Eli Zaretsky | Walter Benjamin’s Would-Be Rescuers
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12 May 2026<br>Walter Benjamin’s Would-Be Rescuers<br>Eli Zaretsky<br>Share on BlueskyShare on FacebookShareEmailPrint
To understand Walter Benjamin’s life, it is best to begin with his death. Attempting to flee Nazi-occupied France, he died by suicide on 26 September 1940, in the village of Portbou, Catalonia. Born into a wealthy Berlin family in 1892, he had been a prodigious intellectual force as a student, anti-war activist and journalist. After Hitler came to power in 1933, however, he became an impoverished and isolated exile in Paris, writing and researching at the Bibliothèque Nationale. His friend Gershom Scholem later wrote of him:<br>He had nothing of the bohemian about him. In those days, he had a little belly that protruded slightly … I don’t believe I ever saw him without a tie … Sometimes he had an owlish, profound expression behind his round spectacles, and it took time to decide if he was mocking what he had just said aloud.
When the Germans invaded France, Benjamin made his way south to Lourdes with a group of refugees that included another friend, Hannah Arendt. In the refugee camp he had a dream that foretold his end:<br>We found ourselves in a pit. I saw that there were some strange beds almost at the bottom of it. They had the shape and the length of coffins; they also seemed to be made of stone. Upon kneeling down halfway, however, I saw that one could sink gently into them as if getting into bed. They were covered with moss and ivy.
Although he was only 48, he looked like an old man. Weakened by cardiac failure, he nonetheless proved his mettle to his guides by laboriously climbing a trail into the mountains, heading for the Spanish border. Lisa Fittko, a member of the group crossing with him and the last person to see him alive, recalled: ‘He planned his crossing carefully, and at regular intervals – about every ten minutes, I think – he would stop and rest for perhaps a minute.’ He told her: ‘With this method I’ll be able to go all the way. I rest at regular intervals – before I become exhausted. Never spend yourself entirely.’<br>‘What a strange man,’ she thought. ‘A crystal-clear mind, unbending inner strength, yet hopelessly clumsy.’ Just as salvation seemed within reach, the Spanish authorities announced that no new refugees would be admitted. Benjamin took the single dose of morphine he carried. He had kept a briefcase with him but it was found empty. What had been in it? Perhaps, according to the psychoanalyst George Makari, ‘the roaring voices of history’s refugees and exiles, all their lamentations, their laughter and their stories, all their accusations and confessions, all free from oblivion’. The next day, the authorities, possibly responding to his suicide, reopened the border.<br>At the time of Benjamin’s death, three friends were trying to rescue him. The first was Scholem, who was from the same assimilated German-Jewish Berlin milieu as Benjamin. Scholem was six years younger than Benjamin and the two men had shared a passionate adolescent friendship, studying the Hebrew Bible, the Kabbalah and mystical theories of language together. What Benjamin called, in a letter to the philosopher Martin Buber, the ‘problem of Jewish spirit’ appears frequently in his subsequent thought. Scholem emigrated from Germany to Palestine in 1923. There he maintained an archive of Benjamin’s writing and dedicated his first masterwork, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941), to his friend. Throughout the 1930s, Scholem had tried to get Benjamin to emigrate, and even obtained a position for him at the Hebrew University. But Benjamin was not a Zionist and was not eager to relocate to Palestine.<br>The second friend who tried to save Benjamin was Bertolt Brecht, with whom he explored the relations of technology, art and mass society in an era of incipient fascism. The two became friends after Benjamin was forced to leave academia in 1925, when his Habilitationsschrift (a qualification for the highest university degree) was rejected. Plunged into avant-garde currents that were oriented towards both the Soviet Union (where Benjamin lived for two months)...