Edouard Roditi
MEETINGS WITH WALTER BENJAMIN
When I first met her in Berlin in 1930 or 1931, Jean Ross,
the real-life model for Sally Bowles in the fiction of Christopher
Isherwood, was a very lively English girl who spoke fluent French
and had already learned to speak very passable German. Having
spent much of her childhood and adolescence in British-occupied
Egypt, where her father was stationed, she displayed none of the pe–
culiarly provincial English insularity that characterized Christopher,
who mistook her more worldly wisdom and greater ease in the com–
pany of foreigners for the kind of moral looseness and sexual promis–
cuity that he appears to have attributed to her in his fiction.
Jean was managing to earn her living in Berlin with a variety of
odd jobs, among which private tutoring in English conversation was
the most important, and she had thus acquired, before we met her, a
number of German friends in different walks of life. One of these
friends was a rather handsome, outspoken, and independent Ger–
man girl who worked as an occasional freelance secretary for several
German journalists and other writers, among whom she named
Walter Benjamin . He was particularly interested in the writings of
Marcel Proust and even considered the task of perhaps undertaking
a German translation of
Remembrance of Things Past.
In the course of
one of my conversations with Jean and this girl, I mentioned my
own interest in Proust, and they both decided that my knowledge of
French and of Proust's writings and social environment might be of
interest to Benjamin. I was thus in the company of Jean and Chris–
topher a few days later when this girl turned up at Jean's home with
Walter Benjamin .
Throughout his literary life, Christopher again and again ex–
pressed his distaste for the writings of Proust, and he was obviously
bored throughout our meeting with Benjamin, who questioned me
at great length on several details of Proust's social environment and
personal habits, while Christopher chatted in English with Jean or
fidgeted and squirmed on his chair. In any case, Benjamin's appear–
ance and personality were rather colorless and unprepossessing, in
fact like those of a somewhat conventional and pedantic German–
Jewish academic. After this meeting, Christopher even declared to
us that Benjamin was a dreary and depressing bore, and it is in this
