Frontiers of hope and misfortune, from Walter Benjamin to other victims of war

What will it be like to find yourself in a zone of crossroads (these crossroads, these border zones) so strong that their power is introduced into the body, into the destination? Take the case of the great thinker Walter Benjamin, arrived from Paris to the border town of Portbou, on the border with France. It was 1941 and Nazi-occupied France was filling trains with men, women and children bound for the extermination camps, the gas chambers. Benjamin, a Jewish theology student – although politically distant from Zionism – had decided to go to an enclave near the border, where some maquis –members of the resistance – would help him cross to Spain and then embark for New York.

It was the frontier of hope. Benjamin clung to a briefcase in which he carried his latest manuscripts. But the border was closed. No one could cross to the other side.

He had to take a room at the Hostal Francia, in Portbou. The room was guarded by three soldiers from the Spanish Francoist National Guard, who had orders to hand him over to the French authorities governed from Vichy. there with him Marshal Petain at the head – a puppet of Hitler– the French government hid its genuflection before the Nazis, determined to exterminate Jews and leftists. How will the Jewish thinker pass Walter Benjamin his last hours in Portbou, before deciding to commit suicide?

will have thought of Theodor W. Adorno, becoming, among other things, the goal of saving his life. Adorno had left Germany a few years ago and with Max Horkheimer he had reestablished the Frankfurt School in New York. From there he urged Benjamin to leave Europe, but these recommendations were in vain. Although Benjamin is no longer in Nazi Germany and is in the Paris of his passing bookIt is also true that he thought that not leaving Europe was an act of resistance: he was convinced that the proletariat would rise against fascism and that war and social revolution would take place. It couldn’t be.

You may be interested: 80 years without Walter Benjamin: his last thoughts before committing suicide in Portbou

When Germany invaded France and installed Vichy, he decided to listen to his friend, to go to Lisbon and from there to New York. A checkpoint in Portbou would prevent him but, before taking a number of morphine pills that ensured death, he wrote a note left for one of his traveling companions. “In a hopeless situation, I have no choice but to end. It is in a small town in the Pyrenees, where no one knows me, that my life will end. Please pass on my thoughts to my friend Adorno and explain to him the situation I’ve been dragged into. I don’t have enough time to write all the letters I would have liked to write.” The short text is seen as the end of the copious correspondence between the two intellectual friends, so to speak. Then he took the pills he treasured as a last option.

The next day, the border is open, while Benjamin is buried in the Catholic cemetery of Portbou. From hope to fate – but there is no Deus Ex machine that fate decides, as in Greek tragedy, but that it is about reality and, in this case, the reality of war.

As these days we live. It has been said: “The first victim of every war is the truth” Did you hear it?

Europe is living its own 1984. At the moment, the Andalusian Cinematheque is rescheduling the film Solarisof Andrei Tarkovsky (Russian Andrei Tarkovsky), in the version of the film directed by the American Steven Soderbergh and featuring George Clooney. The Russian soprano Anna Netrebkowho played Tosca at the Teatro Colón, his concerts were canceled for refusing to condemn his country. The Cardiff Orchestra suspended the concert with works by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, of Russian nationality and who died a century and a half ago. Meanwhile, the President Zelensky was at the opening session of the berlin festival, who has participated in various cultural events which he attends as a hero. Meanwhile, in Russia, the customary censorship of Cheese fries it grows. He shut down television stations at the start of the invasion of Ukraine and put a tighter gag order on journalists.

De Portbou Benjamin would have observed the crossroads of the war which afflicts us. He would have said, surely: “There is no cultural document that is not, at the same time, barbaric.

* The name of this section “Panorama de Portbou” alludes to the Spanish border town where Walter Benjamin ended his life and also to a border territory that erases the limits of ideas.

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