Crossed Wires, Broken Lines: Ernst Schoen and Charlotte Wolff

Professor Esther Leslie and Dr Sam Dolbear, co-authors of the 2023 book Dissonant Waves: Ernst Schoen and Experimental Sound in the Twentieth Century, will first talk about the life of Ernst Schoen (1894-1960)—poet, composer, radio programmer, theorist, and best friend of Walter Benjamin from childhood—as he moves between Frankfurt, Berlin, Paris, and London. Through friendship and comradeship, a position in state-backed radio, imprisonment, exile, networking in a new country, re-emigration, ill-treatment, neglect, Schoen suffers the century and articulates its broken promises.

Sam Dolbear will then discuss his latest project, on Charlotte Wolff (1897–1986)—a friend of Walter Benjamin, Helen Grund and also Ernst Schoen⁠—a doctor who, after fleeing Germany in 1933, took up hand reading in Paris to make ends meet. She read the hands of anonymous members of certain professions—acrobats, dancers, and department-store managers—but also members of the surrealist and modernist avant-gardes of Paris and London: from Antonin Artaud to Romola Nijinsky to Marcel Duchamp to Virginia Woolf. His book Hand That Touch This Fortune Will:  A history and theory of hand reading (After Charlotte Wolff) is forthcoming with Ma Bibliothèque.

Schoen and Wolff were friends in the early 1920s and both made it to London, the former in 1933, the latter in 1936. The session will address their differing experience of exiled life and their feelings about ‘returning’ to Germany after the end of the war – Schoen going back in 1947 on a BBC mission and, permanently, in 1951 and Wolff only twice, for two short trips, with great nervousness.

Booking link here