"Benjamin's encounter with Surrealism probably prepared the ground for his experiments with hashish, which he began shortly after our separation and his return to Berlin and which he wrote me about several times in those years. As late as 1932 a book on this subject was among his projects that remained unfinished. Naturally he did not want to content himself with the notes and descriptions that have been preserved but wished to probe the philosophical relevance of such perceptions from an altered state of consciousness, which he regarded as more than mere hallucination. This was still wholly in keeping with his conception of the scope of genuine experience that I have discussed earlier. Of his notes on this subject he sent me only a printed one, but he repeatedly requested my strictest discretion about the experiments he made with two physicians, Dr. Fritz Fränkel and Dr. Ernst Joël. In these experiments he derived special inspiration from the presence of Ernst Bloch and a lady friend who later took her life. Benjamin was extremely cautious in the use of the drug, and when I questioned him in Paris in 1938, he told me that he had completely stopped using it several years before."

My former life.

Gene