Being a rational person, I like to understand why I do things. It is not enough simply to act; animals can do that, the beasts of the field. What separates human beings from such beasts is self-consciousness, however weak this may be. So what exactly brought me here, to Port-Bou, a full decade after Benjamin’s death? Was it merely guilt—surely the most boring of motivations?
I must resist this interpretation. I did everything within my powers to help Benjamin get to Palestine, and none of it was exactly easy. What could I say to people in his defense? What evidence would convince them that Walter Benjamin might actually perform a useful service? He had no teaching experience and would probably dissolve in front of a class, pooling on the floor before their very eyes. He could surely never be counted on for regular journalistic writing: Even his book reviews were inscrutable, and he did not have the habits of production necessary to keep up with such pressures.
So how would he live? Who would pay him? There was little money for anyone in those days. Indeed, I lived on air myself when I first came to Palestine, sustained mostly by the vision of Eretz Yisrael that we all shared. I hardly noticed the essential poverty of my people: We survived happily on dust and sunlight, and the parched earth was a blank tablet awaiting our inscription. I remember fingering the dirt: It might have been gold for all anyone who saw me on my knees could tell. God was everywhere, in the stubborn fruit that bloomed in the Negev, in the shimmer of Galilee’s bright surface, in the amber glint of Jerusalem’s old city walls. Once I stood mutely before the Wailing Wall, wanting to pray, but could utter nothing. Every moment there was an answered prayer.
Alas, poor Benjamin! What could he do to justify his presence in Palestine? I fretted, month after month, in the late twenties, when I saw that unless something was done soon, he would come to ruin quickly. Some people do not care for themselves very well; they take no pity on their own hearts. Fortunately, the Institute for Social Research in Frankfurt came to the rescue, offering him a small but regular income in return for “research.” But even there, problems quickly arose. Benjamin resented their assignments, which he found irrelevant to the main strands of his research. “Why should I write what interests Adorno or Horkheimer? Who are they to insist upon these command performances?” he would ask, full of indignation. He complained bitterly about this work, even when the money was good. As this income began to dwindle, in the mid-thirties, he became frantic, as anyone would. The Institute seemed to demand more and more time for less and less money. “They treat me like a schoolboy,” he wrote to me from Paris. “It is reprehensible. Non serviam.”
The income they offered, however paltry, was still desperately needed. It was pathetic to see a man of his exquisite learning and originality living in such conditions, half starved and writing essays of little interest to himself. On the other hand, without these assignments from Adorno and Horkheimer, there is no telling what he would have written. I remember asking him once, “What do you expect to produce in the next decade, Walter?” He turned to me with those baleful eyes, vaguely twinkling, and said, “Less than in the previous decade, I suspect.” Another time, when I was begging him to write more, for his own sake as well as for his admirers, he said, “All art aspires to the condition of silence.”
When, in the late thirties, I began to realize the full extent of his financial—and spiritual—problems, I tried to convince my publisher, Salman Schocken (who was deeply enamored of my own work, much to my surprise and delight), to commission a book on Kafka from Benjamin. He had, however, read some of the essays I’d sent him, and he said, “Your friend Walter Benjamin is a tedious writer. I can’t stay awake when I read him. In fact, I have no idea what he’s trying to say most of the time.” And that was that. (Of course, I protected Benjamin from the full brunt of this criticism, telling him that Schocken had too many books on Kafka in the works.)
Benjamin was a depressive by nature, which doubtless made it difficult for him to work. Gloom was part of his visage: The hooded eyes seemed to grow darker year by year, slipping deeper into the skull, and the black mustache and hair added to the effect. The sorrowful mouth (which he frequently covered with his right hand, muffling his speech) only made things worse. Especially in the later years, he did not trouble to groom himself, although he was fastidious in other ways, even dandyish in his choice of clothing. I could never reconcile the lack of attention to ordinary hygiene with the overlay of formal white shirts, distinguished ties, and striped waistcoats. The style of clothing he preferred was, of course, antiquarian: a way of broadcasting his affinities with an earlier time, when reading and (more generally) culture mattered. But the sordidness, the soiled effect, somehow ironized the presentation. “Yes,” he seemed to be saying, “there are good things in the world, but they are badly tarnished. Look! Even I am badly tarnished!”
In Paris, in the midst of hideously degrading circumstances, he surrounded himself with fragments of an earlier life, the life of an educated, bourgeois gentleman. Old books, in their crumbling buckram covers, would be propped beside assorted ceramics and porcelain bric-a-brac, with small pencil drawings and favorite pictures hung on the walls. Once, when he complained of poverty, I suggested that he sell a particular drawing by Max Unold that held some monetary value. He said, rather fiercely, “I would rather kill myself.”
Benjamin talked openly, and often, of suicide, so it did not surprise me when I heard about what happened. I always supposed that, sooner or later, he would die by his own hand. In Nice, in the stifling summer of 1932, he went so far as to draw up his will, leaving everything of any material value to Stefan, his son; his manuscripts were to go to me. This sad document arrived in the mail with a note saying that by the time I got it he would certainly be dead. It was almost embarrassing to get his next letter, which made no mention of the previous communication. Being tactful, I did not raise the subject again. Suicide, like masturbation, is a private matter.
Benjamin’s misery was evident in his correspondence. In one letter of that time, he spoke of the “small victories” achieved in his writing, and how little compensation they offered, given the “great defeats” that life had dealt him. But they were not so great as he imagined. He had obviously not attained everything in his powers; perhaps only Goethe, or Shakespeare, managed to squeeze out everything that was in them. Genius on that scale is sublime, and rare. Benjamin was not of this kind, or anything like it, yet the quality of his mind was undeniable. It was best witnessed in his letters, I think: I treasured each one of them, although his hand was so small and cramped that I resorted often to reading his letters with a magnifying glass, poring over the smudged pages (he invariably spilled coffee on them, or wine) as if I were trying to piece together the marks on some ancient scroll. But what marks they were!
It seems odd, you know, that someone of Benjamin’s rarefied and idiosyncratic temperament should suffer from the same ambitions and anxieties that beset even the most commercial of writers. However quixotic, he passionately hoped to acquire a readership large enough to make it possible for him to earn a living from his pen. In the twentieth century, this is no longer possible, not for poets and philosophers. The circle of readers has narrowed, almost vanished. I, for instance, expect to find only a few responsible readers for my work, “fit company though few.” Benjamin understood this abstractly but continued to struggle in vain for two decades to wrest a small income from his Herculean labors. “The position from which I approach things,” he wrote to me, in a sad moment of self-awareness, “is far too advanced still to fall within the purview of a public readership.” Indeed.
Even I, who spent decades in dialogue with this man, could only partially grasp his most difficult and original work, such as the early book on German tragic drama, or his late essay called “Theses on the Philosophy of History”—a magnificent piece of aphoristic prose, if somewhat strange in its obliqueness and inwardness. Benjamin’s highly personal manner of building an argument often eluded me, although I never found a word he wrote less than suggestive. I would hate to think how many times he sent me darting this way or that, frequently into thick briars. I came away scraped and bleeding too many times! Nevertheless, through his essays and letters, I came to know Proust, Kafka, Leskov, Baudelaire, Krause, and so many others as if I had never really read them before. Only the beastly Brecht defeated me, and still defeats me. I will never see the attractions of that man, an obvious charlatan.
It was puzzling, even disquieting, that Benjamin should grow Janus-faced when it came to Brecht, saying one thing to him and another to me. Brecht complained about his “mysticism” and his “Judaisms,” writing to him in 1938: “You must forget these dark gleanings, this almost Oriental aspiration to find the one. The one does not exist. There are only people and their problems, and the point of writing is to annoy the people so badly that they solve—or wish to solve—their problems.” Such humbug!
The mystical and Judaic aspects of Benjamin’s thought were precisely what attracted me in the first place. What he saw of value in Brecht is another matter. I had read a number of the playwright’s early scenarios without interest, but at Benjamin’s urging I went to see a performance of The Threepenny Opera in 1932. It had been playing to full houses for two years, and I assumed it must have some power. People do not throw their money away for nothing. So I was truly stunned to witness a middle-class audience cheering a play in which the author spat vengefully upon them. This self-loathing, and mostly Jewish, audience was indeed more shocking to behold than the play. In three months, of course, Hitler would assume total control of Germany; this, in retrospect, makes the attitude of that audience seem all the more baffling and terrifying. (I am almost tempted to say that it explained a little of what followed.)
Apart from Brecht, Benjamin would have nothing to do with “famous” or “important” writers of the day like Lion Feuchtwanger or Emil Ludwig. Heinrich Mann was the exception: Those witty, deft, sardonic novels pleased him, and he urged them upon me (I did not care for their flippant cynicism, but I understood what was admirable in the craftsmanship). Heinrich’s brother, Thomas, meant nothing to Benjamin until The Magic Mountain appeared. Suddenly a missive full of praises arrived: “What is unmistakably characteristic of this novel is something that moves me and has always moved me; it speaks to me in a way I can evaluate and acknowledge and that I must, in many respects, greatly admire. However charmless such analyses are, I can only imagine that an internal change must have taken place in the author while he was writing. Indeed, I am certain this was the case.”
It saddens me to think what I have lost. But it was already lost. We had ceased, perhaps earlier than I care to admit, to share our intellectual life in a way that followed from what began, in Berlin, so long ago. That trouble started in the late summer of 1928, when he was again beset, besotted by Asja Lacis, who despised me and did everything she could to keep us apart. She tantalized and tormented him; ultimately, she drove him away from his deepest concerns, prompting him to waste his time on dialectical thinking of the crudest sort. Hegel is bad enough, but pseudo-Hegelianism! The Benjamin I knew in 1918 would never have dined happily with the Benjamin of 1928.
It was obvious to me, and (I think) to Benjamin, that his life in Berlin was hopeless. The marriage to Dora had dissolved, and Asja was not going to live with him, except intermittently and falsely. It was clear to anyone who could see with open eyes that Germany was no place for Jews. Jews had been demonized, cast as Other: Hitler and his friends understood only too well that one needs to construct an enemy to advance an ideology, and we were once again the chosen people.
I urged Benjamin, once again, to come to Jerusalem, and he agreed. “What I must do is, at last, clear to me,” he wrote. First, however, he would have to learn Hebrew, and I put him in touch with my old friend Max Mayer, from an assimilated family, one of the few Zionists left in Berlin, who knew Hebrew well enough to teach it. Benjamin applied himself vigorously to his studies for about two months, but it soon became obvious from his letters to me that this project was doomed. Benjamin’s interests lay elsewhere just now.
As I later surmised, he was wasting his time with a long article on Goethe for some bogus encyclopedia spawned in the Kremlin. This counted as another success for Asja Lacis, who had by now managed to permeate his mind as well as his senses. I wrote a blistering letter, upbraiding him for his failure to pursue Hebrew and further his plans for emigration to Palestine, and he replied with characteristic rue: “Unfortunately I cannot counter your reproaches with anything at all; they are thoroughly justified, and in this matter I have encountered a pathological vacillation which, I am sorry to admit, I have already witnessed in myself from time to time.” From time to time!
Our sad, last meeting in Paris, a couple of years before the war, stays with me. It had been a decade since I had actually seen him, and his physical degeneration was unsettling to behold. He had grown heavier, with a paunch that tilted upward when he stood; a double chin rippled into existence whenever he dipped his head forward. Even the knuckles on his hands had acquired a faint puffiness: a sign of heart trouble, I guessed. His skin had taken on the aura of old newspaper, and strands of silver mingled with his otherwise jet-black hair; the mustache seemed more copious than before, unkempt, almost decadent. His eyesight, always bad, had grown worse, and he would take my arm like an old man as we walked the city streets. Quick steps or a few stairs inevitably brought on a bout of wheezing, and he would cry, “You are killing me, Gerhard! You are a young man! Take pity!”
We had been arguing about Marxist theories of language for many years, and I confronted him now more purposefully. “You want to take away the magical aspects of language,” I said. “Linguistics is not a science.”
“You are wrong, Gerhard. You have not been listening to me, as usual.”
How many times in my life had those sentences been uttered by my dear friend Benjamin? A thousand times? I used to love to hear them. “You are wrong, Gerhard. You have not been listening to me.” Always, it was said with affection, with a slight bemusement. But years of reading that Marxist gibberish had taken their toll, and the ironic bite was missing. “You are wrong, Gerhard” meant, unequivocally, that I was indeed wrong. I was wrong!
Still, whenever we argued about language he continued to make a distinction between God’s words and human words. This was, he maintained, the foundation of all linguistic theory. The difference between word and name remained alive in him, although he struggled with himself to keep his terms within the boundaries of Marxist, or pseudo-Marxist, thought. It was painful to listen to him, to watch him shift and squirm: the inevitable product of his disingenuous position.
After a particularly tortuous discussion, I took his hands in mine, and I said, “Come, Walter. To Jerusalem.”
His eyes, sequestered behind thick lenses, turned watery. “I cannot come with you, Gerhard,” he said. “But I would, were it possible. You must believe me.”
We had been sitting on a bench beneath a tulip tree, talking and watching the pedestrians stroll by. There was a bookstore behind us, and I led Benjamin to the broad window, now filled with a hundred copies of Céline’s new book, Bagatelles pour un massacre, a wild, anti-Semitic rant of six hundred pages. The book had seized the imagination of French intellectuals, and it was much respected, despite its vulgarity and racism.
“What do your friends say about this?” I asked him. “Do they think Céline means no harm?”
“They say, ‘But it’s a joke.’ ”
“Do you think it’s a joke, Walter?”
Benjamin shook his head. It was obviously not a joke. And it would never be a joke. The trahison des clercs that led to millions incinerated in the camps had only just begun.
We spent that evening in an obscure café on the Left Bank with Benjamin’s quarrelsome relative Hannah Arendt and the even more trying Heinrich Blücher, whom Hannah later married. Arendt was much obsessed with the show trials of Stalin and denounced them volubly. “Stalin is a monster!” she cried, drawing attention our way.
Benjamin said, “You overstate the case, Hannah. That is just like you.”
Blücher said, “Surely, Walter, you cannot defend what is happening in Russia!”
“The Soviet Union is a bold experiment,” he said. “It is perhaps a failed experiment…I will grant this.”
I began to laugh. “You take away my breath, Walter. How can you call it a failed experiment?” I considered the Stalinist regime a model of barbarism.
“It is sad, you know,” said Benjamin. “What began as such a noble attempt to make life better…has degenerated.” After a heavy pause, he continued: “Capitalism will not work, not ultimately. There is too much emphasis on short-term gain. It is bad economics, and bad for people.” He cracked his knuckles, then added: “The world will become a glittering trash heap, then blow away.”
Arendt was contemptuous of this attitude, although she managed to show considerable respect for Benjamin. She adored him, really. You could see it in her eyes.
And I adored him, too, despite his irritating stubborness, and his way of clinging to a worn-out ideology. He suffered the obsessive desire of many intellectuals to make the world whole by applying intelligent pressure of a specific kind, but human intelligence cannot make the world whole. Unchecked by compassion, humility, and a deep skepticism of its own virility, it can only destroy.
“He was a remarkable man,” said Madame Ruiz. She agreed to show me his “real grave,” as she put it.
The cemetery attendant, Pablo, had taken me down a gravel path to an unmarked grave the evening before. He claimed he had buried Benjamin himself in that particular place, and that Sergeant Consuelo, a local police officer, had personally overseen the burial. I can’t say why, but I doubted him. His eyes avoided mine: the mark of a liar.
“Pablo cannot be trusted,” Madame Ruiz said. “He is like the rest of them, thoroughly unreliable.” She took me to another site, although this grave was unmarked as well. “I am certain that this is the one,” she said. “I attended the funeral. It was very moving. There were no clouds in the sky, and a seagull landed right there, beside the stone.”
She was lying, too. Nobody would remember a seagull. There were seagulls all over the place, on every gravestone. But I decided it didn’t matter. He was here somewhere, in this cemetery, and it was an arresting place, one of the most beautiful I have ever seen. Fragrant smells drifted down the hillside, a mingling of floral scents and the faint odor of moss and mint. The cemetery grove itself hovered precipitously over the Mediterranean, its lawn like a flying carpet suspended in ice-blue air. The coffins were tucked neatly into stone walls, which seemed to defy gravity.
Madame Ruiz was clearly an intelligent, cultivated woman, however unreliable. Apparently she had done what she could to prevent this tragedy, but it was hopeless. Benjamin, for reasons of his own, had decided it was better to take his own life that day, ten years ago, than to push forward into Spain and Portugal with Frau Gurland and her son.
“Did you know him well, professor?” she asked.
“We met in Berlin, before the war…the Great War,” I said. I wanted her to know the length of our acquaintance, if not the depth. One cannot really suggest the depth of such a friendship. It is beyond description.
“Ah, the Great War,” she said. “My father was in that war.” After a long and boring bout of remembrance focused on her father, a minor official of Nice, she asked me about Benjamin. “Was he some kind of writer? A famous writer?”
I explained to her that his work was not well known but that I admired it. “One day he will be recognized as an important voice,” I said. “His philosophical viewpoint was…” I could not continue in this fashion, and lapsed into silence.
“Should I read one of his books?” she asked.
“There is only one book, a treatise on German drama,” I explained. “It is quite unreadable. And a collection of essays and fragments. Tantalizing but inadequate.”
I was tempted to launch into a critique of Benjamin’s life and work, but it seemed futile. Standing here, beside his grave, I realized that what is lost is lost. Madame Ruiz was simply pandering to me. I was a customer, nothing more. The longer I remained in Port-Bou, in mourning, the more cash I would spend at her hotel.
In spite of having come so far, I did not wish to remain at his grave for long. The guilty feelings that overwhelmed me there were unwelcome and baseless. It was not my fault that he was dead, after all. Benjamin was killed by Hitler, and by Karl Marx. He was killed by Asja Lacis, who never really loved him, and yes, by Dora, his wife, who had never learned how to love him properly. He was killed most certainly by the Angel of History, whom he could never satisfy. Most obviously, he was killed by Time, which often waits teasingly in the wings, but which always appears onstage at last, claiming full authorship of everything that has gone before, each mincing step and wince, each flicker of the eye, each heartfelt line and random gesture.
I keep thinking of that essay of his, the intractable yet provocative “Theses on the Philosophy of History.” Benjamin wrote: “The messianic world is the world of all-sided and integral immediacy. Only there is universal history possible.” These words, written as Hitler’s troops moved darkly across the national boundaries of France, hung in memory with a strange white light. “It would not be written history,” Benjamin continued, “but a festively enacted history. This feast is purified of all solemnity. It knows no festival hymns. Its language is integrated prose, which has broken the shackles of writing and is understood by all human beings.”
The myth of Babel obsessed him, as it does me. Thick walls of unintelligibility loom between each of us who would lay claim to some measure of humanity, and we are unable to address one another except in crude signs and abstract gestures, in tongues far too idiosyncratic and private to be understood. This point is made often, and beautifully, in the Zohar.
“One day,” Benjamin wrote, “the confusion of tongues will end. And storytelling will come to an end, too, absorbed in the one integral prose.”
“Are you all right, professor?” Madame Ruiz asked, practically shouting in my face. “You are preoccupied.”
I shook my head. No, I was not all right. Walter Benjamin was dead, and his words had scattered like so many spores in the black winds that swept Europe in 1940. No, I was not all right, and I would never be all right again. Unless his words, invisible, were somehow to land in hospitable soil, find nourishment, break into roots, tremble, and flush with life.
There was truth in those words, and truth is one thing that cannot be murdered, though it must often be disguised, hidden craftily in places where nobody would care to look.