 |
| Walter Benjamin |
The Grandma is in Portbou where she has arrived to visit the Walter Benjamin's Memorial. Today, the weather is rainy with a grey sky and strong wind, a sad picture for a dramatic story.
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 Hannah Arendt through her first marriage to his cousin, Günther Anders.
Among Benjamin's best known works are the essays The Task of the Translator (1923), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936), and Theses on the Philosophy of History (1940). His major work as a literary critic included essays on Baudelaire, Goethe, Kafka, Kraus, Leskov, Proust, Walser, and translation theory.
More information: Walter Benjamin in Portbou
He also made major translations into German of the Tableaux Parisiens section of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and parts of Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu.
 |
| Walter Benjamin |
In 1940, at the age of 48, Benjamin committed suicide in Portbou at the French–Spanish border while attempting to escape from invading Nazi forces. Though popular acclaim eluded him during his life, the decades following his death won his work posthumous renown.
Perceiving the socio-political and cultural significance of the Reichstag fire, in February 27 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.
More information: The Charnel House
In 1937 Benjamin worked on Das Paris des Second Empire bei 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.
 |
| The Grandma in Portbou, Alt Empordà |
The historical record indicates that he safely 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.
It was told by the Spanish police that it would be deported back to France, 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 on the night of 25 September 1940 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, which is still a mystery, Benjamin was buried in the consecrated section of a Roman Catholic cemetery.
The construction of life is at present in the power of facts
far more than convictions.
Walter Benjamin
No comments:
Post a Comment