‘Proverbs are a school of crude thinking,’ he writes in the same context; and the art of taking proverbial and idiomatic speech literally enabled Benjamin – as it did Kafka, in whom figures of speech are often clearly discernible as a source of inspiration and furnish the key to many a ‘riddle’ – to write a prose of such singularly enchanting and enchanted closeness to reality.

Wherever one looks in Benjamin’s life, one will find the little hunchback. Long before the outbreak of the Third Reich he was playing his evil tricks, causing publishers who had promised Benjamin an annual stipend for reading manuscripts or editing a periodical for them to go bankrupt before the first number appeared. Later the hunchback did allow a collection of magnificent German letters, made with infinite care and provided with the most marvellous commentaries, to be printed – under the title Deutsche Menschen and with the motto ‘Von Ehre ohne Ruhm/Von Grösse ohne Glanz/Von Würde ohne Sold’ (Of Honor without Fame/Of Greatness without Splendour/Of Dignity without Pay); but then he saw to it that it ended in the cellar of the bankrupt Swiss publisher, instead of being distributed, as intended by Benjamin, who signed the selection with a pseudonym, in Nazi Germany. And in this cellar the edition was discovered in 1962, at the very moment when a new edition had come off the press in Germany. (One would also charge it to the little hunchback that often the few things that were to take a good turn first presented themselves in an unpleasant guise. A case in point is the translation of Anabase by Alexis Saint-Léger Léger [St.-John Perse] which Benjamin, who thought the work ‘of little importance’ [Briefe I, 381], undertook because, like the Proust translation, the assignment had been procured for him by Hofmannsthal. The translation did not appear in Germany until after the war, yet Benjamin owed to it his contact with Léger, who, being a diplomat, was able to intervene and persuade the French government to spare Benjamin a second internment in France during the war – a privilege that very few other refugees enjoyed.) And then after mischief came ‘the piles of debris,’ the last of which, prior to the catastrophe at the Spanish border, was the threat he had felt, since 1938, that the Institute for Social Research in New York, the only ‘material and moral support’ of his Paris existence (Briefe II, 839), would desert him. ‘The very circumstances that greatly endanger my European situation will probably make emigration to the U.S.A. impossible for me,’ so he wrote in April of 1939 (Briefe II, 810), still under the impact of the ‘blow’ which Adorno’s letter rejecting the first version of the Baudelaire study had dealt him in November of 1938 (Briefe II, 790).

Scholem is surely right when he says that next to Proust, Benjamin felt the closest personal affinity with Kafka among contemporary authors, and undoubtedly Benjamin has the ‘field of ruins and the disaster area’ of his own work in mind when he wrote that ‘an understanding [Kafka’s] production involves, among other things, the simple recognition that he was a failure’ (Briefe II, 614). What Benjamin said of Kafka with such unique aptness applies to himself as well: ‘The circumstances of this failure are multifarious. One is tempted to say: once he was certain of eventual failure, everything worked out for him en route as in a dream’ (Briefe II, 764). He did not need to read Kafka to think like Kafka. When ‘The Stoker’ was all he had read of Kafka, he had already quoted Goethe’s statement about hope in his essay on Elective Affinities: ‘Hope passed over their heads like a star that falls from the sky’; and the sentence with which he concludes this study reads as though Kafka had written it: ‘Only for the sake of the hopeless ones have we been given hope’ (Schriften I, 140).

On September 26, 1940, Walter Benjamin, who was about to emigrate to America, took his life at the Franco-Spanish border. There were various reasons for this. The Gestapo had confiscated his Paris apartment, which contained his library (he had been able to get ‘the more important half’ out of Germany) and many of his manuscripts, and he had reason to be concerned also about the others which, through the good offices of George Bataille, had been placed in the Bibliothèque Nationale prior to his flight from Paris to Lourdes, in unoccupied France.7 How was he to live without a library, how could he earn a living without the extensive collection of quotations and excerpts among his manuscripts? Besides, nothing drew him to America, where, as he used to say, people would probably find no other use for him than to cart him up and down the country to exhibit him as the ‘last European.’ But the immediate occasion for Benjamin’s suicide was an uncommon stroke of bad luck. Through the armistice agreement between Vichy France and the Third Reich, refugees from Hitler Germany – les refugiés provenant d’Allemagne, as they were officially referred to in France – were in danger of being shipped back to Germany, presumably only if they were political opponents. To save this category of refugees – which, it should be noted, never included the unpolitical mass of Jews who later turned out to be the most endangered of all – the United States had distributed a number of emergency visas through its consulates in unoccupied France. Thanks to the efforts of the Institute in New York, Benjamin was among the first to receive such a visa in Marseilles. Also, he quickly obtained a Spanish transit visa to enable him to get to Lisbon and board a ship there. However, he did not have a French exit visa, which at that time was still required and which the French government, eager to please the Gestapo, invariably denied to German refugees. In general this presented no great difficulty, since a relatively short and none too arduous road to be covered by foot over the mountains to Port Bou was well known and was not guarded by the French border police. Still, for Benjamin, apparently suffering from a cardiac condition (Briefe II, 841), even the shortest walk was a great exertion, and he must have arrived in a state of serious exhaustion. The small group of refugees that he had joined reached the Spanish border town only to learn that Spain had closed the border that same day and that the border officials did not honour visas made out in Marseilles. The refugees were supposed to return to France by the same route the next day. During the night Benjamin took his life, whereupon the border officials, upon whom this suicide had made an impression, allowed his companions to proceed to Portugal. A few weeks later the embargo on visas was lifted again. One day earlier Benjamin would have got through without any trouble; one day later the people in Marseilles would have known that for the time being it was impossible to pass through Spain. Only on that particular day was the catastrophe possible.

II. THE DARK TIMES

‘Anyone who cannot cope with life while he is alive needs one hand to ward off a little his despair over his fate … but with his other hand he can jot down what he sees among the ruins, for he sees different and more things than the others; after all, he is dead in his own lifetime and the real survivor.’

– Franz Kafka, Diaries, entry of October 19, 1921

‘Like one who keeps afloat on a shipwreck by climbing to the top of a mast that is already crumbling. But from there he has a chance to give a signal leading to his rescue.’

– Walter Benjamin in a letter to Gerhard Scholem dated April 17, 1931

Often an era most clearly brands with its seal those who have been least influenced by it, who have been most remote from it, and who therefore have suffered most.