'An Expensive Death': Walter Benjamin at Portbou

Abstract

In 1940 everything was different. Walter Benjamin arrived on foot, in a small party led by Lisa Fitkko. Setting out from the little French Catalan holiday resort of Banyuls-sur-Mer, they had had climbed inland over the foothills of the Pyrenees before descending into the bay of Portbou. A couple of years before, W.H. Auden had described it in his poem 'Port Bou' as like a child clutching a favourite pet, the arms not quite meeting around the animal's body. That is how it is today, how it was in 1940. Benjamin had an entry visa for the USA. He had a transit visa for Spain and Portugal. But he did not have an exit visa for France, half of it occupied by the Nazis, half of it on loan to the collaborationist Vichy regime. He was a sick man, with a heart condition, and the trek across the mountains must have been a fresh torture for him. Some say he was carrying an important manuscript with him, perhaps a revised version of the Theses on the Philosophy of History. It is dangerous to argue from an author's writing to an author's life. But that overwhelmingly powerful figure of the 'Angel of History', carried forward on the gale, her face turned to the past, observing the destruction in her wake, haunts me. Perhaps more than anything, more than Picasso's 'Guernica', Alain Resnais' 'Night and Fog', it summarises the savaging of people's lives by the forces let loose in the twentieth century: the corrosive links between technology, xenophobia and authoritarian politics. The twentieth century was about the need to be right, to possess the truth, while other values fairness, kindness, nurture were dismissed as only suitable for the weak of the earth. There is remembering, and there is forgetting. Somewhere in an individual life, and somewhere in the collective life of a community or a society, a balance must be struck. To go to Portbou now is to remember, and then perhaps allow the past to become what it should be the past rather than a