Lighting a cigarette, Benjamin wondered when they would come for him, and how it would happen. He had heard chilling stories, about a man wakened in the night by a policeman, then led to a waiting van while his wife and children stood by. Another had been snatched from a restaurant, not a minute after his meal had arrived. He knew personally of a man who was seized while playing chess in a park at midday—whisked into a van without his belongings, the last moves in the game all left to his opponent.
Benjamin’s own health was so precarious that he wondered if he could survive a shock like that. His heart would probably stop dead on the spot if he were apprehended without warning. He would collapse into their military arms, an instant corpse, and they would have to waste a couple of good hours burying him, and it would serve them right.
The chairs in the reading room of the Bibliothèque Nationale had been emptying over the past month. His own table was now like a mouth with missing teeth. A goodly number of scholarly Jews had made a home of this celestial room, with its vaulting domes; these faithful readers could be found in place most days, plowing through massive tomes on Roman history, aerodynamics, modern linguistics, whatever. Solomon Weisel, Joseph Wertheimer, Salman Polotsky, Jacob Spiegel, a dozen others. Benjamin knew them all well; they formed a silent family, each with a private candle burning in the altar of his mind. Every one of them had made astounding sacrifices to keep that candle burning.
This was the sort of thing the secular world did not understand. What was it that could drive a man to sit for nine hours a day in a library chair, exploring byways of human knowledge? What form of ambition led to the sacrifice of family, friendship, worldly possessions, even communal esteem? For the most part, there was no gold medal from the academy to adorn the scholar’s neck at the end of his road. There was no public acclaim. Most of the books composed in this room would never find a publisher; if they did, the readership for each book would be minuscule. So what accounted for this vigilance?
Benjamin was perhaps the most vigilant of all, sitting day after day in the same chair, willfully blocking out whatever seemed irrelevant to his project, including the Nazis. He had been researching and writing his book since the late twenties, when it began in notes and aphorisms. A thick wad of material accumulated in brown folders. He kept wishing he had not left behind so many notebooks at Brecht’s house in Denmark, where he had been a summer guest two years before. The prospects of returning to Denmark grew slimmer and slimmer, and he could not rely on Brecht to send the material on to Teddy Adorno. Brecht was lazy and indifferent. “He is a scoundrel, but a holy scoundrel in his way,” Benjamin said to his sister, Dora, who would reply, invariably, “They all take advantage, Walter. Every one of them takes advantage.”
Although he never would have said such a thing, even to himself, Benjamin felt sure that his encyclopedic study of the Parisian arcades, now all but done, would help to justify his existence, which otherwise amounted to fits and starts, a thousand insights fluttering like crisp leaves on an autumn tree before being wasted by the proverbial four winds. It had, at first, jostled for room amid other projects, always on the back burner; Benjamin reserved the white flame of the front burner for immediate work: a critical essay, a review that was due the following week, a story, or, occasionally, a poem. The arcades project moved toward the full heat of his attention during the bitter winter of 1934, when he was staying at a cheap pensione in San Remo, in a bare, white-washed room overlooking the gray-green sea. By this time Germany had become uninhabitable for a Jew or, for that matter, any person of conscience.
In Benjamin’s mind, he was a defender of the Enlightenment. This was his private work against fascism. In his journal he admonished himself to “clear fields where until now only madness has been seen, to forge ahead with the sharp ax of reason, looking neither left nor right in order to protect myself from the madness beckoning from the primeval forest.” With a rare ferocity, he wrote: “All ground must occasionally be broken by reason, made arable, cleared of the messy undergrowth of delusion and myth.”
Delusion and myth ruled the world that Benjamin knew. Paris, as both capital of the nineteenth century and the unholy womb that had delivered into being this rough beast of the present, was therefore an appropriate focus for his research. The consumerism on display everywhere, the thirst for acquisition, distressed him, and this madness was uncannily represented by the arcades, which in French and German were called passages, emphasizing their spatial aspect. These lurid, glittering paths were, quite literally, passageways; the glass-covered tunnels became a showroom for every product of modern capitalism.
The arcades turned the otherwise rational structure of the city into an irrational maze, a nightmare of connecting tunnels, an inward spiral culminating in a kind of spiritual implosion. The streets of Paris, with their symmetrical houses and perfectly ordered parks, all meant to mirror Reason, now foundered in the dream-architecture of the ancients: the figure of the labyrinth. As Benjamin said, “What generates the mythic dimension of all labyrinthine structures is their downward pull; once inside, the spectator is seized, drawn into a convoluted world with no visible or predictable existence.” The labyrinth is both interior and exterior: street and house, mask and voice speaking through the mask. Weather does not intrude upon the glassy corridors of the arcade labyrinth; even the light of the sun is filtered and distorted, caught in the enameled squares of floor tile, in the polished metal facades and glaucous mirrors that everywhere double reality and turn it in upon itself, in the eyes that swarm, dissatisfied, searching for some bright thing to land on, to consume.
Benjamin mused on the symbol of the labyrinth in history:
In ancient Greece, one pointed out places that led down into the underworld. Our waking existence, too, is a land where hidden places lead into the underworld, full of inconspicuous sites where dreams trickle out. In the daytime we pass them by unwittingly, but once sleep comes we swiftly claw our way back to them and lose ourselves in the dark passageways. The city’s labyrinth of houses, by day, is like consciousness; the arcades (those galleries that lead into its past existence) trickle unnoticed into the streets. But at night, beneath the somber mass of houses, their more compact darkness gushes out frighteningly.
Benjamin saw the world as many-layered but, like the Greeks, he believed in a deep substructure, a mythic or spiritual dimension on which the present rested as on some invisible yet sturdy foundation. He savored the daily shunting back and forth between night and day, between sleep and waking, mirrored by the mind as it moves between conscious and unconscious realms. Dreams, for him, were real. “We pull the material of our dreams back with us into the world of wakefulness,” he said. “It is all part of our journey.”
But the journey cuts through hell, through the purgatory of consumerism. “The modern age,” he said, “is the age of hell. Our punishment is the latest thing available at the time.” And the “latest” is always “the same thing through and through. This constitutes the eternity of hell and the sadist’s mania for novelty.” Thus fashion fills every shop window, consumes all our conversation and thought, becomes a regressive phenomenon, a form of compulsive repetition in the mask of novelty.
Thus the nightmare of history returns: liberated, vengeful, unyielding, uprooting. This is what Sigmund Freud meant when he referred menacingly to the “return of the repressed.” It is the Minotaur that must be slain, that lies half asleep at the bottom of the labyrinth. It glimmers in the unnatural light of consumerism, which is merely an aberrant extension of our normal appetites for food, for shelter and clothing, for personal objects that endear us to the world and, unfortunately, to ourselves.
What nettled Benjamin was the alienation from history produced by this cycle of unwanted recurrence, an alienation that he himself experienced, and that restrained his ability to gaze, clearly, on the present. The past now became a substratum of nightmare and irrationality, of ancient fury cloaked in the forms of myth. Progress was the flight from this bad dream, made swifter by current technologies; the past had never seemed more distant. Yet distance was simply a spatial metaphor. “We have been schooled in the romantic gaze into history,” he said. Hence, Walter Scott, Stendhal, the fetishing of medieval iconography, the worship of ruins, the reverence for dark mythologies, as in Wagner. What could save us, he said, was nearness; “history recovered, dissolved”; propinquity was all.
But how to accomplish this? Aren’t those who have gone before us irretrievably lodged in a far, impossible country? Who can wake the dead? Benjamin believed that the equivalent of a Copernican revolution in thinking must occur. Fiction would replace history, or become history. The past, “what has been,” had previously been accepted as the starting point; history stumbled toward the dimly lit present through the corridors of time. Now the process must be reversed; “the true method,” said Benjamin, “was to imagine the characters of the past in our space, not us in theirs. We do not transpose ourselves into them: They step into our life.” One does not proceed by seeking empathy with the past: Einfühlung. This was historicism of the old mentality. Instead, he argued for what he called Vergegenwärtigung: “making things present.”
History, as such, was the dream from which we must awaken, and to understand culture as the dream of history was to understand time as postponement, as that which stands between us and the realization of an eternal kingdom. The task of the anti-historian, as Benjamin saw it, was to render visible the utopian element in the present, working backward toward the past. “Literary montage,” in his phrase, was “the instrument of this dialectic, the act of placing moments of history in apt juxtaposition.” This was what he had tried, in the arcades project, to accomplish: to create the ultimate montage, to recover and dissolve history in one bold stroke.
They came for him, not in the middle of the night as he expected, but at noon. It was a Tuesday, and he had quite by chance decided to work at home instead of the library. He was writing at the three-legged oak table in the alcove off his sitting room, cutting a picture from a fashion magazine: an advertisement for toothpaste, with three beautiful women holding brushes and smiling like the three Graces of mythology. He had, only a few moments before, copied out an apposite passage from a favorite book about Paris: Le Paysan de Paris by Louis Aragon. Walking through the streets of the capital, Aragon had contemplated the faces that flickered by:
It became clear to me that humankind is full of gods, like a sponge immersed in the open sky. These gods live, attain the height of their power, then die, leaving to other gods their perfumed altars. They are the very principles of any total transformation. They are the necessity of movement. I was, then, strolling with intoxication among thousands of divine concretions. I began to conceive a mythology in motion. It rightly merited the name of modern mythology. I imagined it by this name.
One of these concretions—in the shape of a military policeman—was now standing in the doorway of Benjamin’s flat on the rue Dombasle; he wore a uniform that Benjamin did not recognize. The jacket was belted, with tarnished silver buttons and expansive epaulets, the sort of thing a soldier in a music-hall comedy might wear. The fellow’s capacious silver mustache pushed out ahead of his face like the cow-catcher on a steam engine.
To Benjamin’s relief, the man was French and therefore not German. A German soldier would have been devastating.
“I’m looking for Monsieur Walter Benjamin,” he said. “Are you, in fact, this gentleman?”
“Yes,” he said. “I am Dr. Benjamin.” Perhaps because the official was polite and well-mannered, Benjamin did not feel afraid. It also helped that the man was not young; the young, Benjamin decided, are more frightening in the guise of power. They are not aware of the dangers, to themselves as well as others. Silly, tragic things can happen too easily when inexperience is a factor.
Benjamin continued, “What may I do for you, sir?”
“It has come to our attention that you are an illegal alien from Germany.”
“I am a Jew.”
The man looked over Benjamin’s shoulder. “I’m afraid you must come with me, monsieur. You may carry one bag—a small one, if you will. I would definitely recommend a small bag…for your convenience.”
“I am working on a book, you see. I would need to bring a briefcase. It is not especially large.”
“As you like,” the man said, nodding, then stepping back, as if not to intrude on the last moments of Benjamin’s privacy.
“You will give me a few minutes?”
“I shall wait for you in the hall,” he said.
“Thank you.”
Dora hovered in the bedroom, afraid to come out. She had thus far eluded the authorities and would not present herself to any public official voluntarily, no matter what the papers said. When her brother hurried into the bedroom to pack, she whispered, “Please, Walter, you must escape the back way! The stairs to the basement! Go!”
“It is quite all right, Dora. They will not hurt me. The officer is French.”
She scoffed. “I know the French as well as you do. They will cut your throat, given the chance.”
Benjamin studied his sister’s round, even puffy, face; her big eyes—like the eyes of an ox—stared at the world dumbfoundedly. He could not understand her distrust of the French people, who had sheltered them so hospitably. He himself admired the French unreservedly, with their fierce intellectual tradition, their literature and architecture, their sense of morality and love of justice. The French were among the most remarkable of civilizations. He had said that often, in public, much to the despair of his (mostly) French friends, who never tired of deriding their own kind.
Dora was sobbing now, a small-boned woman in a rumpled, gray dress. Her mascara ran, making black splotches on her cheeks.
Benjamin drew close to Dora. “I shall write to you at once. You’ll know exactly where I am, and you must not worry,” he said. “They are protecting us, Dora. You must understand this. If you would only…”
“Never!” she said, in a loud voice.
Benjamin looked over his shoulder nervously, hoping her shout had not carried.
“I will stay here until I die,” she said. “If they want me, they can wring my neck, like a chicken.”
“You are a stubborn woman,” he said. “You are like our mother.”
“And you are like our father: stupid. What you know about politics could be written on the back of a postage stamp.” She grabbed his shirt, popping several buttons. “There is a war on, Walter. They are killing Jews. They are murdering Jews!”
Benjamin sighed. He had not, in his last minutes with his sister, wanted to quarrel. “Be careful, Dora,” he said. “If you need help, get in touch with Julie. Georges Bataille will be useful, too.” He scribbled a phone number on a slip of paper. “Call him at once if you find yourself in difficulty. His brother has a position in the finance ministry, and he can pull strings if the situation becomes tricky.”
“You think this isn’t tricky?” Dora said, shaking her head. “I suppose, for you, this is a picnic?”
“I cannot argue. Not now, Dora…”
“You put too much faith in your friends. But ask yourself this, Walter. Has it ever done you any good? Why didn’t Scholem find you a job in Palestine? It’s a disgrace, that’s my opinion. We could be living off the fat of the land by now, in Jerusalem.”
Benjamin tried to shush her. He heard the soldier knocking at the front door, and he began to cram a few necessities into his bag. There was no point in going over this ground again with Dora: Scholem was a difficult friend, at best. He had a consuming ego, and somewhere along the way Benjamin had trampled on it; he had not acquiesced in Scholem’s point of view on everything, so he was being punished. No matter now. When the war was over, he would visit Jerusalem and make amends. Although he and Scholem had fallen out frequently in the past, each time the dispute had led to periods of greater understanding.
Teddy Adorno—that was a different story. Benjamin had felt keenly the fragmentation of that friendship. Adorno had meant so much to him; they knew each other so well that even their dream life had been shared. But something had occurred along the way; Benjamin had not simply bought into the dialectics of the Frankfurt School or subscribed uncritically to the politics of the Institute. He could never quite subscribe to any dogma, except partially. It was his nature, as a critic, to complicate issues and to dissent. His natural skepticism was, in part, a legacy from the Enlightenment, and one he was loath to relinquish.
Benjamin kissed Dora, who had managed to control her sobbing, and joined the soldier in the dark hallway. The man looked sympathetically at Benjamin, who said, “I am ready.” A small suitcase hung from one hand, a briefcase in the other.
“Can I help?” the man asked, reaching for the suitcase.
Benjamin refused. It was too absurd.
They climbed down the staircase, slowly; Benjamin was obviously having difficulty in seeing the stairs, with his nearsightedness. Now his chest began to squeeze, and pain rose in his throat and traveled down his arms to his fingertips. He had seen Dr. Dausse, a fellow refugee and friend, only a few weeks before about these recurring chest pains, and today he wondered if the ordeal that lay ahead of him would be too arduous for a man in his condition. The phrase congestive heart failure had been offered, somewhat lamely, by the doctor, who added: “With the heart, one is rarely confident of a proper diagnosis. You might live for twenty years or twenty minutes.”
Benjamin wished he had asked Dr. Dausse for a medical excuse. What could the French authorities want with somebody too ill to cross the street without experiencing palpitations and weak spells? He could no longer walk more than twenty or thirty steps without having to stop for a rest. He would be worse than useless to the French army. But there was no way to argue the case; this was the problem with a large bureaucracy. Kafka understood this perfectly. Anonymity was the enemy, reducing everyone to an integer on a piece of paper. The artist’s job was to overcome this blankness by naming things. Like Adam in Eden, he must find names for every object, animate and inanimate. He must invent a language full of racy particulars, finding the identities of everything. This was the imagination’s endless and desperately important work.
Benjamin bent over, exhaling slowly.
“You are having difficulty breathing, is that it?” the Frenchman asked. “Are you in pain?”
“What a kind man you are,” Benjamin said, straightening himself out.
“We can sit down if you like, on the steps. There is no rush.”
“I’m all right,” he insisted, swallowing hearty gulps of air. An impish smile came to his lips. “We had better hurry. The war will be over soon, and we’ll have missed it.”
He was taken by military train to a collection point near the Camp des Travailleurs Volontaires at Clos St-Joseph Nevers. The first night was spent, not unpleasantly, in a small boardinghouse with pink shutters and wrought-iron balconies, where he shared a double bed with a pleasant man called Heymann Stein, whom he had met in Paris some years before.
Stein was a well-known journalist and, like himself, a bookish fellow. He had lived in Vienna after the Great War and had moved to Paris during the early thirties after a period as a schoolmaster in Bern. Having studied philosophy at Mainz, he tried to keep up with the subject in case he should one day go to America, where he had been told positions were easily available in the major universities. He carried with him a volume by Martin Heidegger, a fact that Benjamin did not hold against him (however much he despised Heidegger not only for his writing but for the way he had mesmerized and seduced his young relative, a philosophy student called Hannah Arendt). In time, he would set Heymann Stein (and Hannah) straight on Heidegger, whose fraudulent appropriation of Kant and Hegel had irritated him ever since he read “The Problem of Historical Time,” Heidegger’s inaugural lecture, delivered in Freiburg in the spring of 1916, and later published in the Zeitschrift für Philosophie und philosophische Kritik.
The sergeant in charge of the “volunteers” woke everyone at six-thirty, allowing them just half an hour to get dressed and swill a cup of coffee and a bit of stale bread with jam before they were to leave for the camp. “Eat up, boys!” he shouted. “This is the last of the good food.”
Stein was annoyed. “Get up, lie down, eat up, sit down,” he said. His white hair stuck out, as if electrified. He had a big nose with a dark nubble of a wart on the left side. An open collar was always his trademark, his sign of identification with the working classes. “There will be a lot of shouting, you can tell. They love it, this ordering around.”
“I don’t mind,” said Benjamin. “It makes life very simple. You do what you’re told. Like school.”
Stein was not convinced.
“I knew your brother, Leon,” said Benjamin.
“Leon the bookseller.”
Benjamin had indeed bought many books from Leon Stein, whose little shop on the rue du Vieux Colombier had become a refuge for German expatriates in the past decade; more important, Leon had bought many books from Benjamin when he was frantic for cash, often paying more than they were really worth.
“What’s the point of putting men like us into a camp?” Benjamin wondered.
“Even an old horse can plow a field. They can’t afford to pay real workers, so they steal labor where they can.”
“You’re a cynic, Heymann.”
“So wait and see. We’re prisoners of the French army, nothing more, nothing less. Why dignify the arrangement?”
Benjamin dressed quickly, putting on his baggy brown suit, worn threadbare at the elbows, his rumpled white shirt, long since permanently stained beneath the armpits, and the red polka-dot tie that had been his father’s. He was worried about the weight of his black leather briefcase, which contained not only a vast manuscript of material for his arcades project but the final draft of his latest essay, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” as well as some books. He could not travel without books.
But he had not counted on the fact that they would be marched to Nevers, en masse: thirty-seven men herded like cattle along a dirt road for a dozen or so miles, with a drill sergeant screaming at the side of the phalanx, more a sheepdog than a man. “They ought to muzzle that dog,” Stein said. “He’s probably rabid.”
Three times Benjamin collapsed, falling on the gravel-and-tar road. The first two times he managed to struggle back to his feet; the last, he was put onto a stretcher and carried straight to the camp infirmary, his briefcase and suitcase on his stomach like paperweights.
“You will not be allowed to work,” the camp physician, Dr. Guilmoto, told him. “This is not a concentration camp like in Germany. We are not intent upon killing you.”
“So why not send me home? Let the Nazis take me away. It will be easier on everyone.”
“You are making a joke?” the doctor asked. His eyebrows lifted like quotation marks. “Yes, you are. I enjoy a sense of humor.”
Benjamin said, “This is so absurd.”
The doctor smiled, rather patronizingly. “We want to be sure the Nazis do not take you away. That is the whole point, Dr. Benjamin.”
“But you think some of us are spies….”
The doctor studied his own hands, avoiding Benjamin’s gaze.
“You are afraid of us, in other words,” he continued.
“I agree, there are those who worry about such things. Part of our job here is to weed out those who might cause trouble, should the Nazis invade. One cannot tell what will happen.”
“The Nazis have already invaded.”
The doctor listened to Benjamin’s heart with a stethoscope, then said, “What are we going to do with you, Dr. Benjamin? You are unfit to work.”
“I’m lazy by nature, you see. I will spend my days reading and writing. If only there were access to a library….”
The doctor laughed. “Would you like a secretary as well? I will speak to my superior. We appreciate intellectuals in France, as you know. The word intellectual is a French invention.”
Benjamin understood only too well the vexed origins of this word in France. During the Dreyfus scandal, those brave men and women (led by Zola) who spoke up for reason and enlightened values in order to defend an unfortunate Jew were called intellectuals by an outraged press. It remained a term of opprobrium in the popular mind, especially in England. (Benjamin had received mournful letters from Dora, his ex-wife, who detested the English for their snobbishness and refusal to think about serious topics. According to Adorno, the situation was even worse in America, where cultivated and intelligent people had to feign dullness and ignorance just to make a living.)
After two days of rest in a whitewashed clinic with acceptable food, Benjamin joined Heymann Stein and twenty-eight others in a tin-roofed building that had once served as a slaughterhouse for poultry. The men slept on rotting canvas cots without mattresses; each volunteer was issued a single woolen blanket, and most were so moth-eaten you could hold them up to the moon and see an imitation Milky Way poking through. Meals were taken outdoors in what was grandly called the “dining hall,” though it amounted to no more than a platform with a tattered covering of oil-slicked canvas; long makeshift tables had been fashioned from scraps of pine and rusty metal drums.
Most of the work of the camp consisted of latrine duty and cooking. The food, though fetid, was available in sufficient quantities to fuel the activity of the camp at a fairly low level. As it had been raining ever since Benjamin arrived in Nevers, nobody had begun to work very hard. The guards were themselves unwilling to stand in the rain and supervise. The rains, which virtually everyone regarded as a godsend, continued through the first three weeks of Benjamin’s internment: a steely drizzle that made September feel like December.
Like nearly everyone else in the camp, Benjamin could not get warm, no matter how hard he tried. The meager blanket covering him at night only made things worse, since it reminded him of what such coverings were supposed to do. He slept, rather badly, in the fetal position, blowing into his closed fists for warmth. In the morning he felt as though his joints had rusted in place. It hurt simply to stand or bend over.
Benjamin insisted on referring to his fellow detainees as colleagues, and not inappropriately; many were voracious readers, and several had managed to bring into captivity some classics of literature and philosophy. One particularly cold night, a young man from Bavaria acquired a bundle of dry sticks from a sympathetic guard, and a fire was lit in the stove squatting in one icy corner of the barracks. The men gathered around to plot their survival.
Heymann Stein said, “You know, we should consider ourselves lucky.”
“How is that, Stein?” a cocky younger man asked. “I would like to know about my good luck. Maybe I’ve been misreading the situation.”
“We have in our midst a brilliant writer and philosopher—Dr. Benjamin.”
This lavish if somewhat unctuous compliment embarrassed Benjamin, in part because he did not regard himself as a brilliant anything. Perhaps when the arcades project was published, he might be worthy of notice, but not at present. When several of the men began clapping, it shocked him. Were they simply going along with Heymann Stein?
“Good friends,” Benjamin said, under his breath. “I’m very grateful.”
“So why don’t you lecture, Dr. Benjamin?” asked Stein. “We can turn a bad situation into a better one. You can teach us something—philosophy, perhaps. We can turn Nevers into a little university!” He swept his hand around as if onstage. It was quite a performance, Benjamin decided. Stein stared at Benjamin, as if to convince him. “You must do this, for the sake of everyone here.”
Benjamin thanked Stein but demurred. He was not nearly so accomplished as Stein pretended. Furthermore, it had been a long time since he had seen the inside of a classroom. Even after he got his doctorate, he had never done much teaching.
“I, too, would like to hear some lectures,” said a white-bearded man called Meir Winklemann, who had studied to become a rabbi in Odessa before the Great War. “Something with a religious theme would be especially good,” he added. An unfortunate marriage had apparently scuttled Winklemann’s promising career, and he had since made his living as a salesman, crossing borders so blithely that he no longer believed in the existence of separate countries.
Others chimed in, including Hans Fittko, who had just arrived in this camp from another. He was among the handful of familiar faces in the room, and his presence was reassuring to Benjamin. Something about Fittko made everyone feel confident that the situation was, ultimately, under control. “We should make the best use of our time here,” said Fittko. “Herr Stein is right about this.” He went on to explain how, during the Spanish Civil War, Loyalist prisoners of war had famously put their captivity to good use, holding poetry readings and philosophical lectures in camps where living conditions were notoriously inhuman.
A man called Kommerell, a former teacher in Leipzig who had spent several years in an English university, produced from his rucksack a copy of Plato’s Dialogues, in an English translation by Benjamin Jowett of Oxford. Someone else had works by Rousseau and Kant. Stein himself had carried a dog-eared book by Martin Buber, with so many passages underlined that you could not easily read many pages. Benjamin had brought with him a selection of essays by Montaigne, whose work had long been a source of comfort. He also had in hand Mendelssohn’s beautiful (if somewhat decorously old-fashioned) translation of the Torah.
“So we’ve got a library!” said Hans Fittko. “What else do we need?”
“What do you say, Dr. Benjamin?” Stein prodded.
“He will do this, of course,” said Fittko confidently. “I heard him lecture in Paris. He is very good.”
Benjamin wiped his forehead, suddenly thick with perspiration. “If you all wish, I will do as you like,” he said. His attention was tugged into the room’s far left corner as he contemplated the prospect of lecturing on philosophy under these conditions. After a pause, to demonstrate his gratitude for their interest, he said, “I’m quite happy to conduct some philosophical discussions…if that will help to pass the time. But you must bear with me. I am not a teacher, nor a philosopher.”
The next morning, soon after breakfast, with the rain still thundering on the roof and the camp guards reluctant to drive anyone to work, Benjamin began to lecture on Greek metaphysics, reading aloud from Plato (but translating from Jowett’s Victorian English into German by sight). He explained from the outset that his real interest was as much in Kant as in Plato, but he considered the two thinkers so linked in their approach to the world that it was necessary to begin with the great Athenian. “It is often said that Western philosophy consists of footnotes to Plato,” he said. “If this is the case, Kant’s footnotes must be considered the most elaborate and original.” He paused, then began again, in a small voice: “It seems clear to me that in the framework of philosophy and hence of the doctrinal field to which philosophy belongs, there can never be a shattering, a collapse, of the Kantian—and thus Platonic—system. One can only imagine a revising and expanding of Kant and Plato, their philosophies ripening into doctrine, which is not necessarily a good thing.”
He was intrigued by Plato’s “invention” of Socrates. “He is both real and unreal, both historical and ahistorical,” Benjamin explained. He noted that any philosophical system began with an attitude, an approach, to history, and that Plato’s understanding of how one could grant eternal life to a figure such as Socrates was utterly ingenious. It was not a question of mere appropriation. “We’ve seen what happens when a writer overwhelms his subject, as with Max Brod and Kafka,” he said. “Brod did not respect the aura of the individual genius; he did not proclaim Kafka’s separateness from himself, and so his biography of his friend is horribly flawed.” He explained to them that the figure of Socrates in Plato’s dialogues was “made up” in the sense that Plato had transposed the man he once knew into intellectual and moral situations he had never, in life, encountered. But Plato knew the spirit of Socrates so intimately he could give him a life ancillary to the one he “really” had. Plato could, in other words, be trusted with Socrates; the fiction was real.
Heymann Stein leapt to his feet when Benjamin drew the allusive quotation marks around the term really with fingers in the air. “Surely,” Stein argued, “one has a life. One does not ‘have’ a life.”
Benjamin said, “I am sorry, Herr Stein. I should have made myself clearer. It is our tendency as moderns to cast everything we say in ironic light. This is a mistake, of course.” He began to pace, as if thinking intensely, trying to work out something fresh. “Language brings reality into being; it is, as it were, a bridge between what happens in the mind and what occurs in the world. Perhaps I will try to put this more boldly: Unless one frames reality in words, the reality does not exist. This theory of language plays havoc with conventional notions of time, and that is a problem; on the other hand, I do not believe in time. That is, I can’t believe in unimagined, linear time. To put something between brackets is to expose its linguistic element, its dependency on invented time, its mystery, its final unreality.”
He noticed that Heymann was staring at him, rapt, and he smiled slightly. Perhaps he was a good lecturer, after all? “We are working,” he said, “here and always, to achieve a reality that is not so terribly contingent on mere expression.”
He paused long enough to notice puzzlement on some of the other faces in the audience. Perhaps what he said was not clear? Perhaps he did not himself understand exactly what he was saying? It was frustrating. He wanted to talk about history as catastrophe, about revolution as the only legitimate way out of the nightmare of history, but that would have to wait for another day. He must stay, for the moment, with Plato. But even as he spoke, he was aware of the final goal of all philosophy; in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” he had put it well: “The messianic world is the world of all-sided and integral immediacy. Only there is universal history possible.”
One did not have newspapers in this so-called camp des travailleurs volontaires, so gossip abounded. “The Germans have overrun Paris, and they will be here any moment,” Stein whispered to Benjamin. “I have this from a guard, who would not lie.” But there was no artillery fire in the distance, and the guards did not seem especially nervous. Surely if the Germans were really coming, the camp would have devolved into chaos?
Benjamin felt detached from camp life, as if somehow floating above it. The physical discomfort was curiously bearable, and even the worst things felt oddly acceptable: the bitter nights under the single blanket or the agony of a weekly sprinkle under a cold spigot. The dinners of lukewarm broth, with a chunk of gristle lurking at the bottom of the bowl like a creature from the deep sea, were demoralizing but not devastating. Even the humiliation of shitting in a putrid shed with a dozen other men could be borne. Perhaps the finite amount of reading material was the worst thing to suffer, but even this he could tolerate.
It was harder when the boy who slept in the cot next to him developed a terrible pain in his side one night and died a few days later from a ruptured appendix. Young Efraim Wolff—he was not yet twenty-three—had come to France only recently from Lublin, where he had taught in a school for young boys. He was already ailing when he arrived, and the guard would do nothing to help him, even though he begged to see a doctor. “Stop the nonsense. You have indigestion,” said the guard. “Who wouldn’t have indigestion, given the food in this place?”
Efraim Wolff lay in agony for three nights, groaning; he subsided to a whimper on the fourth day, and he died, in silence, on the fifth, with Benjamin applying wet towels to his forehead and whispering lies into his ear about how the indigestion would soon pass. The body was interred on the sixth day, on the edge of a hazel wood half a mile or so from the gates of the camp, with a dozen men saying Kaddish above the grave. Benjamin, for the first time in many years, wept as he rocked back and forth on his heels.
In the third month of his captivity, a commission de triage informed Benjamin that he would soon be released. His sister Dora wrote to explain that this good fortune was due in part to the intervention of Adrienne Monnier and Jules Romains, who had circulated a petition on his behalf among the right people. “The God of the Jews is with you,” she had said, though it was most unlike her.
The reaction in the camp was mixed. On the one hand, people were glad enough to see one of their number freed. It was a propitious sign; if Benjamin had been released, perhaps everyone would be sent home soon. Perhaps even the war itself was nearing an end? On the other, a beloved figure in their little society was to be withdrawn, and his lectures—which had proved entertaining even to those who could not really understand a word of what he was saying—would come to an end.
“So I’m left here to rot like a squirrel while you do the cancan in Paris?” Heymann Stein said on the night before Benjamin’s release. “I see you’ve left all the hard work for me, the lectures on Nietzsche,” he added. “I hope you sleep very badly, thinking about what I’m going to say.”
“Nietzsche we don’t need,” said Meir Winklemann. “Not today. Hitler will have us all reading Nietzsche next week.” He stood close to Benjamin, studied him as if he were a piece of sculpture, then kissed him on either cheek. “Go with God,” he said.
Hans Fittko, too, with his strong masculine face and dark hair pushed back like a film star’s, kissed Benjamin. “We’ll meet again soon,” he said, squeezing his hands. “If you see Lisa, tell her I’m well.”
“But you’re still a schmuck,” Stein insisted, and everyone laughed.
That night he fell into a woolly sleep and had a dream in which he was led by his friend, Dr. Dausse, into a steep underworld: a version of Hades, a labyrinthine tunnel. There were many chambers in this tunnel, and beds were pushed to the walls at either side. Men and women—some of them friends, some acquaintances or strangers—lay on the beds or sat up, a few of them smoking cigarettes. In one vast candlelit chamber full of golden stalactites, Benjamin noticed a blond woman with short hair lying on her bed with her legs slightly parted. He came close to her and saw she was beautiful. Upon hearing him approach, she opened her eyes, and their green lightning dazzled him. The blanket covering her seemed to hold in its luminous pattern an intricate design much like one that Benjamin had once described to Dr. Dausse: a kind of spiraling blue line. “A spiral,” he said to himself, “is a circle released from space.” He suddenly realized that the woman had lifted the blanket to one side to show him the design, which seemed to offer some kind of spiritual key, a way out of the labyrinth into which he found himself burrowing. He must reverse himself now. He must seek the light.
Her eyes were glittering, and her white thighs. Her small breasts lifted with each breath. It was all so heartbreaking, so beautiful. But did he know this woman? Would she speak to him? Was she, indeed, alive or dead?
Benjamin wakened to find himself staring at the ceiling of the barrack, which was crossed by rotting beams; through his narrow window he could see a million stars pricking little points of light in the black sky. Galaxies seemed to be exploding, spreading great concentric rings of fire. He realized that he would never be able to go back to sleep. The dream burned like coals after a hot fire, and it warmed his whole body. For once he felt no compulsion to interpret the dream; there would be plenty of time for that in days to come. Just now, as he lay there, he felt something strangely akin to bliss.