Private Life x Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast

Private Life presents a bonus episode from our friends at Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast. Produced by the eponymous art gallery, Dialogues brings together artists, creatives, and intellectuals in conversation about what it means to make things today.  

 

In this episode, host Helen Molesworth is joined by the art historian Lisa Saltzman to discuss Walter Benjamin’s final days. Molesworth and Saltzman discuss philosophy, World War II Europe, and the network of intellectuals who saved Benjamin’s most prized possessions, including Angelus Novelus, the Paul Klee drawing that helped inspired one of his most well-known texts, the Theses on the Philosophy of History.  

 

Saltzman is the inaugural Emily Rauh Pulitzer ’55 Chair of Modern and Contemporary Art at Bryn Mawr College. She is currently working on a book, To Make Whole What Has Been Smashed, that explores how one passage from Benjamin’s posthumously published writingscame to transform Klee’s etching of an angel into the “angel of history,” a postwar icon of our seemingly impotent witness to historical catastrophe. 

 

You can find Dialogues: The David Zwirner Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube.  

 

This Spring, The New York Review of Books announced a new column, “At the Galleries”, featuring sharp, timely reviews of a wide variety of exhibitions, with a particular focus on contemporary art. The column debuted in the magazine’s May 2026 Art Issue.  

Read “At the Galleries” with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, which, in addition to twenty issues a year, gives you access to our full archive since 1963, searchable on our website. 

  

 

Creators and Guests

Host

Jarrett Earnest

Jarrett Earnest has contributed essays to the New York Review of Books on artists ranging from Tom of Finland to Jack Whitten. He is the author of What it Means to Write About Art: Interviews with Art Critics (2018) and Valid Until Sunset (2023) and has edited several collections of criticism, including volumes of Dave Hickey and Peter Schjeldahl as well as artist's writings by Nayland Blake and Jesse Murry. His curatorial projects include the acclaimed 2019 exhibition "The Young and Evil" at David Zwirner gallery, New York.

What is Private Life: A New York Review Podcast?

Private Life is a podcast from The New York Review, hosted by contributor Jarrett Earnest. Each episode offers intimate, in-depth conversations with distinguished voices from across the literary landscape—about their lives, their work, and the ideas that shape both. Along the way, they revisit pieces from the The New York Review of Books's robust sixty-year archive (some episodes of the podcast will feature newly recorded readings of these classic essays) to situate arguments within contemporary culture. The show also includes discussions of titles from our book publishing arm, New York Review Books, featuring talks with translator Mark Polizzotti on Andre Breton's surrealist masterpiece Nadja and musician Richard Hell on the re-issue of his novel Godlike. Other early episodes find Joyce Carol Oates ruminating on true crime, while Darryl Pinckney opens up about the perils of memoir and his formative friendship with essayist Elizabeth Hardwick. 

Private Life is a personable, expansive invitation for longtime subscribers and a new generation of readers alike to connect with the past, present and future of The New York Review. 

Jarrett Earnest: This is Private Life, a New York Review podcast. I'm your host, Jarrett Ernest. And here is some exciting news. The review is announcing a new column, At the Galleries, featuring sharp, timely reviews of a wide variety of exhibitions with a particular focus on contemporary art. As it is for many things, this is a rocky and transitional moment for art criticism. And in response, the review intends to cover the most vital and significant exhibitions of the moment. Along with Private Life, At the Galleries marks an enhanced focus on art at the review, and I personally am looking forward to reading it and to writing for it. The new column debuts in the magazine's Art Issue, with Ben Davis covering the Drawing Center and Don Chan on a show at Green Neftali, both in New York. And speaking of contemporary art, Today, I am excited to bring you a special episode from our friends at the contemporary art gallery David Zwirner. Their podcast, Dialogues, brings together artists, creatives, and intellectuals in conversation about what it means to make things today. What you're about to hear is an episode from their 10th season, which just launched this spring. I felt that it connects to so much writing from the New York Review of Books, as well as some episodes we have coming up here on Private Life. In it? Host Helen Molesworth is joined by art historian Lisa Saltzman to discuss Walter Benjamin's final days. It's about philosophy, but it's also about World War II Europe and about friendship, all centering on the Paul Klee drawing that inspired one of his most famous and trenchant texts, Theses on the Philosophy of History. If you enjoy it as much as I did, I recommend checking it out and subscribing to the Podcast, wherever you listen.

Lisa Saltzman: I'm Lisa Saltzman, I teach art history at Bryn Mawr College.

Helen Molesworth: From David Zwirner, this is Dialogues, a podcast about artists.

Lisa Saltzman: And the way they think. It's really not until the 70s that American academics are even starting to receive Benjamin. And it's only at that moment that the Klee drawing starts to, one might say, rise into significance because it is invoked in this most powerful thesis.

Helen Molesworth: I'm Helen Molesworth, your host for this season. Every episode features a conversation about what it means to make things today. Hey, everyone. Today's episode is about Walter Benjamin, a writer I hold close to my heart, and the Paul Klee drawing that inspired one of his most famous and trenchant essays, The Thesis on the Philosophy of History. My guest is art historian Lisa Saltzman, and she joins me to tell the gripping tale of how both the Klee Drawing and Benjamin's essay survived the Nazi invasion of France. It's a story about art and philosophy, But it's really a story about post-World War II Europe, the legacy of fascism, Jewish identity, trauma, memory, and friendship. Now, here's Lisa Saltzman. Welcome to the podcast, Lisa Saltzman. Thank you, pleasure to be here. I'm so excited about our conversation today. We're gonna talk about Walter Benjamin. We're going to talk about the thesis on the philosophy of history. It is an essay I, like many others, have returned to over and over again. It is the ultimate essay for hard times. So. You are an art historian. You have worked on contemporary art that finds itself in the overlapping concerns of post-World War II Europe, the legacy of fascism, Jewish identity, trauma, memory, among many other topics. And I know that you're at work on a new project that explores the legacy and influence of Walter Benjamin's engagement with Paul Klee's 1920 drawing. The Angelus Novus, a drawing that Benjamin writes about in his thesis on the philosophy of history, a draw that because of Benjamin, we often just call it the angel of history. And this story, like many, has a few different beginning points. And I just thought in the tradition of Uncle Valter and Uncle Valters radio show, We would I'd just like to ask you a bunch of questions to get this story out of you because it's such a great and important story and I think it's a story about artwork and writing and history that just is feckoned beyond all measure and has real things to say to this moment. So I wonder if we could just start with the absolute basics, which is when did Walter you mean come into possession of this drawing by Paul Klee.

Lisa Saltzman: He actually bought it a year after it was made. It was first shown at an exhibition in Munich in 1920. That was a big, big show of clay's work. There's a gallerist named Goltz who ran a big modern art gallery. Benjamin had already been interested in clay's works. His wife Dora had given him a clay as a birthday present the year prior. And though we're not sure how or why he came. To go to this gallery in Munich a year later after the show had closed. He emerged from the gallery wanting to buy the drawing and was hard up because he wasn't the most successful of academics. He wasn't most successful in his moment at placing his work. So he got another Jewish philosopher friend, Ernst Bloch, to loan him some money to buy it. My mind is blown already. And He didn't even really have a place to live. He was like stuck at his parents with his wife and his young son in Berlin, but he'd gone to Munich to visit his friend Gershom Shulam, and then he'd gone off to Heidelberg to just like have some time to himself. So to his disappointment, he was able to buy the drawing, but didn't get to take hold of the drawing for some months. So Gersham Shulham actually had the drawing for the first sort of six months of its. Being in Walter Benjamin's possession and it was hanging in Shulam's apartment in Munich.

Helen Molesworth: Did Benjamin and Clay know one another? Are they friends? Are they in the same circle?

Lisa Saltzman: Nope, not at all. I mean, Benjamin's circle is very much principally German Jewish intellectuals. And so, Clay isn't in Berlin. So there's no geographic connection. He liked his work. He finds it, the first drawing very beautiful and this one deeply compelling. So much so that he had to have it.

Helen Molesworth: So Hitler comes to power, as we know, in 1933. And Benjamin, as I understand it, flees Germany for Paris, where he meets...

Lisa Saltzman: On a rent?

Helen Molesworth: Thank you very much.

Lisa Saltzman: Yeah, well, he remembers meeting Hannah Arendt in Berlin, but she has no recollection of it. So they either remeet in Paris or meet for the first time. They each have a different version of that story. But it's in Paris that their friendship really takes off. Let's see if we can get a little bit of background music in here. I'm going to go ahead and turn it off. I'm just going to turn it on.

Helen Molesworth: It seems like there's a group of- German Jewish expats that we now sort of associate with the Frankfurt School, cooling their juts in Paris in 3033, trying to figure out what to do, is that right?

Lisa Saltzman: Yeah, a few of them have had the good fortune already to get themselves, or are making their way out of Europe, first to England, then to New York. So ultimately Adorno and Horkheimer have made their way, or will have made their, way to New york. But Benjamin and Arendt are two who end up in Paris, and there ends up being this little circle of German-Jewish exiles, all of living. In the 14th arrondissement on a little street or around a little Street called the Rue d'Ambassade, that's Benjamin's last address in Paris, and that's where a bunch of them live sort of there or a few blocks from there. So there's this intense little circle or tribe as there's one French scholar who calls it, you know, Hannah Arendt's tribe. And Benjamin is part of that circle. And the drawing is with him then? It is. He apparently doesn't flee Berlin with it. And he actually goes to Ibiza before he gets to Paris. But someone brings him the drawing shortly thereafter. So he is reunited with his drawing in Paris and has it for the next seven years.

Helen Molesworth: Right. So then, as I understand it again, in 1938, German Jews, regardless of where they are in the world, are stripped of their citizenship, meaning that Benjamin is now both in exile and he is also stateless. And during this period, he's arrested by the

Lisa Saltzman: He is. It's a year later. In 1939, I think August 1939, the Hitler-Stalin pact is signed. And then right at the start of September 1939, Germany invades Poland. And that's the moment that the war begins. And it's both German and Austrian, whatever their religious background, or then, you know... Enemies of the state. But the Jews have this additional burden or problem. So it's not long after that. I think it's September 1 that Germany invades Poland. By September 3, Benjamin and others are rounded up in Paris, sent to the Olympic Stadium that's right outside the city and within a week or so are deported by train to a town called Nevers, and from there they actually marched for like two hours to some abandoned old chateau where they'll be interned for a couple of months until they're released in late November of 39. And then he has a few months. He has almost six months in Paris as things get worse and worse.

Helen Molesworth: Wow, so he's rounded up as a sort of matter of course. Does that mean that, like, the other members of Hannah Arendt's tribe are also rounded up? Like, are all Jews in Paris rounded up at this time?

Lisa Saltzman: Is it intellectual? Yeah. I mean, it's a combination of things. Men are always seen as more dangerous than women, so he is with a group of men when he is rounded up, when he is deported, when is then interned in this old house. He is already separated from his wife at this point, and wife and son are in Italy for a period of time. Running a little like I don't know probably what we would call like a bed-and-breakfast sort of hotel or working in one And they managed to escape to London. They survived the war Benjamin's son marries has two kids like there is a there's a

Helen Molesworth: And it's my understanding that around January 1940, he begins to draft the thesis on the philosophy of history.

Lisa Saltzman: But that is the presumption that sometime in those months after his return, and as the situation in Europe grows more desperate, as he is writing to friends in the States, in England, in Israel, to try to find a way out to get the appropriate papers, transit papers, affidavits, visas, whatever he may need, and he's also still furiously trying to get his work done. He's working on his Baudelaire essay. He's work on this, that, and the other. He's apparently still working on the Arcades project, this massive project that will be, like many things, posthumously published. And it's in those months of sort of winter into spring that he drafts the thesis on the philosophy of history.

Helen Molesworth: Would you mind reading for us stanza number nine where he writes about the clay drawing?

Lisa Saltzman: A clay painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past, where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage. And hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from paradise. It has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm. Is what we call progress.

Helen Molesworth: All right. I mean, that is such an amazing little bit of writing about what history is, and it is just so extraordinary that he comes to it through that drawing. Okay, so Paris falls to the Nazis in June. What does Benjamin do?

Lisa Saltzman: Yeah, so Benjamin panicking, he's been mailing off versions of his writings, he's being trying to find a way out, and some say on the eve, some would say on the morning of, but on June 14th, he and his sister have managed to get train tickets, and they take a train south on what is probably one of the last trains out of Paris, as or just before the Nazis are marching in. And so... He has escaped, and he's also done the work in the run-up to that because the Germans were first marching east, taking Poland and so forth, but then there has been a slow march west, so it is not unknown that things were getting really perilous. So in that moment that he's drafting the theses, as he's thinking about history, as thinking about catastrophe, as he is trying to finish his work, as trying to get his transit papers, he finds a way out. Train tickets south, at least out of Paris. And he's also been mailing off drafts of his work. And then one of the final things he does is he has been working at the Bibliothèque Nationale. He's gotten to know Georges Bataille. And to Batailles, he gives a whole bunch of his papers, including the Arcades project, which won't be found till decades later, including a copy of the theses that also will not be found until decades later. But that's also where the clay drawing is stowed. And that clay drawing is turned over earlier to those who will help to save it. Okay.

Helen Molesworth: You've got to just break this down. So while Benjamin is in Paris, he's met and become friendly with Georges Bataille of Surrealist fame.

Lisa Saltzman: Yeah, you know, there are different people who are working in the Bibliotheca. You know, the world may be collapsing, but they're still at the library doing their work.

Helen Molesworth: And he gives Bataille, the Arcades project, a draft of the thesis on the philosophy of

Lisa Saltzman: yeah some say he also gives him the his um berlin childhood which is a lovely evocative set of recollections uh copy of the uh work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction like all the biggies

Helen Molesworth: of the biggies and the drawing. Because Bataille is not Jewish. That is correct.

Lisa Saltzman: He also has a position at the library. It's not like they just put it in a locker for the afternoon. But Ty has some position, I think, at the Library, keeper of something or whatever it may be. So he is able to secrete stuff away. And when you say secrete stuff

Helen Molesworth: Is he literally like hiding it in the Bibliotheque Nationale so the Nazis can't find it when they come into town? Like, what's the dynamic there?

Lisa Saltzman: I mean, I would like to imagine kind of, to the extent that he put the drawing somewhere where it was more known. It was couriered to Adorno in New York before America entered the war. So the drawing is out before you can't bring something like that across the Atlantic very easily, whereas the papers aren't found some of them for decades. So it suggests that they really were hidden away because it took some time. After the war to find them. So for those of us who were in grad school, 80s into 90s, like that's a moment where the arcades project or, you know, it's being published because it's not till 1982 that Bataille's widow gives the copy of the theses that were stored in the library that have all of Benjamin's little markings and annotations on them, gives them to, of all people, Giorgio Agamben. So the intellectual kind of lineage, connections, it's kind of remarkable who has had their hands on both these writings. And I haven't told you everything about what's happened with the various drafts of the writings, but also the drawing. That the drawing went from briefly hanging in Gerstam Schollam's apartment in Munich, to basically being with Benjamin all the time in Berlin, all the times in Paris. Brief period of safety in the Bibliotheque Nationale, and then there's more after that, but I'll keep you waiting on that.

Helen Molesworth: Yeah, it's really, I mean already what you're describing to me is so marvelous in a couple of ways. One, it is a network of friends and compatriots, allies, protecting things, protecting this clay drawing. And I assume they're protecting it in part because it was important to Benjamin. Yeah!

Lisa Saltzman: Play was- crazy prolific. You know, had Benjamin not bought this drawing that didn't sell from the show a year prior, and that wasn't illustrated in the edition of Ararat, which was the journal that this gallerist published, like this might have been a drawing that just languished in the clay collection of hundreds and thousands of things on paper, but Benjamin did buy it, and he It I mean, Shulam and others will say it was his most cherished possession.

Helen Molesworth: He develops a theory of history in part out of his engagement with this drawing. So he's given Bataille a draft of the thesis on the philosophy of history, but it seems like he's dispersing many copies of the Thesis to many different people. Is that correct?

Lisa Saltzman: Is correct, but in delving into this project, one of the amazing things is these people were writing to each other constantly, like the volume of letters that go back and forth between Benjamin and Theodore Adorno and Benjamin and Gretel Adorno, and Benjamin, and Arendt, and Benjamin, Sholem, and Benyamin and Krakauer, and like the list goes on. They're writing to each other all the time, and often they're sharing work as much as they're sharing personal intimacies. And so it is not unusual that he would send a draft of something, you know, for Adorno to tell him what's wrong with the Baudelaire essay. Oh, okay. But in this instance, that's not what he's doing. This is something that he wants to make sure gets out there. And so he in late April, early May sends a copy, I think a type script copy of the theses to Gretel Adorno musing in the letter that accompanies them about the kind of constellation of events that have Brought him to really think about this situation, by way of this drawing, that in some ways, like he realizes he's been thinking about this for, he says, nigh on 20 years. So he sends a copy to Adorno's wife, Gretel Karplus Adorno, and presents them to her. He says, I want you to receive these less as a collection of theses than as a bundle of whispering. Grasses. So there's also something just sort of beautiful, not, it's not, it's quasi romantic. I mean, there's nothing going on there, but there is this like intimacy with which he's sending her a set. There's another copy that was the copy he worked over and goes into the probably a suitcase that was like stored away at the Bibliotheque Nationale. There's a another copy I've come to think of as the first draft that he writes on the back of, I don't know, like back in the olden days when newspapers or magazines went through the mail, they had a paper wrapper around them. And in his Paris apartment, he is using some of those wrappers as paper. I mean, times were tough. This is spring in 1940. And so he's not using a beautiful new notepad. He has his sister there, sometimes typing things up for him. And she typed one of the copies of the theses. But the original copy, he keeps with him. He doesn't mail it away. And it's that copy that ultimately... After he's fled Paris, he spends time in Lourdes, and then he makes his way to Marseilles, and it's in Marseille that he meets up with Hannah Arendt in Marsee, because Marseil, you know, very in fry, and this it becomes this city of exiles, where lots of German Jewish and European Jewish artists, intellectuals, are fleeing to this transit point from which they might get to Spain, get to North Africa. From Spain get to Portugal and make their way across the Atlantic. So it's when they meet in Marseilles for what, you know, he can't know, but he likely fears is going to be the last time they see one another. It's at that moment that he presses this bundle of repurposed newspaper mailers on the backs of which he has written the first draft of the theses. So that copy is carried with Arendt during her journey.

Helen Molesworth: We know that in September of 1940, he heads towards the Spanish border. What happens at the border?

Lisa Saltzman: Nothing good. Um, Arendt will say that he was always a pretty unlucky man. He has a set of transit papers, visas, but he doesn't have a French exit visa, which he didn't need when he set off with a woman named Lisa Fitko and a couple other German Jews. And so it's at that border that this party is told no good. Like you don't have a French exit visa. The law had changed that day. So that's the bad luck of Benjamin. And I guess it was late in the day, night. They let them stay at a little guest house in this little town of Port-Bou. And sometime in the night, Benjamin took his own life. He had been traveling with morphine. And the authorities in this little town I guess, felt bad enough that they let the rest of the party go on. So this woman, Henny, Gerland, and her son are able to make the rest of their journey. And it's through them that we know some of this last moments of Benjamin.

Helen Molesworth: So in many ways, Benyamin has behaved in an incredibly prescient manner by sending all of those manuscripts to all of...

Lisa Saltzman: To all of those people. 4 versions that we know survived. And that's a lot of versions of one pretty short manuscript. So there's a sense that he is really thinking about how and where this will get to places that the war is not. And what I find most moving is that he hands this original copy to Arendt and trusts her with it. It's one thing, I mean there's an act of faith in putting things into the mail. And we don't know what he sent that was lost, but that he's able to put these in her hands and that one of the copies survives because she carried it with her when she was able to flee on a boat from Portugal to New York.

Helen Molesworth: Is it true that Hannah Arendt reads this copy of the thesis of the philosophy of history to her fellow passengers on the boat from Portugal to New York on the last leg of her from Nazi Germany.

Lisa Saltzman: It is apparently true. And I'm not sure she reads it to a huge gathered audience, but she definitely reads it to her second husband. And so she may read it to him and some group of friends. She also knows that Benjamin has died. So it is not unknown to her that she is carrying with her some of the last words, the last work of her dear friend. And one of the things that she does in... Like a month later in October of 1940, she goes to visit the grave and she can't find the grave because there is no grave. He's buried in a common grave in a Catholic cemetery and part of why she can find any trace of him is they've inverted his name so they have his name as Dr. Benjamin Walter. So she doesn't find anything and she writes to show them in. In October of 1940, both to tell him what has happened to their dear, beloved friend Benji, as some of them would call him. She writes, it was not to be found. His name is not written anywhere. A heart

Helen Molesworth: This is so extraordinary to me that in the middle of the Holocaust and the middle of a world war that Hannah Arendt is carrying such precious cargo that she's trying to go and see if he's been properly buried. I mean, these are very extraordinary gestures at a time of catastrophe.

Lisa Saltzman: I mean, absolutely. I mean all of, all of this, I mean this story to me of the survival of the drawing, of the the survival and posthumous of so many of his writings. I mean his career was not made, Benjamin's, until after the war, long after the war. But it is a testament, testament of friendship. I mean it is thanks to his friends that his work, his legacy comes to us. And it's a slow bill. Like his friends, may commemorate him in 1942 with a little memorial volume that displaced Frankfurt School for social research, organizes, and that is to some considered a kind of definitive version of the theses, though Adorno and Arendt were squabbling a bit over, you know, there are differences in the text and what is the definitive, and there's a German scholar who in the past year has just written about how There's really no real, you know, it's all a construct, which is not to say it's a fiction, but it's to say everything that we have read is predicated on this original copy that is an amalgam of a couple different versions when Arendt finally publishes the version that we all know that we read in grad school or in college or in illuminations. The version you just read today. But it's really not until the 70s. That American academics are even starting to receive Benjamin.

Helen Molesworth: Hmm

Lisa Saltzman: and it's only at that moment that the clay drawing starts to, one might say, rise into significance because it is invoked in this most powerful thesis, and so the drawing kind of re-emerges, or some might even say emerges for the first time, because sure it was shown in Munich in 1920 but to not much fanfare and then it was purchased and was in the collection, first of briefly Shulam, then Benjamin, then Adorno. Then there's a moment once Adorno is back in Frankfurt after the war that he finally relinquishes the drawing to Shulham, but that's only after Adorno, Shulom, and Benjamin's son Stefan have been writing back and forth to sort of try to establish like who should the drawing. Stefan's fine with not having the drawing, Adorno and Shulam also wrestling with aspects of that legacy. And so it's finally Shulam who takes the drawing back to Israel. And then by the early 80s, in the aftermath of Shulams death, his widow will give it to the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. So it is not seen by anyone, but people start to reproduce it because it's a way to illustrate the theses. It's such a powerful thesis. That the inventors making his movie Wings of Desire, like, all of a sudden that clay ongolus is back, but it's back as the angel of history.

Helen Molesworth: Okay, so the drawing, the Paul Klee drawing ends up at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Yep. Where I understand, it is almost never shown because it is considered to be so fragile. Can you tell us a little bit about the fate of the drawing today? I can.

Lisa Saltzman: It is only very, very rarely allowed out. It was in Berlin this summer for a strange show that was less commemorating Benjamin or German Jews than it was about like commemorating the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II and a way to think about the destruction of Berlin and various art objects and antiquities. But it's very, like you can look at it's history of exhibition and see that it travels very seldom, both because it's really delicate. It's something called an oil transfer drawing. So it's a weird little, it's teeny. It's like the size of an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper. Did you see the drawing this summer in Berlin? I did. I actually got to see it by chance the spring of 2016. Not because I went to Paris to see a clay exhibition, but it so happened that this play show had opened? Like the week prior, and I thought, oh, I like clay. I'll go check it out. And in a little dorken chamber, a few rooms into this exhibition, you know, I came upon the Angelus. And so I don't generally have, like, a deeply affective relationship with art, which I shouldn't confess as an art historian, but this was a moment. Like, I was suddenly in this little chamber with this drawing, so that's... That's where my interest was kind of reignited. I wanted to kind of think more about how it was that this drawing has such an impact, and what it meant for a moment to see it not through the scrim of Benjamin's words, but to actually just see it. And it was really powerful.

Helen Molesworth: Right. Lisa, I am so happy that you came on to share this incredible story about friendship and displacement and diaspora, what matters in the face of catastrophe. So I just, I'm very moved.

Lisa Saltzman: You're welcome. It's been a pleasure talking to you and being able to share some of the things that I've learned over the past few years of really digging into all this material.

Helen Molesworth: I can't wait to I can wait to read the book. I know that is going to come out of this. Excellent. Thank you, Helen Dialogues is produced by David Zwirner. If you like this episode, please follow, rate, and review us on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen. It really does help the show. Thanks so much for tuning in. I hope you join us here next time.

Jarrett Earnest: That was an episode of Dialogue's podcast from David Zwirner. If you like it, there are many other great conversations that you can listen to over on their feed, wherever you get your podcasts. That conversation also relates to many essays in our archives, including writing on Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, among others, that you can read with a subscription to the New York Review of Books, which in addition to 20 new issues a year. Gives you access to our complete archives since 1963, all searchable on our website. Subscribe for a discount at nybooks.com slash PLSUB. Private Life is hosted and produced by me, Jarrett Ernest, along with associate producer Luna Hayesdeen. The audio is edited and produced by Tyler Hill. The music is by Matthew Aucoin and it is a production of the New York Review.