It was late in the evening when I arrived, and the town was being buffeted by a stiff wind off the sea and squalls of rain. After checking into my hotel, I had dinner in the hotel restaurant and then turned in early, halyards slapping against aluminum masts in the harbor, and a lighthouse flashing in the darkness.
If migrants are sustained by their hope in the future, refugees are afflicted by their loss of the past. Of no one was this truer than Walter Benjamin. But though I had contemplated making this journey for at least a year, I had never fully fathomed my motives. I only knew that one must sometimes abandon any conception of what one is doing in order to do it, accepting that reasons and meanings cannot be imposed upon events but have to be allowed to surface in their own good time. And what kind of translation is it, anyway, that seeks parallels and echoes, not between languages, but between experiences, and, as Benjamin himself suggested, between the lines?
Walter Benjamin was born in Berlin in , and reborn 21 years later in Paris. This is what ages usβthis and nothing else. Did he ever feel at home in twentieth-century Germany? Benjamin was in many ways someone whose idea of history never completely encompassed the unfolding tragedy of his own epoch. When the Nazis seized power in January , Benjamin could no longer count on an income from writing, and his attempts to write under pseudonyms such as K.
Stampflinger and Detlef Holz proved fruitless. Although often isolated, and with Europe moving ineluctably toward war, Benjamin worked patiently at his projects, declining the offers and urgings of friends such as Gershom Scholem, Arendt, and Adorno to move to Palestine, England, or the United States. He was, he explained to them, no longer capable of adapting Scholem Yet Benjamin was well aware of the fate of Jews in Germany after Kristallnacht βthe mass arrests, the new edicts, the concentration camps, the panicked exodus.
When war was declared on September 1, , all Germans, Austrians, Czechs, Slovaks, and Hungarians aged between 17 and 50 and living in France were subject to internment. In November , thanks to the intervention of friends in Paris, notably the French poet and diplomat St.
