This essay explores the intellectual and personal relationship between Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin, tracing its formation during their shared exile in 1930s Paris. It situates their friendship within the broader historical and political context of Jewish emigration, anti-Semitism, and intellectual resistance. The essay examines how their contrasting yet complementary approaches to history, politics, and literature shaped their connection. Arendt’s political activism and Benjamin’s philosophical reflections converged in moments of collaboration, admiration, and posthumous caretaking. Through detailed archival references, it illustrates how exile both divided and united them, and how Arendt ultimately preserved and promoted Benjamin’s legacy. The essay also highlights their mutual intellectual influences and shared affinities, particularly around themes of Jewish identity, memory, and cultural preservation during dark historical times.

This article offers an interpretation of the friendship between Ernst Jünger and Carl Schmitt, two of the leading thinkers of the interwar Conservative Revolution and major influences on the European New Right. Previous accounts of their relationship have usually foregrounded their intellectual exchange — including important disagreements — and focused on their growing estrangement after World War II. This article, by contrasts, reads their relationship first and foremost as a friendship, in which such disagreements were secondary to other values, including the pleasure each found in the other’s company, mutual support for their independent intellectual projects, and their common vision of a good life. I reference ideas about friendship in the works of Aristotle, Siegfried Kracauer, and Friedrich Nietzsche (among others) in order to draw out the essential grounds for the friendship between Jünger and Schmitt — grounds which continued despite complications in their friendship after 1945, and which account for the friendship’s longevity, lasting from 1930 until Schmitt’s death in 1985. I argue that their friendship was in important ways typical of the sociability of self-professed elitists and ‘outsiders’ who disdain modern liberal society, a style of friendship common among political radicals on the left and right, including among German conservative revolutionaries and their latter-day heirs in the New Right.

This paper examines the historical and conceptual marginalization of female friendship in literary discourse, using the relationship between Fanny Lewald and Therese von Bacheracht as a case study. Against the backdrop of a tradition that theorizes friendship as a bond of male sameness and excludes women from its philosophical and political imaginary, the paper shifts focus from abstract ideals to lived practices. Through letters and autobiographical reflections, it reveals how Lewald and von Bacheracht enacted a relational model of friendship grounded in care, difference, and familial metaphors — particularly sisterhood. By tracing these affective and discursive strategies, the paper argues for a revised literary historiography: one that listens more closely to women’s voices and recognizes friendship not as deviation from a male norm, but as a distinct and meaningful mode of relation.

This article explores the ethical implications and poetic resonances of Ingeborg Bachmann’s friendships with survivors of the Shoah, foremost among them Paul Celan. Departing from the dominant scholarly tendency to read the Bachmann–Celan relationship primarily as a failed love affair, it reframes their bond as a failed friendship — shaped above all by Bachmann’s effort to reconcile her ideal of friendship as a relationship of equals, in which she sought recognition as a writer in her own right, with the irreducible singularity of Celan’s trauma as a survivor of the Shoah. Central to this inquiry is Bachmann’s literary work, which not only reflects on the concept of friendship but also forges a language for a poetic dialogue that both supplements and, at times, counterpoints their correspondence, ultimately carrying the relationship forward even beyond the point at which their lived friendship had come to an end.

This article investigates the friendship practice between the intellectual Lou Andreas-Salomé (1861–1937) and Sigmund Freud’s youngest daughter Anna Freud (1902–83). Focussing on Anna Freud’s inaugural lecture ‘Schlagephantasie und Tagtraum’ (1922), a text she prepared together with Lou Andreas-Salomé, I propose that this lecture is a key to both the relationship between the two women and to Anna Freud’s understanding of psychoanalysis. This article will show how Freud’s interest in lateral relationships developed in parallel with her friendship with Lou Andreas-Salomé. In the context of lateral relationships, I will first discuss the role of sisters in psychoanalytic theory, and secondly put forward a perspective on friendship between women that conceptualises friendship as a productive force and a mode of intellectuality.

On 6 November 1730, the Prussian King Frederick William I put an abrupt end to the friendship that his twenty-year-old son, Crown Prince Frederick, maintained with Lieutenant Hans Hermann von Katte, who was five years his senior. Before his jailed son’s eyes, the king had Katte beheaded in the fortress of Küstrin for high treason, because he had planned to escape abroad together with the prince. The tragic story of this friendship left its mark on literary history. It is the subject of a nineteenth-century travelogue (Theodor Fontane, Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg), a twentieth-century drama (Heiner Müller, Leben Gundlings), and a twenty-first-century novel (Michael Roes, Zeithain). This article investigates which practices of male friendship come to the fore in these three literary works.