78 years ago, on September 26, 1940, at the age of 48, Walter Benjamin committed suicide at Portbou on the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from invading Nazi forces.
Walter Bendix Schönflies Benjamin (15 July 1892 – 26 September 1940)was a German Jewish philosopher, cultural critic and essayist. An eclectic thinker, combining elements of German idealism, Romanticism, Western Marxism, and Jewish mysticism, Benjamin made enduring and influential contributions to aesthetic theory, literary criticism, and historical materialism. He was associated with the Frankfurt School, and also maintained formative friendships with thinkers such as playwright Bertolt Brecht and Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem. He was also related by law to German political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to Benjamin's cousin, Günther Anders.
In 1932, during the turmoil preceding Adolf Hitler's assumption of the office of Chancellor of Germany, Walter Benjamin left Germany for the Spanish island of Ibiza for some months; he then moved to Nice, where he considered killing himself. Perceiving the socio-political and cultural significance of the Reichstag fire (27 February 1933) as the
de facto Nazi assumption of full power in Germany, then manifest with the subsequent persecution of the Jews, he moved to Paris, but, before doing so, he sought shelter in Svendborg, at Bertolt Brecht's house, and at Sanremo, where his ex-wife Dora lived.
As he ran out of money, Benjamin collaborated with Max Horkheimer,
and received funds from the Institute for Social Research, later going
permanently into exile. In Paris, he met other German artists and
intellectuals, refugees there from Germany; he befriended Hannah Arendt, novelist Hermann Hesse, and composer Kurt Weill. In 1936, a first version of "
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" ("
L'œuvre d'art à l'époque de sa reproduction méchanisée") was published, in French, by Max Horkheimer in the
Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung journal of the Institute for Social Research.
It was a critique of the authenticity of mass-produced art; he wrote
that a mechanically produced copy of an artwork can be taken somewhere
where the original could never have gone, arguing that the presence of
the original is "prerequisite to the concept of authenticity".
In 1937 Benjamin worked on "
Das Paris des Second Empire bei Baudelaire" ("The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire"), met Georges Bataille (to whom he later entrusted the "
Arcades Project" manuscript), and joined the College of Sociology. In 1938 he paid a last visit to Bertolt Brecht, who was exiled to Denmark. Meanwhile, the Nazi Régime
stripped German Jews of their German citizenship; now a stateless man,
Benjamin was arrested by the French government and incarcerated for
three months in a prison camp near Nevers, in central Burgundy.
Returning to Paris in January 1940, he wrote "
Über den Begriff der Geschichte" ("
On the Concept of History", later published as "
Theses on the Philosophy of History"). While the Wehrmacht was pushing back the French Army, on 13 June Benjamin and his sister fled Paris to the town of Lourdes,
just a day before the Germans entered the capital with orders to arrest
him at his flat. In August, he obtained a travel visa to the US that
Max Horkheimer had negotiated for him. In eluding the Gestapo, Benjamin planned to travel to the US from neutral Portugal, which he expected to reach via Francoist Spain, then ostensibly a neutral country.
Walter Benjamin's grave in Portbou. The epitaph in German, repeated in Catalan, quotes from Section 7 of Theses on the Philosophy of History: "There is no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism"
He crossed the French–Spanish border and arrived at the coastal town of Portbou, in Catalonia.
The Franco government had cancelled all transit visas and ordered the
Spanish police to return such persons to France, including the Jewish
refugee group Benjamin had joined. They were told by the Spanish police that they would be
deported back to France the next day, which would have destroyed
Benjamin's plans to travel to the United States. Expecting repatriation
to Nazi hands, Walter Benjamin killed himself with an overdose of
morphine tablets that night, while staying in the
Hotel de Francia; the official Portbou register records 26 September 1940 as the official date of death. Benjamin's colleague Arthur Koestler, also fleeing Europe, attempted suicide by taking some of the morphine tablets, but he survived.
Benjamin's brother Georg was killed at the Mauthausen-Gusen concentration camp in 1942. Despite his suicide, Benjamin was buried in the consecrated section of a Roman Catholic cemetery.
The others in his party were allowed passage the next day (maybe
because Benjamin's suicide shocked Spanish officials), and safely
reached Lisbon on 30 September. Hannah Arendt, who crossed the French-Spanish border at Portbou a few months later, passed the manuscript of
Theses to Adorno.
Another completed manuscript, which Benjamin had carried in his
suitcase, disappeared after his death and has not been recovered. Some
critics speculate that it was his
Arcades Project in a final
form; this is very unlikely as the author's plans for the work had
changed in the wake of Adorno's criticisms in 1938, and it seems clear
that the work was flowing over its containing limits in his last years.
"Geschichten der Freundschaft" is an insisting documentary film with quotes from letters and diaries about the friendship with Gershom Scholem, Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, the "Passagen", living in the exile and the Shoah.
Walter Benjamin - Geschichten der Freundschaft
(documentary film in German language, 52 minutes, 2010)
.gif)
