously illustrated book is a readable treatment of an important subject.

Booklist

A beautiful book.

— Frederic Raphael

Times Literary Supplement