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Excursions
By michael jackson Duke University Press
Copyright © 2007 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4075-1
Chapter One
In the Footsteps of Walter Benjamin
It was late in the evening when I arrived, and the town was being buffeted by a stiff wind off the sea and squalls of rain. After checking into my hotel, I had dinner in the hotel restaurant and then turned in early, halyards slapping against aluminum masts in the harbor and a lighthouse flashing in the darkness. My last thoughts before falling asleep were of a photograph I had seen that morning in a Danish newspaper of a listing wooden boat with splintered upper strakes being towed behind an Italian coast-guard cutter on whose cramped foredeck huddled thirty or forty bewildered African asylum seekers, and of a report in another paper of a proposal by several European governments to create "holding centers" in North Africa for these clandestine immigrants who every night risked their lives crossing the Mediterranean in unseaworthy boats, hoping to find work and a livelihood in Europe.
If migrants are sustained by their hope in the future, refugees are afflicted by their loss of the past. Of no one was this truer than Walter Benjamin. I had come to Banyuls-sur-Mer on the French Catalonian coast with the intention of crossing the Pyrenees on the anniversary of Benjamin's own fateful journey on 26 September 1940. But though I had contemplated making this trip for at least a year, I had never fully fathomed my motives. I only knew that one must sometimes abandon any conception of what one is doing in order to do it, accepting that reasons and meanings cannot be imposed on events but should be allowed to surface in their own good time. Still, I was mindful of Benjamin's notion of translation "as a mode" that requires one to "go back to the original, for that contains the law governing the translation, its translatability" (1969:70). Could shadowing a writer through a landscape, or repeating a journey precisely sixty-four years after the original had taken place, enable one to know that writer's frame of mind or translate his thought? And what kind of translation is it, anyway, that seeks parallels and echoes, not between languages but between experiences and, as Benjamin himself suggested, between the lines?
Walter Benjamin was born in Berlin in 1892, and reborn twenty-one years later in Paris. But while Paris was where he came to feel most at home, it would be truer to say that it was the Paris of the nineteenth century that captivated him and later became not only a refuge but the subject of his monumental though unfinished Passagenarbeit (The Arcades Project). Hannah Arendt suggests that the allure, for Benjamin, of this fabulous city had something to do with the "unparalleled naturalness" with which it had, from the middle of the nineteenth century onward, "offered itself to all homeless people as a second home" (Arendt 1973:170); for Benjamin, however, it was more immediately the "physical shelter" afforded by its arcades, the ghostly presence of a perimeter connected by medieval gates, the villagelike intimacy of its old neighborhoods, and the homeliness of the boulevard cafés that invited one to live in Paris as one lives within an apartment or a house. Besides, Paris could easily be covered on foot, making it an ideal city for strollers, idlers, and browsers-that is to say, flaneurs. And Benjamin, who had never been successful at getting an academic job and was obliged to lead a freelance existence that involved "the precarious, errant practices of a critic, translator, reviewer and script-writer for radio" (Steiner 1998:11), living under his parent's roof until he was in his late thirties and always dependent on the support of friends, was in many ways a man who had missed his time, a would-be man of letters and leisure with old-fashioned manners, a passion for antiquarian books, and little practical sense, someone whose idea of history never completely encompassed the unfolding tragedy of his own epoch. As he wrote in his essay on Marcel Proust, with whom he undoubtedly identified: "He is filled with the insight that none of us has time to live the true dramas of the life that we are destined for. This is what ages us-this and nothing else. The wrinkles and creases on our faces are the registrations of the great passions, vices, insights that called on us; but we, the masters, were not at home" (1969:211-12). Did he ever feel at home in twentieth-century Germany? "One has reason to doubt it," writes Arendt. "In 1913, when he first visited France as a very young man ... the trip from Berlin to Paris was tantamount to a trip in time ... from the twentieth century back to the nineteenth" (1973:170).
When the Nazis seized power in January 1933, Benjamin could no longer count on an income from writing, and his attempts to write under pseudonyms such as K. A. Stampflinger and Detlef Holz proved fruitless. In March he left Germany and stayed with friends on Ibiza for six months before settling in Paris, supported by stipends from the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung, where Max Horkeimer, Friedrich Pollock, and Theodor Adorno were his staunch allies. Though often isolated, and with Europe moving ineluctably toward war, Benjamin worked patiently at his projects, declining the offers and urgings of friends such as Gershom Scholem, Arendt, and Adorno to move to Palestine, England, or the United States. He was, he explained to them, no longer capable of adapting (Scholem 1982:213). Yet Benjamin was well aware of the fate of Jews in Germany after Kristallnacht-the mass arrests, the new edicts, the concentration camps, the panicked exodus. And even as Scholem tried to find funds to bring the reluctant Benjamin to Palestine in the spring of 1939, the Gestapo was ordering the German embassy in Paris to expedite his repatriation, probably because of a "Paris Letter" he had published in 1936, in which he made no bones about his antifascist views, observing for instance that "culture under the Swastika is nothing but the playground of unqualified minds and subaltern characters" and "fascist art is one of propaganda" (Brodersen 1996:24). Though he continued to seek naturalization in France, Benjamin's efforts in the summer of 1939 seemed to have been devoted mainly to his essay on Baudelaire, and he passed up an invitation to Sweden in order to finish it.
When war was declared on 1 September 1939, all Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Slovaks, and Hungarians aged between seventeen and fifty and living in France were subject to internment. Men rounded up in Paris were first taken to football stadiums-the Stade Colombe and the Stadion Buffalo-where they remained for ten days and nights, sleeping in the bleachers, killing time playing cards, strolling around the track, or planning how they might gain their release (women were assembled for screening in an ice-skating stadium, the Vélodrome d'Hiver). The internees were then trucked to the Gare d'Austerlitz under military escort, thence in sealed railway carriages to various hastily prepared camps throughout France. Benjamin was interned first at Nevers, where empty châteaus, vacant factories, and farms had been converted into concentration camps for ressortissants (enemy aliens) including ressortisants allemands (aliens from Germany), and then at Vernuche, where three hundred prisoners were crammed into a disused furniture factory. In November 1939, thanks to the intervention of friends in Paris, notably the French poet and diplomat Saint-John Perse, Benjamin was released and seemed finally reconciled to leaving France (Horkeimer had managed to secure for him an emergency visa to the United States). But once again, like an ostrich burying its head in the sand, Benjamin took refuge in intellectual labor, unable to break his long-standing habit of seeking security in an interiorized existence, in libraries, and in the collecting of rare books. After renewing his reader's card for the Bibliotèque Nationale, he attempted to begin researching and writing his sequel to his Baudelaire piece.
In a letter to Gretel Adorno, dated 17 January 1940, he wrote of this tension between the exigencies of his own survival and the work that was his life:
The fear of having to abandon the Baudelaire once I have begun writing the sequel is what makes me hesitate [to leave Paris]. This sequel will be work of monumental breadth and it would be a delicate matter to have to start and stop again and again. This is, however, the risk I would have to take. I am constantly reminded of it by the gas mask in my small room-the mask looks to me like a disconcerting replica of the skulls with which studious monks decorated their cells. This is why I have not yet really dared to begin the sequel to the Baudelaire. I definitely hold this work more dear to my heart than any other. It would consequently not suffer being neglected even to ensure the survival of its author.
In May 1940, Hitler's armies overran the French forces, and in June they entered Paris. That same month, the Franco-German armistice was signed, with its ominous Article XIX requiring the French government to "surrender on demand" anyone the Third Reich wanted extradited to Germany-an edict that effectively ended the issuing of exit visas to German refugees like Benjamin, whether in the occupied or unoccupied zones.
After entrusting his precious manuscripts to friends, Benjamin and his sister Dora joined the 2 million or more refugees trudging en pagaille toward the unoccupied zone. After spending most of that summer in Lourdes in the Lower Pyrenees, he traveled to Marseilles in August to ratify his emergency visa to the United States. There, he briefly met Arthur Koestler, to whom he confided (as he had to Arendt in Paris) that he carried with him fifteen tablets of a morphine compound-"enough to kill a horse." From Marseilles, Benjamin and two other refugees (Henny Gurmand and her sixteen-year-old son José) traveled to Port Vendres, where they met Lisa Fittko and her husband Hans, who were in the process of reconnoitering, with the help of the socialist mayor of Banyuls, a new escape route across the Pyrenees. During the previous few months, refugees had fled France by taking a train to Cerbère, the last town before the Catalan frontier, and then walking to Portbou in Spain through the railway tunnel or over the steep ridge along which the border ran. Only a week or ten days before Benjamin tried to reach Spain, several other Jewish refugees-among them Lion and Marta Feuchtwanger, Alma Mahler Werfel, Franz Werfel, Heinrich Mann, and Golo Mann-had successfully used the route via Cerbère, traveling on to neutral Portugal, where they found ships to America. But with increasing Gestapo pressure on the Spanish government, and the French police obliged to collaborate under Article XIX of the armistice agreement, French exit visas were impossible to procure, and Cerbère was, in any event, too carefully watched by the gardes mobiles (military police). After a five-minute train journey from Port Vendre to Banyuls (though, in her memoirs, Lisa Fittko thinks they may have taken the coastal path), Lisa Fittko led Benjamin and his party on an afternoon reconnaissance of the route they would take the following day. After walking for almost three hours, they reached a clearing at which Benjamin announced he intended to sleep for the night and wait for the others to rejoin him in the morning. Fearing for his safety, Fittko tried to persuade him against this plan, but der alte Benjamin (that old Benjamin), as she called him (though he was only forty-eight, and she thirty-one) prevailed, and she had no option but to leave him, without provisions or a blanket, clutching the heavy black leather briefcase he had brought with him and that he claimed to be "more important than I am, more important than myself" (Fittko 1991:106). Well before first light on the next day, the others again left Banyuls-sur-Mer. Passing through the village of Puig del Mas, and making themselves inconspicuous among the vineyard workers, they climbed to their rendezvous with Benjamin, and on across the Col de Cerbère toward Spain. After a grueling twelve-hour journey, they arrived in Portbou only to find that their transit visas, which would have taken them through Spain to Lisbon, had been cancelled on orders from Madrid.
That night the exhausted and dispirited travelers were placed under guard in a local hotel; in the morning they were to be escorted back to France. At ten o'clock that night, unable to see any way out, Benjamin swallowed some of the morphine tablets he carried with him. He died at seven the following morning. Ironically, had the refugees attempted the border crossing one day earlier or one day later, they would have made it, for the embargo on visas was lifted-possibly on compassionate grounds, possibly for some unspecified bureaucratic reason-the same day Benjamin died.
The last thing Benjamin wrote was a postcard. As Henny Gurland remembered it many months later in the United States, the five lines on the postcard read: "In a situation with no way out, I have no choice but to end it. My life will finish in a little village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me. Please pass on my thoughts to my friend Adorno and explain to him the situation in which I find myself. There is not enough time to write all the letters I had wanted to write" (Brodersen 1996:245).
These were the details I had gleaned from my reading. But as with so many written sources, it is often impossible to get a sense of the life that lies behind the language, or to lift the veil with which memory screens out landscapes, faces, voices, not to mention the physical and emotional experiences that might tell us what it was like to undergo the events that are so summarily recounted. So it was that with a faxed copy of an old map I had been given at the tourist information office at Banyuls (I was evidently not the first foreigner to ask about the route that Walter Benjamin had taken across the Pyrenees) and a hastily packed lunch in my rucksack, I set out at first light along the road that led up into the hills behind the town.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Excursions by michael jackson Copyright © 2007 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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